Global Climate Panel Faces Strife, Potential Funding Crunch

At a time when cascading climate shocks are unfolding faster than scientists can track them, the UN’s scientific body that assesses global warming risks and response options is mired in procedural gridlock and staring at a potential budget crunch.

The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plenary meeting in Bangkok ended last week without members approving a definitive timeline for completing its seventh assessment report, even though the cycle formally began nearly two years ago. And experts warned that dwindling funds could affect future work.

The IPCC was formed in 1988 by global consensus and has issued comprehensive climate science assessments in five- to seven-year cycles. Its next report, on cities and climate change, is due in about a year. But the lack of agreement on basic procedures and funding questions suggests that current international tensions could erode hard-won international consensus at the intersection of climate science and policy.

IPCC reports are global reference points that governments use to plan, invest and respond to climate change. When timelines slip and funding tightens, the shared foundation can start to wobble, risking delays and gaps in the basic climate science guidance needed by many countries with limited scientific resources.

Trying to build a lasting global science and policy consensus at the IPCC has been tough even in the best of times, and it’s not getting easier. Noted climate scientist James Hansen recently projected that human-caused warming could push the average global temperature to 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.06 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average temperature by 2027. That would be well past the 1.5 degree Celsius climate risk threshold identified by a crucial 2018 IPCC report and adopted as a climate target under the Paris Agreement. At that level, warming could bring irreversible consequences, such as centuries of sea-level rise and the collapse of climate-regulating ocean currents. At the same time, conflicts over fossil fuels, which drive the climate crisis, are expanding.

Altogether, those circumstances have made the past couple of years the most challenging in the past 15 years of IPCC work, said the panel’s current chair, Jim Skea. But he emphasized that, for now, the crucial scientific work is continuing apace, and noted the IPCC’s track record of approving and delivering its comprehensive assessments on time over the last few decades. 

The report authors and reviewers, including about 50 from the U.S., are meeting as scheduled. But he acknowledged that not knowing exactly when the major reports are due makes it harder for the researchers who volunteer hundreds of hours to work on them.

With the current budget, Skea said the panel should have enough funding to complete the reports planned for the current cycle, through 2029, but that fiscal risks emerge in some of the “worst-case” funding scenarios.

“We’re not going to make light of the situation, but I don’t have existential angst about it at the moment,” he added.

The IPCC has an annual operating budget of about $9 million from voluntary government contributions, but the value of its trust fund has decreased by roughly 30 percent in recent years due to the loss of U.S. funding and uneven support from other countries. It’s a gap small enough for a handful of wealthy countries to fill, but for now it’s being covered by drawing down reserves. There will be longer-term concerns if funding doesn’t recover.

“This is not big money, and we should absolutely be able to deal with that,” Skea said, citing the panel’s funding uncertainties as an example of a key finding in a recent IPCC report.

“We got very clear conclusions in the last report that there is enough money in the world to address climate change,” he said. “The question is, how do you direct money to where it is needed?”

Frayed Assumptions

The $2 million gap left by the withdrawal of U.S. funding could be filled by five or six other countries each contributing less than half a million dollars, but the money is only the tip of the iceberg, said Mike Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge who has studied the IPCC for years. 

“We may be seeing a fraying of the tacit assumptions that held the IPCC together,” Hulme said. Recent troubles point to deeper uncertainties about the health of global climate agreements, which could be facing “if not a dissolution, maybe a fragmentation or repositioning,” he said. Other signs of strain include countries “falling back on side deals and parallel initiatives when consensus breaks down,” he said, referring to non-binding agreements adjacent to the United Nations climate framework, including forest-planting initiatives and methane-reduction pledges.

At the recent Bangkok meeting, independent observers for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin said the lack of agreement on a formal timeline at this stage of an IPCC cycle was unprecedented. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin is a reporting service of the International Institute for Sustainable Development that monitors and analyzes global environmental negotiations.

They tracked a “persistent divergence of views,” and “contentious discussions spilling across agenda items,” and noted that some “delegates expressed concern about the ability to deliver on the work program.”

“It’s a tough, challenging time for the IPCC,” said political scientist Jessica Templeton, who attended the meeting and leads the IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin team. “It has become extremely political. The lack of a decision on the timeline is unprecedented, as I understand it,” she said, adding that IPCC reports are fundamental to global climate policy.

“It’s really critical to get this out … especially with climate change happening so rapidly,” Templeton said. The reports provide trusted scientific input. “It’s vetted by every member country and the credibility of that really is so helpful to policymakers.” Without the reports, she added, many countries will not have the best available science to prepare for and respond to climate impacts.

Real Impacts

Climate impacts are real, right now, killing and displacing tens of thousands of people each year, destroying property, food supplies and power systems, making the IPCC’s scientific role more important than ever, said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, lead author of a key chapter in an upcoming report from the panel.

The global majority still relies on the panel’s accurate shared global climate science assessments “to ground public policy discussions in evidence,” said Schleussner, a climate researcher at the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, where he studies how the climate will respond to heating beyond the target of the Paris Agreement. He said that even with ongoing turmoil in some regions, the IPCC will continue to play a key role in spurring action by governments, businesses and civil society. 

Uncertainty about IPCC timelines is a “real concern” that can have a disproportionate and potentially exclusionary impact for researchers, especially from the Global South, he said.

At the same time, the scope and scale of the reports are expanding to match the escalation of climate impacts, and are becoming more demanding to produce, he said.

Templeton, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin expert, said participants are gathering resolve for the October meeting. 

“What left me feeling hopeful is seeing the number of very dedicated individuals coming together to work collaboratively in really hard geopolitical circumstances,” she said. “They will be successful in delivering its valuable reports.”