The Paris Agreement footprint on the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C of global warming – an input to the scoping meeting and process

Abstract

For the sake of the scoping meeting in August 2016, this paper provides four broad suggestions on how to best reflect the Paris Agreement into the IPCC report requested by the UNFCCC COP Decision. It provides a list of issues that might be discussed at the scoping meeting in order to produce together a preliminary table of contents of the Special Report on “The impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways” and key questions each chapter might answer (for the Annotated to the Table of Contents and the Steering Committee document with the outcomes of the Scoping Meeting to be transmitted, through the Secretariat, to the 52nd Session of the Bureau and the 44th Session of the Panel for their consideration).

The paper provides insights to our submission of the Pre-scoping questionnaire for the IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty and it constitutes the basis of our Call for Co-Authors.

The four broad suggestions are summarised here:

A. The balanced outcome structure and architecture of the Paris Agreement should be fully reflected in the Special Report, with due and proportional attention paid to mitigation (art. 4, 5 and 6), adaptation (art. 7), loss and damage (art. 8) and support (art. 9, 10, 11), transparency, compliance and facilitation (art. 15, 12, 13), in formats useful for global stocktake (art. 14 and point 20 of the FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1).

B. Since the contribution are bottom-up and nationally determined, indications for the national level are essential in formats and statements that can be useful inputs for Nationally Determined Contributions and for national strategies, plans and prioritised list of action in the domain of adaptation. Due to the sensitivity of the governments to too specific indications for them, a taxonomy of countries should be established by the IPCC, with broad statements to be inserted for more and more ambitious NDCs and adaptation actions, leaving room for policymakers to choose which category their country should belong, which statements to choose and how to revise, articulate, detail and adapt them, with the obvious overall freedom due to their full sovereignty.

C. Communication should be kept as open as possible (as for bibliography, knowledge bases, model structures and assumptions, and empirical evidence used in the perspective and during writing the IPCC Report as well as reporting highlights). Since 1.5 °C have been mostly neglected in the scientific past production, the majority of the papers that will be useful for the Special report have not yet been written, published, peer-reviewed and surveyed. A repository of working paper should be open under IPCC to collect papers submitted and non-submitted to peer-review. Lead Authors should keep an on-going open directory with the bibliography they intend to survey and utilise (including peer-reviewed journals and their own selection of the materials deposited in the repository). An appeal to journals to fast-track peer review of 1.5 °C- relevant papers should be launched by IPCC. Meanwhile, the Special report should contain tables in interactive formats, that can be updated by authorised users, even after the Special report will be released, so as to contain very updated and global information.

D. Involvement of vulnerable countries, for which climate change represents an existential and central threat, 1.5 °C a key threshold and which have been asking the international community to set the 1.5°C limit, is essential. IPCC is still dominated by US and European scientists, with their university being the standards also for developing world participants as Lead Authors, Contributors and Reviewers. This skews their institutional settings and incentives. Rules in terms of expertise, funding and language – seemingly neutral – have the actual effect of discriminating against people from the frontline of climate change. For this report, a minimum of 40% participants should be nominated by vulnerable countries and including scientists, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, community organisers and representatives of indigenous people and “Language gatekeepers” should be nominate.

The paper is organised as follows: in Part I, it reports the UNFCCC and IPCC decisions on the Special Report, then it shortly highlights why countries in UNFCCC asked for such report and which are the expectations it should fulfil. This leads to a first broad suggestion. Then it alternates a chapter devoted to discussion and a broad suggestion, for three time. Part II contains a long tentative Table of contents covering 11 chapters, very preliminarily outlining key questions for each one, based on the broad suggestions. Finally, limitations of the paper are highlighted in its conclusion.

Author: Valentino Piana, director of the Economics Web Institute. Including by participating to COP15, COP19 and COP21, he closely follows the UNFCCC process.Email: director@economicswebinstitute.org

Part I

1. Context

In Paris, in the same COP Decision FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1 that approved the text of the pathbreaking Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC has invited “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide a special report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways” (point 21 of this COP Decision).

The choice of 2018 deadline is because in the same year, according to point 20 of the same Decision, the COP “decides to convene a facilitative dialogue among Parties in 2018 to take stock of the collective efforts of Parties in relation to progress towards the long-term goal referred to in Article 4, paragraph 1, of the Agreement and to inform the preparation of nationally determined contributions pursuant to Article 4, paragraph 8, of the Agreement”.

Article 4, paragraph 1, of the Agreement states:

“This Agreement, in enhancing the implementation of the Convention, including its objective, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, including by: (a) Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change; (b) Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production;

(c) Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.”

Article 4, paragraph 8, of the Agreement states:“In communicating their nationally determined contributions, all Parties shall provide the information necessary for clarity, transparency and understanding in accordance with decision 1/CP.21 and any relevant decisions of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement”.

Not quoted by the COP Decision, but central to the possible future role of IPCC, is art. 14, which states:

“1. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement shall periodically take stock of the implementation of this Agreement to assess the collective progress towards achieving the purpose of this Agreement and its long-term goals (referred to as the “global stocktake”). It shall do so in a comprehensive and facilitative manner, considering mitigation, adaptation and the means of implementation and support, and in the light of equity and the best available science.2. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement shall undertake its first global stocktake in 2023 and every five years thereafter unless otherwise decided by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement.3. The outcome of the global stocktake shall inform Parties in updating and enhancing, in a nationally determined manner, their actions and support in accordance with the relevant provisions of this Agreement, as well as in enhancing international cooperation for climate action”.

The Panel responded positively to the invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to provide a special report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways at its IPCC-43 session convened from 11-13 April 2016, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Moreover, the IPCC Bureau, after having considered a comprehensive overview of the effects of all Decisions taken in Paris (including the encouragement of “the scientific community to address information and research gaps identified during the structured expert dialogue, including scenarios that limit warming to below 1.5 °C relative to pre-industrial levels by 2100 and the range of impacts at the regional and local scales associated with those scenarios” and the fact that “the COP requested the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice to provide advice on how the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can inform the global stocktake of the implementation of the Agreement pursuant to its Article 14 of the Agreement and to report on this matter to the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement at its second session”), at its 51st Session (Geneva, Switzerland, 16-17 February 2016), recommended “to the Panel to take the outcomes of UNFCCC COP-21 into account when determining the IPCC programme of work and products for the sixth assessment cycle”1.

A special event on the SBSTA and the IPCC was held on 18 May 2016 during the UNFCCC inter-annual session. The event allowed for an open exchange of views between Parties and IPCC representatives on how the work of the IPCC assessments can inform the global stocktake, as stated by the Note by the Chair of the SBSTA on “Information on the SBSTA and the IPCC special event on IPCC assessments and the global stocktake”2. “The SBSTA welcomed IPCC decisions IPCC/XLIII-6, IPCC/XLIII-7 and IPCC/XLIII-8, enumerating the forthcoming products of the sixth IPCC assessment cycle, including an IPCC Special Report to be produced in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways to be prepared in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, which will have relevance to the first global stocktake”3. While reiterating that IPCC is independent and should assure scientific integrity, many Parties called for “policy relevance” of the Report and expressed the wish that the scientific community does respond by doubling down efforts and new scientific production.1 http://www.ipcc.ch/apps/eventmanager/documents/37/100320160926-INF.4_FollowupCOP21.pdf2 http://unfccc.int/files/science/workstreams/application/pdf/sbsta_chair_information_note_sbsta_ipcc_special_event.pdf

3 http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2016/sbsta/eng/l16.pdf

2. The reasons behind the Special Report

All this stresses that the Special Report is not an autonomous purely scientific enterprise: it a crucial building block in the international answer to climate change. It is (a part of) what vulnerable countries got from the other nations in exchange for relaxing requests such as mandatory top-down emission reduction quotas – as a treaty building on the Kyoto Protocol would have done, starting from the carbon budget computed by IPCC and distributed according equity and to historical responsibilities in over-using the atmosphere4.

The international answer to climate change is, for decades from now, structured by UNFCCC and the landmark Paris Agreement, which contains a ratchet up mechanism for ambition and cyclical – even frequent – stocktacking sessions to evaluate if the joint and cumulative efforts by all countries fall short or is adequate to address all dimensions of climate change.

On 22 April 2016 the Paris Agreement broke all records for the number of signatures of any UN treaty and was ratified by 15 countries. By comparison the Kyoto protocol was, on the first day, signed by 6 countries and was ratified by none. After one year, the Kyoto Protocol was signed by 84 countries. Large and small countries alike pledged to ratify the Paris Agreement and its entry into force will be well in advance of the 2020 timeline that many considered as normal.

This is crucial because: “by the time AR6 is published, the current pace of emissions will mean the IPCC’s carbon budget to stay below 1.5C will essentially have been exhausted”5.

The timely and effective delivery of the Special Report can make the difference in how countries will update and ratchet up their Nationally Determined Contributions.

IPCC traditionally begins with a scoping process, geared toward developing detailed outlines of these climate reports, with government representatives, together with a large group of scholars and other interested parties, drafting a tentative table of contents and outlines of each chapter of the IPCC.

Following the scoping process, the IPCC Plenary approves the outlines, sometimes after some modification.

At its Nairobi meeting, IPCC has decided the strategy and timeline for its next series of reports, the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), and the special reports that will be prepared in the next few years. Expert scoping of the Special Report on 1.5 degrees will begin in the coming months with a full scoping meeting in August 2016.

4 See the option present in the Lima elements for a negotiating text: “A global emission budget to be divided among all Parties according to the principles and provisions of the Convention, so as to limit global warming in this century to below 1.5 °C according to the IPCC assessment. The distribution of the global emission budget should be undertaken in accordance with historical responsibilities, ecological footprint, capabilities, and state of development” and see also e.g. Sujatha Byravan, How the Most Vulnerable Countries Fared at the Paris Meeting, which states: “For the most vulnerable countries, including the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and small island states, there were several concerns going into COP21 (Coast Trust 2015). The significant ones were as follows: (i) Setting a target of no more than 1.5°C rise in average temperature has been considered important at least since 2007, when the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out that exceeding those levels would give rise to worsening risks for ecosystems, coasts and food production. The extreme vulnerability of many LDCs, including the small island nations, whose very existence is threated by rising seas, led to a strong push for 1.5°C as a safer target than 2°C, and this has been the dominant theme in technical sessions of the UNFCCC (AOSIS 2015)”. 5 http://www.carbonbrief.org/the-ipccs-priorities-for-the-next-six-years-1-5c-oceans-cities-and-food-security

Countries nominate experts, among which Lead Authors, Contributors and Reviewers are selected. Participation is for free and involve a large amount of volunteer time.

Previous Special Reports included: Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) (2000); Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (2005); Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SREN) (2011); and Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) (2011).

This Special Report is different, because it arises from an explicit invitation by UNFCCC and it follows the Paris Agreement, whose word-by-word drafting has taken four years, with Parties inputs, the Lima Call for Climate Action and finally in Geneva an official negotiating text (FCCC/ADP/2015/1) containing 1270 square brackets. The words were in the text because at least one Party wanted then but they were in brackets because at least one Party objected. Successive rounds of consensus building and subtle compromise have generate a text with fewer brackets.

I personally followed the different version and I was at COP21 in the party overflow rooms where, with an open wordprocessor sheet, the co-chairs tried to remove brackets and negotiated even the punctuation. It’s a painfully long process, whose outcome should be respected as the perfect equilibrium point. Final arm-twisting in the “Comité de Paris” closed the arguments. The text is now official and generating legal actions by signature and ratification at unprecedented scale.

It would be contradictory to relitigate and reinstall positions rejected during the process.

3. The first broad suggestion: the balanced outcome structure and architecture of the Paris Agreement should be fully reflected in the Special Report

The balanced outcome structure and architecture of the Paris Agreement should be fully reflected in the Special Report, with due and proportional attention paid to mitigation (art. 4, 5 and 6), adaptation (art. 7), loss and damage (art. 8) and support (art. 9, 10, 11), transparency, compliance and facilitation (art. 13, 15, 12), in formats useful for global stocktake (art. 14 and point 20 of the FCCC/CP/2015/10/Add.1).

IPCC has been largely underplaying the Kyoto Protocol and has heavily hinted at alternative venues to UNFCCC6. After the universal success in Paris and in New York signature day, this has to stop: the IPCC should produce documents in line and useful to the international answer to climate change as enshrined in the Paris Agreement.

For example, it’s important that a full chapter is devoted to “loss and damage”.

The issue whether “loss and damage” of actual impact of climate change is a part of “adaptation” or has a conceptual and legal autonomous standing has been hotly debated in the negotiations with specific countries strongly advocating one or the other approach.

However, the Paris Agreement has definitively chosen that it represents a distinct and autonomous article. The logics chosen is then the following: first, the world has to reduce human interference in the climate system by reducing emissions (art. 4) and by increasing removals (art. 5), including by cooperative, market and non-market approaches (art. 6). Then it should adapt to all impacts involved by what it was not mitigated (in the past, currently and in the future). Then, for what is beyond the limits of adaptation (either because the actual adaptation measures were not taken - nor were sufficient, including because of insufficient financial flows - or because the magnitude of the 6 The Chapter 13 “International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments” in the IPCC WGIII Assessment Report devotes 24 lines to Kyoto Protocol and 67 lines to alternatives to UNFCCC, including 24 lines to MEF and G20.

impact overwhelmed any possible adaptation), it’s necessary to cope with losses and damages that actually occur. And IPCC should review the literature and make those evaluations and generalisation that would authoritatively provide the international community with a reference point.

4. The dynamics of mitigation pledges: from Kyoto to Paris

The Kyoto Protocol exerted a deep influence on a general mindset in which top-down externally negotiated emission reductions are mandated, with countries taking external commitment as for the level of reduction but providing no details about how to achieve them and without expecting any help to do so. Flexibility mechanisms were offered to countries mandated to reduce, in order to fulfil abroad their commitments, in the name of a “least cost” approach7. The Paris Agreement is founded on a totally different architecture.

Countries, which agreed on global goals and the overall shape of the mitigation trajectory, start with their Nationally Determined Contributions; a global aggregation is independently performed, the emission gap (and the adaptation and funding gaps) is computed, and countries are called to revise upwards their Contributions in successive rounds of a ratchet-up mechanisms, where support is provided to enhance ambition. The upward revision is made possible by synchronisation, synergies, cooperation, and positive feedbacks from actions in other countries and from the three pillars (technology, finance, capacity-building). Governments are pressured to act by art. 12 mechanisms involving the public opinion (public education, awareness, access to information, participation).

The national level plays a central role in the dynamics. Country structural features and conditions are central for ambitious goals that are respecting and leveraging the CBDR principle. Accordingly, indications about the risks involved by reaching a 1.5 warming and how to nationally reap the mitigation potential are quite relevant for the process.

Scientists at IPCC have in the past attempted to provide country-specific recommendation, based on independent judgement of past and current emissions and actions. But political representatives have been resisting such indications as damaging their country sovereignty. Since summary for policymakers are agreed line by line, many statements finally agreed turned out to be weak and generic, since they simply remarks that countries are different and that the world as a whole could do more.

5. The second broad suggestion: produce useful inputs for NDCs, NAMAs and NAZCA pledges for taxonomies of countries, since the Paris logics is bottom-up (and not top-down) with cycles ratchetting-up ambition

Since the contribution are bottom-up and nationally determined, indications for the national level are essential and should be provided in formats and statements that can be useful inputs for Nationally Determined Contributions and for national strategies, plans and prioritised list of action in the domain of adaptation. Due to the sensitivity of the governments to too specific indications for them, a taxonomy of countries should be established by the IPCC, with broad statements to be inserted for more and more ambitious NDCs and adaptation actions, in a way that allow national choices and flexibility, leaving room for policymakers to choose which category their country should belong, which statements to choose and how to articulate, detail and adapt them, with the

7 We remark that the Kyoto Protocol continues to hold legal validity, including for its second commitment period. However, the contrast between the rate of adoption of the Doha Amendment and the Paris Agreement is clearly showing a shift, especially if the Paris Agreement early enters into force.

obvious overall freedom due to their full sovereignty, which is coupled by transparency of action and support (art. 13 and successive rules to be established as the Agreement will have been entered into force).

The IPCC Special report should provide relevant elements for ratchet-up mechanism of NDC and adaptation ambition. It should extensively cover which factors can facilitate, enhance and push higher ambition, pointing out at sectors and actions where cooperation and coordination (art. 6) can help the involved countries in becoming more ambitious. Supply chain coordination of demand and supply of eco-innovation is a domain where international action could complement local experiments to nurture and upscale disruptive and evolutionary technologies. More in general country-wide or cross-country sectoral tranformation is the subject of NAMAs (Nationally Determined Mitigation Actions), whose role is undiminished by the lack of a direct verbal quote in the Paris Agreements, as their blossoming presence in the UNFCCC registry testifies. The IPCC should highlight which variables are relevant to establish taxonomies of countries, both objective and subjective, in terms of quantitative and qualitative indicators of responsibilities, capabilities and willingness.

During the negotiation the concept of “countries in the position of doing so” was briefly fleshed out; it was too immature and unfortunate at the time but an attempt to decline country differentiation in useful, manageable and acceptable categories is worth exploring.

This is true not only for pledges from country political representative but also for the regions and cities, the private sector, the financial institutions, and civil society, all free to submit their pledges to the Non-State Actors Zone for Climate Actions.

6. A timely delivery of useful scientific information from dispersed knowledge bases requires a new level of transparency in the process towards writing the Special Report

The IPCC Expert Meeting on Communication held Oslo, Norway in February 2016 underlined that “[t]he most important stakeholders are the UNFCCC, governments and policymakers at all levels, and the rest of the UN system”, recognised that “[m]any users seek practical and actionable information in an IPCC report that can inform their behaviour and response to climate change” and recommended to “[e]ngage with stakeholders from the outset to understand their priorities and requirements so that the report is policy-relevant. You cannot simply bolt on communications at the end and provide information to ‘ignorant’ audiences (information deficit model); you must understand what information is relevant and how it should be presented”.

“Author teams or TSUs should include someone who can understand how stories are filtered through the news media and the public policy landscape and how this affects the reception of IPCC findings”. Indeed, previous Assessment Reports generating newspaper headlines in terms of “centimetres more in the sea-level” in 2100 did not help the cause of relating voters to climate change issues and helped powerful lobbies in belittling urgency of the issue.

As the feasibility of meeting the 1.5 C goals will be a major issue of the Special Report, the understanding of the assumptions made to declare it feasible or not, and to estimate costs and who would be bearing them, should be based on their transparency. Accordingly, it’s important to consider that policymakers need to know which are the options for their actions during their term of office. What happens in 2100 is the concern of formal models and their modellers, but in actual policymaking has very little room. Almost no country has such a planning period and can credibly commit to act in such remote decades. A lengthy discussion about which mitigation should happen

in the second half of the century should not crowd out a much more necessary discussion about what can be done to reduce emissions now and prepare the adaptation steps to be taken now to minimise losses - and avoid the largest and irreversible ones.

We live in an internet-age where encyclopaedia, to which an Assessment report can be well compared, are getting not only Wikipedised but also the most prestigious like the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” have frequent online updates.

As the world is getting warmer, the 1.5C is slowing entering into the realm of news coverage. So the possibility that events not thought possible or not covered by models because of their inevitable simplifications might enter into the list of what could be exacerbated over time. Since the control of a complex system is undermined if there are delays in detecting, interpreting and acting upon signals, it’s crucial that the SR set a new standards for interactivity and, at least in part, ongoing updates.

All this in the context of an issue that has been neglected by the scientific community, heavily biased in fervour of two degrees (with too many still advocating for higher levels). As Prof. Simon Lewis, professor of global change at University College London puts it: “The emergence of 1.5°C as a serious policy position comes with important lessons for scientists. The global research community has shockingly little to say on the probable impacts of a 1.5°C rise.”

There is an immediate need to scale up production, review and utilisation of new studies.

7. The third broad suggestion: Communication should be kept as open as possible (as for bibliography, knowledge bases, model structures and assumptions, and empirical evidence used in the perspective and during writing the IPCC Report as well as reporting highlights).

Communication of bibliography, knowledge bases, models and empirical evidence should be kept as open as possible already during writing and after release. Since 1.5°C have been mostly neglected in the scientific past production, the majority of the papers that will be useful for the Special report have not yet been written, published, peer-reviewed and surveyed. A repository of working paper should be open under IPCC to collect papers submitted and non-submitted to peer-review. In this repository, you would have the most updated collection of works, whose authoritativeness might yet to be established but whose authors and structural features might stand out and attract attention.

Lead Authors should keep an on-going open directory with the bibliography they actually intend to survey and utilise (including peer-reviewed journals and there own selection of the materials deposited in the repository).

This operationalise Decision IPCC/XLI-4 “FUTURE WORK OF THE IPCC” in which “the Panel decided [t]o request the IPCC Secretariat to facilitate and enhance further the consistent and coherent use of up to date digital technology for sharing and disseminating information”.

As for climate models, it’s crucial that they transparently exhibit their assumptions, in particular about the prices of renewables and other low-carbon technologies, about the rate of assumed decrease (if any) and whether such decrease is considered related to the cumulative installation (which is often the case with new technologies and can be influenced by NDCs).

An appeal to journals to fast-track peer review of 1.5°C- relevant papers should be launched by IPCC. Quality-assurance alternatives to peer-review, such as the “open validation process” at World Economics Association for its World Economic Review should be given a fair shot8.

The cut-off date at which the bibliography stops growing, which was for AR5 WGIII the January 2012 for submitted papers and 3 October 2013 for accepted papers, should this time be split with an earlier cut-off and a late cut-off for papers covering issues on which lacks of literature was recognised.

Meanwhile, the Special report should contain tables in interactive formats, that can be updated by authorised users, even after the Special report will be released, so as to contain very updated and global information.

In particular, interactive boxes two particularly fast moving and crucial issues (costs and profitability for renewables, also in time series, and the list of announced and actually operating CSS plants) should be present.

8. The skewed composition of IPCC would be highly inappropriate for this Special Report

Over the years, there have been several analysis of the scientists taking part as Lead Authors, Contributors and Reviewers in the process of IPCC Assessments.

Back in 2011, “small island nations of Oceania were the most severely under-represented group”9 and that’s exactly one of the key constituencies that mostly pressed the international community to move to a 1.5°C goal.

In 2014, “The supply of climate change knowledge is biased towards richer countries - those that pollute the most and are least vulnerable to climate change – and skewed away from the poorer, fragile and more vulnerable regions of the world. That creates a global imbalance between the countries in need of knowledge and those that build it. This could have implications for the quality of the political decisions countries and regions make to prevent and adapt to climate change”10

In 2015, “we highlight the persistence and extent of North–South inequalities in the authorship of the report, revealing the dominance of US and UK institutions as training sites for WGIII authors. Examining patterns of co-authorship between WGIII authors, we identify the unevenness in co-authoring relations, with a small number of authors co-writing regularly and indicative of an epistemic community’s influence over the IPCC’s definition of mitigation.

These co-authoring networks follow regional patterns, with significant EU–BRICS collaboration and authors from the US relatively insular. From a disciplinary perspective, economists, engineers, physicists and natural scientists remain central to the process, with insignificant participation of scholars from the humanities.

8 https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/journals/wer/9 Ho-Lem, Zerriffi, and Kandlikar, Who participates in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and why: A quantitative assessment of the national representation of authors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 1308–1317.10 M. Pasgaard, N. Strange. A quantitative analysis of the causes of the global climate change research distribution. Global Environmental Change, 2013; 23 (6): 1684 DOI:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.08.013.

The shared training and career paths made apparent through our analysis suggest that the idea that broader geographic participation may lead to a wider range of viewpoints and cultural understandings of climate change mitigation may not be as sound as previously thought”11.

This Special Report is particularly sensitive to such bias because on the feasibility and on how to limit warming under 1.5°C, people from developed and vulnerable countries have dramatically different views (and possibly interests). For some countries, none of which in Europe or North America, there is an existential threat if the world is warming more than 1.5°C.

Since it is already decided by the Paris Agreement that we need to stay “well below 2” (which is different from a 2 degrees constrained pursued by most climate models and scenarios), it’s important to understand the different with even deeper goal of 1.5°C, which brought feminist social scientists to “interrogate what may be deemed ‘acceptable’ and what may be ‘dangerous’, and for whom, and [to] contest the global community as a homogeneous entity. Those for whom a 2°C target appears to be a relatively safe bet are the richer countries in temperate latitudes, as well as politicians and economists from the global North deeply entrenched in a masculinized rationality that nature can be controlled and that in the imminent climate race with inevitable winners and losers they will be among the former. Seager rejects the notion of a 2°C target as a real geophysical threshold that neatly distinguishes between little and much danger; instead, she argues that the target represents the point ‘when global warming “comes” home to the rich world, …. when “their” [the others’] problems are likely to become “ours”’12.

Conversely, participants from vulnerable countries would bring a much necessary input on adaptation actions, needs, and approaches, including criteria for good quality of adaptation, which in turn is the focus of much of art. 7 of the Paris Agreement.

In Art. 7.5 “Parties acknowledge that adaptation action should follow a country-driven, gender-responsive, participatory and fully transparent approach, taking into consideration vulnerable groups, communities and ecosystems, and should be based on and guided by the best available science and, as appropriate, traditional knowledge, knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems, with a view to integrating adaptation into relevant socioeconomic and environmental policies and actions, where appropriate”.

As IPCC aims to represent the “best available science”, it is crucial it includes, compares and relates to the other sources of knowledge.

The Preambular section of the Agreement states that “Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity”.

As IPCC should explore all options on actions to address climate change, it should fully integrate these consideration and ascertain which of those options are acceptable (or even “legal”) in the light of the Paris Agreement.

11 Corbera, Calvet-Mir, Hughes and Paterson, Patterns of authorship in the IPCC Working Group III report, Nature Climate Change (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2782.12 Seager J., Death by degrees: taking a feminist hard look at the 2 climate policy. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning. 2009;34:11–21 as quoted by Tschakert, 1.5°C or 2°C: a conduit’s view from the science-policy interface at COP20 in Lima, Peru Climate Change Responses2015 2:3 DOI: 10.1186/s40665-015-0010-z.

The COP Decision that includes the Agreement as annex “recognizes the need to strengthen knowledge, technologies, practices and efforts of local communities and indigenous peoples related to addressing and responding to climate change”.

In short, the IPCC Special Report would fail on start if it does not significantly deviate from current practices and much more actively invite and facilitate the participation from vulnerable countries.

9. The fourth broad suggestion: strongly involve representatives of vulnerable countries in writing and reviewing the Report

Involvement of vulnerable countries, for which climate change represents an existential and central threat, 1.5°C a key threshold and which have been asking the international community to set the 1.5°C goal, is essential. IPCC is still dominated by US and European scientists, with their universities being the standards also for developing world participants as Lead Authors, Contributors and Reviewers. This skews their institutional settings and incentives. Rules in terms of expertise and funding – seemingly neutral – have the actual effect of discriminating against people from the frontline of climate change. For this report, a minimum of 40% participants should be nominated by vulnerable countries and including scientists, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, community organisers and representatives of indigenous people.

Moreover, there is an issue of language, with the need of going beyond an English-only literature – because national mitigation action and adaptation plans and actions are usually in national language. This could be done by nominating “Language gatekeeper” that by request and on certain subjects would survey national language papers and policy documents and verbally refer on them. To the extent the Lead Author requires so – a synthesis of particularly relevant documents would be written in English. To assure that this streamlining process is fair and effective, all documents in national and English language would be published in the abovementioned repository. This would further operationalise what established on the issue by Decision IPCC/XLI-4.

Part II

Given the broad abovementioned suggestions and by collecting items and ideas from a plurality of sources, including Oxford conference on “1.5 degrees: meeting the challenges of the Paris Agreement”13, our original proposal of a tentative table of contents, and some of the key questions they might address, is presented, with the due limitations explicited in the final chapter.

11. A tentative table of contents for the Special Report on “The impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways ”

Foreword

Preface

Summary for Policymakers

1. A world gearing towards 1.5°C – a general view

How should the the 1.5°C temperature above pre-industrial levels be interpreted?

What was the pre-industrial average global temperature? How to know at different time scale how much are we above it?

Which consequences has the 1.5°C temperature definition for modelling, for policy, and for action purposes?

2. Sensitivity of Earth systems, ecosystems and biodiversity How will the Earth systems, ecosystems and biodiversity respond to 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, including in terms of slowly ongoing events, extreme events and unprecedented extremes, including in regional terms?

How does this response compare with warming levels implied by current trends and by current INDCs and NDCs?

Are these responses stoppable or unstoppable, reversible or irreversible, in the case 1.5°C threshold is overshot?

Which global monitoring and alert system can be put in place to track warming and its impacts? How to convey useful information from such system to policymakers at all levels? 3. Human impacts of reaching 1.5°C of global warming What will be the human impacts of 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, including the impact on all areas covered by Sustainable Development Goals?

Where will these human impacts be localised, in terms of regions, countries, territorial distribution (e.g. urban, rural, coastal, mountainous areas etc.), and social groups?

13 http://www.1point5degrees.org.uk/

How much will be the economic and non-economic losses and damages, including costs (at least in terms of orders of magnitude), globally and for regions, countries, social groups?

How do those impacts and costs compare with those projected with warming levels implied by current trends and by current INDCs and NDCs?

Are these impacts stoppable or unstoppable, reversible or irreversible, in the case 1.5°C threshold is overshot?

Which global monitoring and alert system can be put in place to track human impacts? How to convey useful information from such system to policymakers at all levels? 4. Implications of a 1.5 degree target for adaptation Which adaptation measures are adequate to address impacts at global, regional, national, and social group levels?

How much will such adaptation measures costs (at least in terms of orders of magnitude) and which is the best way to fund them?

How to leverage overlapping with SDGs and mitigation actions so that adaptation is effective and inclusive?

How to define mal-adaptation and how to avoid it?

Which is the most appropriate division of work between the different levels of planning (local, national, regional and international)?

How governments, civil society, private sector, the financial system and science can support UNFCCC and Paris Agreement mechanisms for adaptation?

Which global monitoring and alert system can be put in place to track adaptation and adequate support? How to convey useful information from such system to policymakers at all levels?

5. Loss and damage during the trajectory leading to 1.5 degree

How to avert, minimise and address loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events? Which is the role of sustainable development in reducing the risk of loss and damage?

How to map losses and damages of climate change? How to attribute class of events and specific events to climate change, totally or partially?

Which is the current understanding and options for actions in the following areas:

(a) Early warning systems;(b) Emergency preparedness;(c) Slow onset events;(d) Events that may involve irreversible and permanent loss and damage;(e) Comprehensive risk assessment and management;

(f) Risk insurance facilities, climate risk pooling and other insurance solutions;(g) Non-economic losses;(h) Resilience of communities, livelihoods and ecosystems

In these and other possible areas of interest, how to connect to (and operationalise) the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction? Which role for preparedness and operationalisation of resilience?

Is still evitable surpassing the threshold of 1.5°C? If not, when did this became inevitable? If yes, when and how shall we know whether we crossed a milestone that implies its inevitability?

Which global monitoring and alert system can be put in place to track losses and damages? How to convey useful information from such system to policymakers at all levels?

6. Global greenhouse gas emission pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C degrees Which is the emission and carbon budgets that would result in a 1.5°C warming for different levels of probability? In how many years of current and perspective trends would such budget exhausted? How the current INDCs and NDCs would widen the number of years for this to happen?

What are the mitigation pathways that would achieve a 1.5°C target with a high (>75%) probability and medium (>66%) probability? Which are the major choices of shapes over time of the pathways? How do they fit the decisions contained in art. 4.1 according to which: “Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty”.

How do differences in costs of different mitigation pathways for different temperature goals compare, in terms of orders of magnitude, with the costs of impacts and adaptation? Is a 1.5°C target justified by a large positive savings in impacts and adaptation costs with respect to other temperature targets? Which are such savings in the case of overshooting the 1.5°C target?

How to fully reflect the additional values of a 1.5°C target in terms of reduced probability of a 2°Cand of even higher temperature scenarios, including in terms of expected benefits?

Since the long term goal is not total decarbonization but “a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases ”, how much will be in future decades the natural removals by sinks and how to allocate to different sectors the anthropogenic emissions?

Is this balance compatible with decades of global negative emissions?

Is it possible to reach a 1.5°C target without global negative emissions? Conversely, if decades of negative emissions have to be excluded from the models, which civilisation scenario allows to achieve a 1.5°C target?

7. National and inter-national greenhouse gas emission pathways to keep global warming at 1.5°C degrees

Which are the most realistic rapid emission reductions towards decarbonisation and low-emission development scenarios and implementation pathways in taxonomically different countries? In first approximation, and before a refinement of country categories, one would ask: How rapid emission cuts and decarbonisation in currently high-emission countries can be technically, economically, socially and politically feasible and incentivised? How the BAU trajectories of emerging economies can be bended and shifted towards low-emissions developments? How to synergise low-emissions development and exit from Least Development status?

Keeping into account the universal and integrated nature of SDGs, how to synergise mitigation and all Sustainable Development Goals?

Which country did achieve in the last 30 years, at least temporarily, such speed and depth of change? Which policies were instrumental to such success cases? How these cases and policies could be transferred and implemented elsewhere? Which role and how to enhance International Cooperative Initiatives by non-state actors, including those inserted in the NAZCA portal?

What do these dynamics imply for different economic sectors and on what timescales? In particular, which disruptive and evolving technologies, industrial dynamics and sector structure is called for, under a 1.5°C mobilisation, in the emitting sector of Energy Systems, Transport, Buildings, Industry, Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use and possibly others. How to boost mitigation by including a territorial dimension of human settlements, infrastructure and spatial planning, such as cities, peri-urban, rural, coastal, mountainous areas and others?

How globalised sectors as aviation and maritime shipping should fairly contribute to emission reductions enhancing and implementing a 1.5°C goal?

How all this can channelled in more and more ambitious NDCs and NAMAs, as well as Non-State Actors Climate Actions?

8. International action on technology development and transfer before the carbon budget for 1.5°C target is exhausted

Which technology diffusion, including transfer, is requested to make best use of the years before the carbon budget is exhausted? Which technologies are mature and commercial enough – and with a realistic time-to-build - to provide a sizeable contribution in this time frame, leading to such emission reductions that widen this time span?

Given their extensive presence in INDC and in current new installed capacity, which role for renewable can be foreseen? In which date could a 100% renewable electric system be reached globally and by groups of countries? Which role for other zero-emission technologies outside the electricity production, including heat pumps and electric mobility?

How to best transfer technologies across countries and sectors?

Ideally, subchapters for main technology challenges by sector of emission should be included.

Which are the features of a Green Innovation System at national and international level to generate waves of eco-innovations? Which technology development should be fostered by international action, including the Technology Mechanism and the CTCN?

As for the pathways that assume the deployment at large range of negative emissions techniques, which is a current and detailed assessment of proposed negative emission techniques, drawing on a wide range of expertise from natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and the humanities to assess to what extent, if any, such approaches could be deployed without creating countervailing side-effects?

What about nature-based solutions?

Which is the assessment of the efficacy, costs, and risks of all technologies and approaches to limit warming to 1.5°C, with particular attention to those technologies that might pose an intrinsic risk? Which categories of the risks of climate-related technologies, including their environmental and social impacts?

How to ensure that technologies offered in climate projects under the UNFCCC do not have unexpected consequences and, particularly, cross-boundary or global incidents? How to lowerthe cost of doing technology assessments in project implementations, by focusing on appropriatelevels of assessment for each project?

Which role for capacity-building in connection to technologies and sectoral approaches?

How can the Technology Mechanism and the Capacity-Building architecture and actions be operationalised, funded and implemented to achieve synergies at international level?

Which conditions would best suggest and characterise bilateral and multilateral cooperation under art. 6 of the Paris Agreement?

9. Financing 1.5 degrees What scale of finance and which finance roadmap would be required to achieve a 1.5°C target before the exhaustion of the relative carbon budget? How might this finance be mobilised? How should finance be allocated between different nations, sectors and priorities?

How the financial system, including the Green Climate Fund and international, regional and national financial institutions, should cope and support adaptation as well as incorporate climate-proofing and climate resilience measures?

How to avoid competition for funds by mitigation and adaptation? How to synergise finance for mitigation with other goals, including adaptation and more in general Sustainable Development Goals?

Which global monitoring and alert system can be put in place to track financial flows? How to convey useful information from such system to policymakers at all levels?

10. Capacity-buildingWhich skills at individual and organisational level do countries need for implementing the mitigation pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C and for adequately addressing adaptation, loss and damage, technology and finance?

Which capacity-building frameworks, programmes, standards, and actions could timely deliver such skills, embedded in operational entities, both public and private? Which choices education and vocational training systems should make to address climate change and sustainability, including synergies and connections with all Sustainable Development Goals?

Which international actions in the capacity-building domain would make the largest effect in the years before the carbon budget for 1.5°C is exhausted?

Which cooperation and institutional arrangements and actions highlighted by art. 12 of the Paris Agreement would facilitate such goals?

11. Societal and political obstacles and conducive processes for 1.5°C mitigation pathways Which have been the societal and political conditions that allowed GHG emissions to such a large scale that it generated a negative anthropogenic interference with the climate system? Which mechanism prevented or delayed effective action? How the distribution of power among and across countries acted in favour or against awareness, attitudes and behaviours protecting the climate?

How conducive processes and good practices were put in place over the last decades? Which societal and political mechanisms allowed them to emerge, connect and reach a critical mass?

As for the present, this chapter should perform a global survey of legal and institutional obstacles to radical cuts in emissions by the diffusion of technology and non-technological solution. How these obstacles could be removed, including by commitments taken in the form of Nationally Determined Contributions? How political cycles, including elections and changes in government composition, can provide a conducive environment for raising ambition?

How can social innovation, including both technological and non-technological components, be promoted with sufficient urgency?

Which type and what amount of behavioural change in individuals and in social groups could be required to achieve a 1.5°C target?

What are the possible distributive/compensatory/intergenerational justice implications of increasing the mitigation ambition to limit warming to 1.5°C, keeping in mind the existing geopolitical realities?

How Sustainable Development Goals and their implementation could boost consensus around 1.5°C mitigation pathways?

All this calls for the integrated involvement of social and political scientists and the humanities, practitioners and observers as research shifts towards implementing a societal transformation to 1.5°C.

Limitations of this paper

It should be clear by the preliminary list of topics addressed in this short note that it was impossible to address all the possible issues that might be discussed at the scoping meeting and that what already mentioned would probably need some streamlining and simplification in order to timely produce the Special Report, due in 2018.

We could not provide an assessment of the availability of published scientific literature on the topics. Indeed, we stress that much of the needed literature has still to be published and the outline, suggested by the scoping meeting, will impact on the decisions of authors and groups of research to devote resources into studies that could in principle be included in the repository and the bibliography of the Special Report.We did not allocate in percentage the contribution of different chapters, nor highlighted the practical process of implementation of IPCC rules for the process of writing and reviewing the Special Report.

This is only an input among many to the crucial process of outlining a Special Report, whose formulation might play a positive role in the acceleration of the international reflection, positioning, and coping with climate change after the Paris Agreement.