Founded in 1988, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a UN scientific body for the same purpose — recently released its Fifth Assessment Report, known as AR5. The report took seven years to compile and was prepared by 836 authors from 85 different countries of the world. The IPCC released it in four parts, between September 2013 and November 2014.

The Working Group I report focused on the science of climate change while the Working Group II report was on impacts and adaptation and the Working Group III report was on mitigation. The synthesis of all these reports is to be released in November 2014. AR5 reviews the scientific evidence on the trends and causes of climate change, the risks to human and natural systems and options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC says that a rise in global warming beyond 2°C might exceed the world’s ability to adapt. It finds that if emissions continue to rise at present levels, the global average temperature will be 2.6 to 4.8 °C higher than present. A 4°C rise could endanger harvests and cause drastic sea-level rise, the spread of diseases, and the extinction of ecosystems.

Jonathan Lynn, the head of Communi­cations and Media Relations at the IPCC was in Islamabad last week on the invitation of LEAD-Pakistan for a media workshop on climate change. He explained that: “even if emissions are controlled today, we will continue to see impacts for many years as the cumulative amount of emissions in the atmosphere has built up each year. The world will continue to face the consequences of climate change for decades; what is needed is an urgency to solve the problem and the cost of mitigation need not be so high. In fact, the IPCC believes that it is doable and affordable, provided we don’t leave it too late as then it will become much more expensive as more damage will be done by green house gases”.

Lynn is not a scientist but a journalist with over 30 years of experience working with Reuters and he explained the inner workings of the IPCC. This was an interactive session and all the journalists at the workshop learnt quite a bit about how the IPCC’s scientific reports are prepared (and how they come under criticism).

Dilly-dallying with solutions to global warming will only lead to high mitigation costs as damage by green house gases continues

Lynn pointed out that the role of the IPCC is not to conduct any scientific research itself but to assess peer reviewed scientific research from around the world, to understand the scientific basis of the risk of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and the options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC provides governments with the information they need to formulate policies. He explained that the IPCC’s work is to be “policy relevant but not policy prescriptive”.

At the workshop, LEAD-Pakistan distributed a report prepared by its partner, the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) entitled “The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report: What’s in it for South Asia?” This report is meant to be a guide, prepared for decision makers in South Asia. It is not an official IPCC report as the publication has not been through the comprehensive governmental approval process that the IPCC’s endorsement requires, but the research team that prepared the report (which “distils the richest material on the South Asian experience in adaptation and mitigation, from the thousands of pages of the Fifth Assessment Report”) has worked under the guidance of the IPCC’s coordinating lead authors and reviewers. Several of LEAD-Pakistan’s staff members were also members of this research team.

One of the key messages of this report is that South Asia’s climate is already changing and the impacts are already being felt; further climate change is also inevitable in the coming decades. Climate change poses challenges to growth and development in South Asia, but adaptation can bring immediate benefits and reduce the impacts. Adaptation is fundamentally about risk management and South Asia has many adaptation options.

According to the IPCC, adaptation is the only effective option to manage the inevitable impacts of climate change that mitigation cannot reduce. The IPCC describes adaptation as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects”. Through adaptation, societies and communities can seek to moderate the harm of current and future climate risks or to take advantage of new opportunities.

The report finds that some low carbon development options may be less costly in the long run and could offer new economic opportunities for South Asia. South Asia stands to benefit from integrated climate adaptation, mitigation and development practices and international cooperation is vital to avert dangerous climate change. South Asian governments can promote ambitious global action.

The CDKN report is very useful as it is difficult to wade through thousands of pages of the official IPCC reports to find references to this region in particular. Unfortunately we don’t have very many good scientists in Pakistan and not that many sound reports on climate change, so one has to depend on this report as valuable reference material. In fact, it was revealed that there was just one scientist from Pakistan, Dr Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal from the Global Change Impact Studies Centre in Islamabad who contributed to the “Food Security and Food Production Systems: Chapter 7” of the IPCC’s Working Group II report. In comparison, there were dozens of scientists from India and Bangladesh who had contributed to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 24th, 2014