UN Experts: IPCC Needs Funding, Restructuring

Amy Harder
Thursday, March 11, 2010 8:30 AM

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could do a more thorough job assessing the science behind global warming if it had more funding and a better management structure, UN experts, scientists and advocates said Wednesday.

The UN announced Wednesday that the InterAcademy Council, a Dutch group made up of scientists from around the world, will review the IPCC's policies and procedures in the wake of controversy over errors found in its influential 2007 report. Climate change skeptics including Senate Environment and Public Works ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla., have seized on the errors to maintain that the science behind global warming is not sound.

The panel won't examine the basic science backing up its reports, but United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth said Wednesday that major structural changes are needed for the IPCC to do a better job in the future.

"I was struck by the fact that the largest undertaking in the history of the world is being done on a budget of less than $5 million a year," said Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, in a conference call. "Not that the money is the sole determinant, but to have the necessary capacity to getting people together to make sure these reports are looked at, to have the kind of rigorous oversight that would have made sure" the errors didn't happen -- "that can't be done on a shoestring. My hope is that the nations of the world looking at this would beef up the IPCC."

IPCC lead author Chris Field also said the organization needs "more expertise, more eyes on the reports and more transparency." But that doesn't necessarily mean more funding, he added. Field, who also directs the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said most of the data assessed by the IPCC comes from scientists who volunteer their time and work. "The overwhelming value asset doesn't really show up on the account books," he said.

The IPCC's main office in Geneva employs about 10 people, and field offices in Germany, Switzerland, Japan and the United States each employ a few people, Field said. Janos Pasztor, director of the UN Secretary-General's Climate Change Support Team, said the managerial structure of the IPCC is outdated and awkward. He noted that the organization's main office in Geneva -- known as the IPCC Secretariat -- does not report to the chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. While this system may have worked initially when the IPCC was created in the late 1980s, Pasztor said, "it may not be appropriate anymore." He added that "money is part of it, but it's also the managerial structure."