The IPCC experience and lessons for IPBES

Large-scale environmental assessments involve the participation of many scientific disciplines, even more so when repeated throughout the decades and when implemented in an institutionalized context such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Although the purported function of these international organizations is to provide a working interface between science and decision-making circles at the international level, the “boundary work” concerns as much the coordination between scientific disciplines not used to work together and lacking a common language, as it defines interactions between the world of politics and the scientific community. The development of common standards for scientific evidence and plausibility is crucial, both within and between the natural and social sciences. The challenge is to produce statements of greater clarity than otherwise found in scientific publications for the use of policy makers, without jeopardizing the established scientific standards. The institutional similarities between these two international organizations are deliberate and derived from the same willingness of UN member states to retain some control over potentially far-reaching scientific assessments (see chapter 2). Institutional differences are largely a consequence of more than two decades of experience between the establishment of IPCC and that of IPBES, and the creation of a more favorable political climate during this time: Today, many member states more clearly recognize the potential for valuable policy support provided by science-policy interfaces as compared to the 1980s. Likewise, various lobbies acknowledge the importance of an institutionalized science-policy interface in the global policy debate on climate change. The development of IPBES will hopefully benefit from the IPCC experience in two areas, i.e. interaction with policy makers and complex scientific coordination. Therefore, it is important to understand the nature of IPCC and its limits and shortcomings, and also to understand the differences between the two institutions. The first section of this chapter reviews the social sciences literature devoted to IPCC and its reports without endorsing all the opinions expressed, while reflecting on the kinds of problems and challenges facing IPBES. The second section, based on the personal experience of the second co-author, both in IPCC and in the nascent IPBES, illustrates these problems and emphasizes the specificities of IPBES in its early stages.