To get these really inclusive chapter groups in the IPCC or to get inclusive people in the lab or in the field, there needs to be just a way for academic research, science or otherwise to be a livable thing that you can do and care about and be good at. And then you’re also allowed to be, that’s what would be in the top of that.

Kaydee Barker: This is the Livable Future podcast. I’m Kaydee Barker, and I’m here with my co-host, Cody Sanford.

Cody Sanford: And we would like to acknowledge that we are creating this podcast on lands that were the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Yute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne people. We would like to honor these people and their contributions to the region.

Kaydee: So I’m really excited about today’s episode because we sat down and talked about the IPCC or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is something that I had no idea existed before I went back to school for environmental science. Despite the fact that it’s actually existed since 1988, plays a key role in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and even won the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2007. So what it is really is obviously intergovernmental collaboration between hundreds of scientists on doing essentially this massive literature review of all of the climate science and all of the environmental science that has been published. 

Cody: So they take peer-reviewed publications and they synthesize the data to get this really good look at where we are essentially going. And then they publish this report and there’s a big technical report that is crazy long and there’s a really nicer report to read, a shorter report for policymakers. And part of the reason we’re talking about this now is that this report informs decision-making processes such as at the recent climate summit in Glasgow COP26.

UN Climate Change Conference showed where we stand collectively on addressing climate change. Katie and I attended COP26 in Glasgow as a part of the research and independent non-government organizations or the Ringo constituency. This is how we met our guest for this episode, Dr. Jessica O’Reilly. Dr. O’Reilly is an associate professor at Indiana University and is a cultural anthropologist. Just a quick definition. Anthropology is the study of our social systems and provides context into how cultures and subcultures. O’Reilly is studying the decision-making processes in the IPCC and in this episode shares a unique glimpse into that process. This interview was recorded at COP26 and I believe has lessons important for any budding scientist. 

Special thanks to Dr. O’Reilly and we start with the question, can you tell us about your research and experience? 

Dr. Jessica O’Reilly: So I am an IPCC researcher, a climate researcher, but I come from questions about science and policy from the perspective of an anthropologist. So all three of my degrees are in cultural anthropology. And so I’m really interested in human relationships with the environment. And traditionally, our discipline looks at indigenous people, marginalized communities. And that’s been important for bringing diverse voices to understanding environmental perspectives, but there’s also a pretty obvious power differential there as well. I decided to study scientists as a cultural group. So I look at scientists as a subculture with a set of cultural values that they have been trained or disciplined into. And then I look, I observe and talk to them about how they do their as sort of… a, you know, so we can look at it as ritual, as cultural process, and then how they turn their scientific research into decision-making, environmental policy, environmental management decisions. So my dissertation research was on Antarctica, and the translation of Antarctic science into policy, generally the Antarctic Treaty meeting, and then I shifted into climate research, generally.

So the project that I’ve been doing since 2018 is an ethnography of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and I’ve been to every single one of their meeting so far and a layer of sort of special breakout sessions that they had in response to the pandemic as well. I’ve went to the approval plenary for Working Group 1 report, the report that’s spoken about here. It was virtual. It was two weeks long. I started following them from the moment the scientists had the outline of the report up through this meeting where they’re handing over the finished approved report to the policy makers and I will also do that with report number two or number three and the synthesis report and then I will be done with the data collection phase. I’ve been observing it all at these meetings and taking notes and then I’ve also done interviews series with a selection of authors and it’s me and three others. We have been interviewing at intervals the same scientists as they moved through this process. And so, yeah, I just had a coffee with one of the Iead scientists who I first met in Guangzhou, China in 2018 when she was starting as a first-time IPCC off there. And then, you know, got to hear her thoughts about how the political presentations or presenting the policymakers has been going on. So that’s just a little overview.

Kaydee: Could you tell us a little bit about the process behind IPCC and sort of what it takes to make this report? 

Jessica: So the panel itself is governments. So it’s government members who belong to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And so they really create this outline of indicative bullet points that they give to the authors. And the authors are also approved by the government. So there’s a lot of government that’s been approved by the government. So there’s a lot of government that’s been approved by the government. And so there’s a lot of government that’s been approved by the government. And so there’s a lot of government that’s been approved by the government. And so there’s a lot of government that’s been approved by the government involvement over who’s writing the report and what the general shape of the report is going to be at the outset. It’s also a UN and WMO body, it’s United Nations Environment Program and WMO, and they also have other considerations for thinking about authorship, so they’re thinking about geographical representation, they’re thinking about age and career stage of the scientists. So they’re trying, you know, the UN cares about this sort of stuff. So they try to make the report authors sort of reflect the world and not sort of what you think of as a climate scientist, which may be an older white male from the global part. And there are plenty of them in the IPCC. But one of the first surprises when I started attending the meetings was how many junior and mid-career authors there were people from the global south developing countries.

Not everybody’s ideas make it in equally, but the representation was more diverse than I expected it to be.

Then the governments kind of leave the authors alone, the scientists alone, for a period of a couple of years while they go through a couple of different drafts of the assessment report. The zero-order draft is just reviewed by IPCC insiders. And the first-order draft is the first one that goes out to review. And anyone who wants to can sign up for review to be a reviewer. So that does mean they might get reviews from climate skeptics, deniers, contrarians, people from think tanks or just people, you know, but usually it’s mostly university professors who are signing up to review these.

The process of the IPCC to respond to every single review comment they get. They get tens of thousands of review comments and they especially spend a lot of care with those sort of skeptic or denier comments because all of the comments and responses also become public. 

So here’s where the governments start coming back in. Although they usually ask their national scientists to review it, this is where governments are also looking at how the sciences is presented in relation to their national interests. So often this is, are we getting enough information about Congo and drought in Congo? Are we getting enough information for Antigua and Barbuda on sea level rise? So often it’s about representation, but of course, as you can imagine, sometimes it’s a little more complex. Saudi Arabia is interested in how much time they have to transform their entire oil-dependent economy, you know. So they might be thinking about how things are represented and how that representation might affect how quickly the world is going to insist on transitioning. 

Then there’s a final response. They respond to all of those comments before the final government draft and then this goes to the approval plenary. So for Working Group 1, which are the physical scientists, that was in late July, early August of this year, was virtual the first time that ever happened. And I know you guys know, and I got this summary for policymakers, I was just given a hard time. It’s the shorter documents, such as 20, or 60 pages, but they go line by line, and figure by figure, so that summary for policymakers not only has a lot of scientific power, but it’s also approved by all of these governments. And so including those that are a little bit difficult. 

Cody: Earlier, you mentioned the budget of IPCC was really interesting. Could you talk about that on the podcast?

Jessica: So here’s the thing about their budget. It’s [approximately]  $4 million a year. So Indiana University, which is a public state college, it’s large, our budget is more than a billion dollars a year. Like it is actually wild how like IPCC is so incredibly powerful and influential, but almost everybody who works as an author is a volunteer. They’re not paid. The scientists are not paid to do this. I mean, governments pay for their travel so the IPCC doesn’t pay for them to travel. 

There’s just the small TSUs that are actually, and they’re temporary employees of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So I think that’s really people often ask why doesn’t IPCC do this, this, and this. It is this incredible, it would be really great to actually try to monetize the amount of volunteer contribution. Anyway, it’s peanuts in terms of the budget. And so while they do hire comms people, they’re sort of, then now the AR6 is ending, they’ll sort of break up and reassemble with all new people for the 7th assessment report. And so that’s good for innovation. It’s good to get from being like old and creepy and dependent on keeping the institution alive that gives fresh ideas. But that also means that there’s not a huge institutional infrastructure to do the kind of work that could be done. So I just wanted to point that out because they are so incredibly powerful. You would think there’s this whole machine behind them, but it’s really a lot of volunteer labor that’s being poured into this.

Kaydee: I also just want to affirm that $4 million is really not much for a project of this scale. First of all, that’s $4 million spent by all of the governments involved, not just a single government. And second of all, the US spent $35.6 billion on sciences, research, etc. last year of which $21.5 billion went to NASA. Even all of those like in billions of dollars is way less than 1% of our GDP. That really is staggering. The IPCC has a profound impact on the whole science community and I can see now why it won the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Cody: Agreed, it’s a little bit mind-boggling what they can do with so such a sparse budget. I know this researcher requires enormous models and it’s very expensive, so who’s paying for it?

Jessica: That’s a great question. So, the IPCC is assessing the research published elsewhere. So they’re not conducting their own research. And so what they do with these assessment reports cycles every five to seven years is they pull together all of the new publications, assess it, and then communicate what is new in climate science on each chapter’s topics. So who pays for the research is really a big deal because a lot of the stuff coming out are these massive climate models, like you said requiring still rooms of computers and those climate models are really centered in the places that you would expect them to be. There’s several in the US, several in Europe, I think there’s one or two in India, there’s a couple in Japan, a couple in China, but there are expensive, right? And so not every country has a climate model. So who’s paying for these really as governments. 

Cody: Thank you for clarifying. So how can scientists, young scientists, get involved with the IPCC process? 

Jessica: You can sign up to be a reviewer. You can ask faculty members in the classes that you’re in when the reports are coming out. So Working Group two and three, when they come out. your class or a student organization, you guys could meet together and review and submit review comments to the IPCC. You can still participate in the process that way through reviews. As AR7 starts to organize and they release the chapter author lists, I would encourage junior scientist graduate students to contact the coordinating lead authors of the chapters that align with your expertise. They hire chapter scientists, who I believe are also volunteers, but these are people who get to go to the meetings and participate in helping help with the chapter. And they’re incredible and that’s a really awesome opportunity. And so it’s always like, you can reach out to the CLA’s to see if they’re chapter science opportunities that way. Yeah, going through the review process for trying to get in as a chapter scientist and also once you have publications, sending those to the chapter teams to make sure that your literature is included. You know, when we all do lit reviews, it’s easy to know in the top of your mind who the top 10 in the field are, but it’s really important for them a representation of literature from junior scholars whose names might be less recognizable. And from people publishing from institutions in the global south, there still is a gap of representation from some countries. And so just sending along any publications or including suggestions for publications when you review. 

Kaydee: There’s recently been a push in the general science community to include different knowledge bases. Have you seen that with the IPCC? Are they trying to include indigenous and local voices, for example?

Jessica: In the past decade, and they were really able to learn from the IPCC’s mistakes and one of the things they corrected right away was including Indigenous people in the assessment report from the get-go and so IPCC has been playing catch up with this. And it’s hard to, I mean, Working Group 1, I mean, this is very much model projections, like data observations and that’s where you are going to see a little bit more representation, but the inclusion of indigenous people as authors too. 

Like it’s not just enough to mention it in a sentence, but trying to get the people there as assessors and part of the process. Because then they can go and translate that back to their community. So working and they have a standard, they have a best practices sheet for how to include indigenous knowledge because it’s also some of this knowledge isn’t meant for public publication, you know. So you want to make sure that this is information that the communities that the knowledge originates from is appropriate, okay, to be published, that people who belonged to the communities that the knowledge emanates from are part of the process as well as contributing authors or something like that. 

So they’re trying, when you’re talking about climate and then different cosmological or ontological or epistemological approaches to knowledge. It’s really difficult to make those different kinds of knowledge and answer it too. But they’re trying, particularly in Working Group 2, they have regional chapters. So when you’re organizing knowledge in that way, it can be a little more intuitive to have different types of knowledge in their court. That’s part of the reason they pick select authors from all of the countries, is that they really hope that the authors based in those different places and communities will then promote the work in a way that is culturally appropriate to the populations that trying to do outreach to. And the IPCC has funds to support these outreach projects. And so there is some attempt at that. 

Kaydee: It was great to hear you say that the UN really tries to have a good balance of who’s taking part in this report and have a representative group. But even still, I wonder what voices are we missing? What barriers are there to inclusion, and what biases might we have in this report because of it? 

Jessica: They really try hard to get represent gender balance, different career stages, disciplinary balance, and global, all the UN regions. So there’s a really, really explicit attempt to get people represented in the hopes that those folks are more familiar, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all, that everything’s represented well. It’s harder to get things published when you’re not in a global north institution. For various reasons, language, research funding, just knowing the shorthand of how to present information in a way that marks you as an expert. They’re all these sort of cultural signifiers that lead to gaps in research publications.

By the way, all of the meetings are conducted in English. I don’t know how people who speak English, their third language, even do it, it’s exhausting to listen to with English as your first language, because it’s so technical and specific. So, yes, there are gaps. And I think the authors try to be really clear about that. They’re not trying to hide it. They will show where there’s limited publications, limited agreement, how much evidence there is, and part of that is sort of global differences in availability for scientific research and funding. So yes, they have it. They’re really aware of it. They’re constantly trying to find new ways to improve. But a lot of that then is going back to the burden of authors from developing countries who are also at a disadvantage in terms of funding. 

Things we don’t even think about like the internet, and things we don’t think about in the global north, like internet capabilities. One of the scientists from a developing country who I interviewed as a pandemic was happening. I didn’t know she did this. I just assumed everyone could Zoom, but she couldn’t access her office, which had good internet. She bought a separate SIM card to do my interview with me. And like she had to like walk to a village store and get that SIM card and she had to do all this extra labor in order for our interview, I hadn’t even imagined it. 

Then another thing you have to deal with is the power of your passport and visa issues. You know, if you have a U.S. passport, we can get almost any place pretty easily. But some countries to travel almost anywhere is weeks long expensive process. Sometimes you have to travel to your national capital. If you don’t live there, then you have to pay for a transit and a hotel. To get your visa and that is an incredible barrier to participation. We don’t even think about the sort of bureaucratic locks that I think it’s so difficult to even get in the room together to discuss the science and then you’re asked to be responsible for representing your entire country’s worth, or entire region in some instances, literature so there’s all sorts of layers there. That’s definitely really a lot. I’ve always been so impressed with the people that are doing good science in English when English might even be their third language. I can’t imagine trying to write scientific language in Spanish my second language so yeah I’m just really amazed at what people overcome.

Cody: On that note, Jessica, in your professional opinion, what do you believe scientists are doing well and what can scientists improve on?

Jessica: I actually think they’re really good at their ability to communicate and finding leaders who are skilled at communication has really improved. I’m really impressed with them. I think that their earnest and care about what they’re doing and I admire them very much for that. They will exhaust themselves to get the science right and to do a good job and what they could do better exhausted. There’s sort of an expectation that you have to martyr yourself to your research or to completing this work. And that expectation is ableist and it has particular ideas about who’s at home helping whom and I think to, for science, for it to get these really inclusive chapter groups in the IPCC or to get inclusive people in the lab or in the field, there needs to be just a way for academic research, science, or otherwise, to be a livable thing that you can do and care about and be good at. And then you’re also allowed to be, that’s what the end on top of that. And so that advice goes all the way up and down the chain. 

Cody: Yeah, they start us early. That’s a fact. 

Jessica: Yeah, you can tell that it’s a cultural value, the way that it’s valorized and expected all of your time and to extend your well-being in order to do this work. And if you don’t, that doesn’t mean you may be less committed to the research that’s illogical and it’s not sustainable. 

Cody: Thank you so much, Jessica. I learned so much from this conversation. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We hope that you learned as much as we did. And if you’d like to learn more, we’re going to have some resources on our website. So check it out. That is at  livablefuturepodcast.com. And you can also follow us on social media and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.