Writing the meaning of climate change together and alone
By Hannah Hughes
Message on the Eiffel tower during the Paris Agreement negotiations, 2015.
Two stark reminders of the advance of climate change have lodged themselves at the back of my mind. First, as 2023 was confirmed the warmest year on record, scientific studies began to report an “unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks”. The stress induced by the heat meant that instead of absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, forest and soils remained passive or served as a source of emissions through, for example, fire. Second, despite the end of El Niño, temperatures did not decrease as expected and 2024 was confirmed as the warmest year on record.
Are these signs that the climate system is not responding as predicted? Are they indications that the climate may not be the knowable and predictable system that the collective global response was designed for?
As well as these scientific facts, which shape how we collectively understand and experience climate change, we have our own relationship with the land around us. I remember in the spring of 2023 the most amazing May blossom on the Hawthorn tree. I watched the hilltop across from our house sparkle with these tiny white flowers. As beautiful as it was, alarm bells rang. It was a very hot, dry spring. Each day I thought of the energy a bloom like that expends as the plant is triggered to ensure its seeds spread under conditions of stress. Can a tree expend that every year? Could the Hawthorn tree disappear or move up hill and northward until there is no land left? Will I observe a loss like this from the landscape in my lifetime?
I told a friend who shared my love for the Hawthorn – in fact, it was her dad that instilled it through a carefully timed annual river walk. I am not sure my words penetrated; some losses are simply too difficult to entertain.
Naming climate change
These accounts illustrate the multiple ways we understand, experience and act on climate change. It has been through the scientific method and scientific assessment that climate change has become known as a shared political issue and framed for collective negotiation. In my book, The IPCC and the Politics of Writing Climate Change, I document the emergence of an international practice to name this problem collectively. When I began this research in 2008, I wanted to understand, who has the power to determine the reality of this issue for every living being on the planet and what gives them this power? I wanted a site to study the social, scientific and political struggle that shapes the meaning and implications of this issue. The IPCC provided the ideal site.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 with the mandate to assess scientific knowledge of climate change, its impact, and potential response options. As an intergovernmental body, it brought together member governments, leading scientists, and intermediaries into a new organizational form and tasked them with establishing a method for realizing authoritative assessments of climate change. The resulting organization has produced six rounds of global assessment reports that assess: the scientific basis (working group I); impacts, vulnerability and adaptation (working group II); and mitigation (working group III). Alongside these large assessments, the IPCC has also produced special reports and methodology reports, some at the invitation of the UNFCCC. The most influential of these was the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C, which was a request in the Paris Agreement.
Member governments of the IPCC are active participants in the assessment practice. They elect bureau members to lead the process, nominate authors, and submit review comments on the draft reports. Most significantly, the outline of the assessment and its key findings in the Summary for Policymakers are approved line-by-line by member governments. It was through observing an intergovernmental plenary meeting of the IPCC that I became aware of the importance of member governments’ role in all aspects of the IPCC’s practice of writing. During this meeting, I watched governments re-formulate and tighten the organizational rules and procedures in response to criticism over errors in the assessment of Himalayan Glacier loss. Watching a small group of governments deeply invested in the process revealed the human resources—in terms of time and expertise—that are necessary for a government to invest in the IPCC, to become an authoritative member of the panel, and to be influential in this practice of writing climate change. By analysing the actors, activities, and forms of authority constitutive of this practice I illuminate how the social, scientific and political forms of capital that constitute power in the IPCC reflect the global distribution of economic resources.
Power and controversy
For some scholars and commentators, this deep involvement of governments in the IPCC hampers and interferes with the dissemination of climate knowledge. For others, it is a necessary compromise to establish a base for negotiating a collective response. One thing is clear: the IPCC’s centrality to climate politics creates immense forces and pressures for the organization to navigate and manage. Climate change undermines the energy source that has powered global development and enabled the accumulation of individual and collective wealth that is available to lubricate investment in resisting, denying, and delaying climate action. As I document in my book, this attempt to delay is observable in the operation of some governments in the IPCC. Saudi Arabia is an easy target in this regard, as its attempts to accentuate scientific uncertainty have remained constant over six rounds of assessment. However, many other countries that share oil and gas interests are as deeply invested in the IPCC’s practice of writing and seek to highlight and legitimate solutions, such as carbon capture and storage and other forms of carbon management, that equally aim to prolong fossil fuel dependence. Economic development enables investment in climate knowledge production, from observation of the climate system to modelling pathways for energy transition, and from identifying technical solutions to ensuring their place in IPCC reports. This relationship between economic capital and climate knowledge has profound implications for participation in the IPCC and ultimately, how climate is known and governed. These relations highlight that climate change is an order-making issue. And global political order – as the distribution of economic, scientific and cultural resources –is in turn reflected in how climate change is written in and by the IPCC.
Back to where I began. While the IPCC remains a critically important object of study in understanding and analysing global climate politics, it cannot and should not determine how we each understand and relate to the changes that the climate system is undergoing and our relationship to these. As these changes press more and more on our daily lives, we will need to determine its meaning to and for ourselves and our own contribution to the collective response.
