Harvard Project and Collaborators Publish Article on Future of the IPCC

Robert Stavins and Robert Stowe, respectively the Director and the Manager of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, have co-authored, with colleagues, an article in the "Policy Forum" section of the journal Science on the future of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The article appeared online on October 2, 2015 and is based on research and analysis conducted in collaboration with Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM; Italy), the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC; Germany), and the Stanford Environmental and Energy Policy Analysis Center (SEEPAC; USA).

The other co-authors are:  Carlo Carraro, Climate Change and Sustainable Development Programme Coordinator, FEEM; Ottmar Edenhofer, Director, MCC; Christian Flachsland, Head of the Governance Working Group, MCC; and Charles Kolstad, Senior Fellow, SEEPAC and Professor of Economics, Stanford University.

The collaborators conducted a research workshop in February 2015, hosted by the Mercator Institute in Berlin, on approaches to improving the process by which research on climate change is assessed—with a focus on the social sciences (economics, political science, policy studies). The Science article captures some of the more important conclusions of this workshop. (Read about the workshop here; read a blog post by Robert Stavins on the workshop and the issues it addressed here.) The workshop was sponsored in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The article in Science is timely, given that the IPCC elected a new Chair at its plenary session in Dubrovnik, Croatia on October 6—Hoesung Lee, a South Korean economist. Read an interview with Professor Lee on September 15, 2015 in The Carbon Brief here and Professor Lee's biography here.