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the purpose of assessing “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data. It bases its assessment mainly on published and peer reviewed scientific technical literature.”

And the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5, 2013/14) asserted that “[h]uman influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history.” These findings informed the climate negotiations resulting in the Paris Agreement of 2015, in which 197 countries committed to limiting global warming to below 2°C.

In the end, it is the authors who bear the sole responsibility for the content of their chapters. Government representatives, however, do participate in the line-by-line review and revision of the much shorter summary for policymakers, or SPM, for each technical report.

Each of these working groups has two co-chairs—one from a developed country and one from a developing country. An additional set of governmental representatives (frequently scientists) have been nominated by their countries to serve on the bureau of each working group. Together, the two co-chairs and the bureau members function as an executive committee, while the team of scientists drafting individual chapters of each working group’s assessment is sometimes referred to as the scientific core.

The technical support units, co-chairs, and bureaus of each working group together assemble a list of proposed authors for its assessment, but the lead authors are selected by the entire working group. Governments and non-governmental organizations around the world are invited to nominate potential authors. 

AR5 WG1 alone generated 54,677 review comments. Many authors attest that this review process ranks among the most extensive for any scientific document.

For the AR5, Working Group I  summarized the physical science basis of climate change. Working Group II  addressed the vulnerability of human and natural systems to climate change (i.e., the negative and positive consequences of global warming) and options for adapting to the changes. Working Group III  assessed options for limiting heat-trapping emissions, evaluated methods for removing them from the atmosphere, and examined other means of slowing the warming trend, as well as related economic issues.

The word “consensus” is often invoked, and sometimes questioned, when speaking of IPCC reports. In fact, there are two arenas in which a consensus needs to be reached in the production of IPCC assessments. One is the meeting of the entire IPCC, in which unanimity is sought among government representatives. Even though such consensus is not required (countries are free to register their formal dissent), agreement has been reached on all documents and SPMs to date—a particularly impressive fact.

Government representatives propose authors and contributors, participate in the review process, and help reach a consensus on the report’s major findings. This can result (especially in the SPMs) in language that is sometimes weaker than it otherwise might be. 

The full assessment is a multi-level document for a wide array of audiences ranging from planners investing in protecting their communities to political leaders.

But it also means that governments cannot easily criticize or dismiss a report that they themselves have helped shape and approved during political negotiations. As Sir John Houghton, co-chair of TAR Working Group I, once put it: “Any move to reduce political involvement in the IPCC would weaken the panel and deprive it of its political clout. . . . If governments were not involved, then the documents would be treated like any old scientific report. They would end up on the shelf or in the waste bin.” 

It is important, however, to reiterate a fundamental point about IPCC assessments: although governments are involved in the process and support it financially, science ultimately predominates. The chapters that underpin all the documents are written by and under the control of scientists, and scientists ensure that all the documents are both consistent with the findings of each chapter and scientifically credible in their own right.

Some authors argue that the consensus process in approval plenaries results in sharper messages, the identification of better and more relevant questions, and greater investment by policymakers in the ultimate outcomes (26). In contrast, a well-known early critique of the IPCC argued that it resulted in bland outputs that do not engage with questions of high disagreement (27). More recently, some authors argue that the process imposes unity in the form of least-common denominator generalities on the very issues that, because they are politically challenging, may be of greatest policy relevance (28–30).

In their study of how eight SPMs produced for the AR4 and AR5 changed through the approval plenaries, Mach et al. (22) find that sensitive issues are often reworked and expanded through approval plenaries. But they also find that sometimes the most sensitive topics are expunged completely

When the newly elected Chair of the IPCC, Hoesung Lee (2015) declared that promoting the involvement of developing country scientists was a cornerstone for his tenure, he was articulating a theme of inclusivity that has been present since the IPCC's inception (82).

From 1990 to 2007, the number of IPCC authors from developing countries quadrupled, but their numbers are still proportionally low. The number of authors from developed countries also increased over the same period of time; only 17% of authors in the AR4 are from developing countries (83). As a result, there is still a significant “north-south divide” that results in an overrepresentation of science from OECD countries or countries that are classified as high income by the World Bank (84)

Quantitative bibliometric analysis of climate change publications reveals not only that climate change research is concentrated in the developed countries, but also that developed countries tend to focus more on issues of mitigation whereas developing countries focus more on adaptation, droughts, and disease impacts (86).

This tendency is also reflected in the composition of the IPCC; where representation from developing countries has improved, much of it is focused on WGII, which publishes regional chapters on impacts and adaptation (83). Science that is conducted in developing countries, which contribute the least to GHG emissions but are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, often has a different focus than in developed countries, which tend to focus more on large-scale positivist understandings of the physical system and the economics of mitigation (87). Many authors from developing countries who participated in WGIII's AR5 did so through coauthorship relationships and “institutional pathways” that are based in the developed world (88). This might be responsible for the “strong harmonization of views [in AR5 WGIII], compared with the diversity one finds across the social sciences of climate change more broadly” (88, p. 98). The forgoing considerations give rise to the question, how should the IPCC engage with the realities of unequal global development and the vast differences between rich and poor nations.

The IPCC has innovated strategies to improve capacity building, one of which was to recruit early-career scientists to managerial roles in chapter writing processes for WGII and WGIII. Such programs can assist with equalizing quality among chapters and can provide early-career scientists with an opportunity to participate in the IPCC process (89).

The justification for inclusivity of science produced in and for developing countries is multifaceted. The credibility of the IPCC in some countries is potentially undermined if it is seen as only representing Western science

But different geographical contexts often have different ways of judging the quality and relevance of scientific knowledge. Developing country scientists may have different but equally valid epistemological norms as those found in developed countries, but those norms might be downplayed in favor of so-called Western standards (93).

For this reason, redressing the imbalance of knowledge in GEAs requires more than simply increasing the numbers of authors from developing nations; it also is a matter of maintaining critical awareness of the assumptions that inform the social authority of science in developed countries (95, 96). As will be seen in the following case study, this comes to the fore when we consider how adaptation is framed in the IPCC.

The international politics of climate change, for most of the IPCC's history, retained this initial focus on abatement and mitigation. The topic of adaptation was shunned partly because it could be interpreted as giving the fossil fuel industry a free pass or capitulating to the status quo. However, since the IPCC's founding in 1988, the impacts of climate change have become more pronounced, and some of the world's most vulnerable people are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, which makes discussion of adaptation imperative (97–99).

The IPCC only gave scant attention to adaptation in its first two Assessment Reports, treating it primarily as a “residual” phenomenon that results from the failure to mitigate climate change in particular local contexts (109). Starting with the Third Assessment Report published in 2001, however, adaptation became increasingly important in the IPCC. Early work in climate change adaptation drew from the literature on natural disasters in which human vulnerability is conceptualized as exposure to hazards, as well as work on the resilience of complex social-ecological systems (110–112). This literature developed the concept of adaptive capacity that theorizes adaptation as a generalizable quality which allows human societies to adapt to negative events.