IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 2 : The Technical Summary

AMY WESTERVELT

Source: The Technical Summary Kinda Slaps (IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 2)

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Forget the Summary for Policymakers, the Technical Summary Is Where It’s At

If I could give other journalists covering this report just one piece of advice, it would be this. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) goes through a tedious approval process during which representatives from 195 governments (some of them very dependent on our continued dependence on fossil fuels, cough cough the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, I’m looking at you). The Technical Summary, on the other hand, comes straight from the authors and is generally released at the same time as the SPM. As Max Boykoff, a contributing author to Ch 13 (on policy) put it: “The technical summary is the one that’s prepared by authors of the report. So it does go through a review process by governments and experts, but ultimately the authors have a say there.” Whereas with the SPM, while authors can reject input that would make the summary inaccurate, that seems to be the most they can do to maintain the integrity of that document; preventing it from becoming a mealy-mouthed political document on the other hand, not so much.

I’m not sure why anyone in media bothers with the SPM at all anymore except that it is shorter and maybe sounds less intimidating? The Technical Summary might add a few more pages (it’s 145 pages in total), but is so much more clearly written and straightforward it doesn’t take much longer to read and gives a much more accurate summary of what’s actually in the report. Again, it absolutely screams: Do something! Here are several options!

At the press conference announcing the release of the report, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, a contributing lead author of the Technical Summary and vice-chair of Working Group III noted: “in every sector there are options available that can at least halve emissions by 2030 and keep open the possibility of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.”

Some highlights to take note of:

• Climate action and alleviating poverty are not mutually exclusive. In fact, sustainable development requires climate mitigation. Longstanding research, as well as newer data underpinning this are in both Chapter 5 and Chapter 3. Again, this debunks an argument the fossil fuel industry has been trotting out again recently, an oldie but a goodie (baddie?), that robbing less-developed countries of carbon-intensive development would commit them to eternal poverty. Ironic given that it was the fossil fuel industry that originally argued that less developed countries must participate in any mandatory emissions reductions scheme to make it “fair.” In any case, the research is clear: there is no high-carbon development pathway that also avoids climate risks, which means the myth of risk-free, cheap, fossil fueled development is just that…a myth.
• Effective climate action requires multisolving. Shout out to Dr. Elizabeth Sawin who coined the term “multisolving” to summarize what the IPCC is talking about when it says: “Accelerating mitigation to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system will require the integration of broadened assessment frameworks and tools that combine multiple perspectives, applied in a context of multi-level governance (high confidence).” In other words, climate policies that don’t take into account the whole spectrum of society, life, the economy are unlikely to succeed. On the website of the Multisolving Institute, the organization Sawin founded to focus on solutions that solve for multiple problems across sectors, she writes: “A good example is how walkable cities help reduce emissions from transportation, provide equitable access to mobility, create healthier citizens, and help local businesses thrive. Multisolving is a way to look at the whole picture and help everyone.”
• Oh hello, we’re talking about power, not just energy. Although scrubbed entirely from the SPM, the power dynamics at play when it comes to climate policy are clearly acknowledged here. Under a rather innocuous bullet point about how “the speed, direction, and depth of any transition will be determined by choices in the environmental, technological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional realms,” the summary notes:

The interaction between politics, economics and power relationships is central to explaining why broad commitments do not always translate to urgent action.

Further on in the summary, it notes:

Many net zero targets are ambiguously defined, and the policies needed to achieve them are not yet in place. Opposition from status quo interests [aka polluting industries], as well as insufficient low-carbon financial flows, act as barriers to establishing and implementing stringent climate policies covering all sectors.

And then it tackles misinformation head on. This is the first IPCC cycle that has included the impact of misinformation at all. The Working Group II report included it in a few spots (particularly North America-specific parts of the report), but to see it right up front in the Technical Summary is refreshing, and I think a sign of the increased involvement of social scientists in this assessment…