Abstract
Since 1990, the date of its first report , the IPCC has regularly provided assessments that are as comprehensive and objective as possible of scientific information concerning the physical basis of climate change (WG1), its impacts, vulnerability and adaptation of socio-economic and natural systems (WG2), as well as climate change mitigation strategies (WG3).
This onerous task is entrusted to volunteer authors, after a summary of the report concerned has been defined at an IPCC general meeting. The report is drafted in several stages, including two stages of peer review by government representatives, giving rise to a large number of comments. This transparent process concludes with an approval session to obtain the assent of all government delegations before publication of the final report.
This highly structured process takes roughly three years to complete, and has so far met with a degree of consensus, despite numerous criticisms of varying degrees of legitimacy, particularly but not exclusively from climate sceptics. Some of these criticisms, as well as the growing societal demand for more ambitious climate policies, call for reflection on improving the process, its effectiveness and possible cognitive biases.
As author and coordinator of the first working group, I will share with you my personal thoughts on this topic, without claiming to exhaust this vast subject or even to provide answers to all the questions that will be raised or that you may ask me.
Hervé Douville
Hervé Douville has been a researcher with the Climate unit of the Centre national de recherches météorologiques for over twenty-five years. He is theauthor of more than one hundred and twenty-five articles in peer-reviewed journals ( A),has held a Habilitation à Direire les Recherches (HDR) since 2008,was a member of the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Seasonal to Interannual Climate Predictability from 2010 to 2015, andthe coordinating author of Chapter 8of the latest report of the1st IPCC Working Group from 2018 to 2021.
