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Cartographier les auteurs du GIEC

Who wrote the first five IPCC reports ? How the contributions for the various countries evolved through time ?

Chronique

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is one the most  visible, influential and complex institutions of modern science.  Established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the  World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988, the IPCC “reviews and  assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic  information” to provide “a clear scientific view on the current state of  knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and  socio-economic impacts”.

Given the stakes of the climate debate and the centrality of the IPCC  in such debates, it’s crucial that its findings represent the broadest  possible range of climate expertise. This need for representativeness is  reflected, to a certain extent, in the composition and structure of the  institution. Overseen by a very light hierarchy of rotating  chairpersons and vice-chairs, the IPCC functions primarily thanks to the  coordinated efforts of hundreds of experts working around the world.  Despite this dispersed and networked structure, the IPCC retains a  fairly “singular” voice thanks to its rules of consensus. This has  created the impression that the institution is more monolithic than it  actually is. Within the IPCC there is a rich world of movement—of  turnover, longevity, shifting responsibilities and disciplinary  bridging—by different contributors across 25 years of Assessment  Reports.

Much regard has been given to different rules that shape how the IPCC  reports its findings, particularly the effects the rule of consensus  has on this reporting (Brysse et al.,2013).  But less analysis has been done on the political and communication  effects of the IPCC’s own structuring. So it came to us that we could  actually map some aspects of this “inner-life” by following the  individual participants of the IPCC over time. With this aim in mind,  the médialab has constructed a novel database of all 3,443 individual  IPCC authors over the last 5 Assessment Reports (ARs) including  information on authors’ institutional affiliations, countries of origin,  authorial roles and individual chapter participations. This database  gives us the means to visualize the life and evolution of the  institution.

What follows are a set of preliminary visualizations from our  database. These are some basic, early cuts at the type of information  that we are in the process of analyzing and interpreting for scientific  publication. Eventually, we will make this data available through an  online interactive platform that will allow the public and other  researchers to conduct their own queries on the IPCC and produce their  own visualizations.

See the notes below for more information about geographic grouping and other details. 

Fig. 1. Repeat contributors in the IPCC
Fig. 1. Repeat contributors in the IPCC

Fig.1 – data available to download in csv format

These two pairs of figures give a window into the longevity of authors  and editors within the IPCC and their geographic origins. The top pair  represents the subpopulation of contributors that repeat across all 5  Assessment Reports and participate in anything from one assessment  report (the total population: 3443 experts and scientists), to 5  assessment reports (there are only 13 people who have been present  across all 5). One initial observation is that the proportions between  the different regions remain relatively constant, with slightly more  continuity of authors from North America, Europe and Australia and New  Zealand. The second pair of images covers the same information, but  looks solely at the Working Group I contributors. Here we clearly see  that nearly half of the repeat authors in the entire IPCC are found in  the Working Group 1 and also that there is much less diversity of  contributors compared to all three WGs.

Fig. 2a. Geography of IPCC contributors
Fig. 2a. Geography of IPCC contributors
Fig. 2b. Geography of IPCC contributors
Fig. 2b. Geography of IPCC contributors

Figs.2 a and 2b – data available to download in csv format

This next two pairs of figures represents the participation of  contributors per Assessment Report, from 1990 to 2014. The first set of  figures (a and b) contain all IPCC contributors (except those still unavailable for the AR5), whereas the second pair of figures (c and d)  contain only those contributors that held roles of responsibility in  the writing of the IPCC – i.e. Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors  or Review Editors (excluding Contributing authors). We clearly see that  there is a significant increase in this subpopulation of “leading”  contributors – the number of leading positions increases from 278 (AR1)  to 833 (AR5), but that more or less after AR3, the diversity of this  group more or less stabilizes.

Fig. 3. Top contributing countries to the IPCC
Fig. 3. Top contributing countries to the IPCC

Fig.3 – data available to download in csv format

There are 129 countries that have contributed to the IPCC over the past  25 years. Of those countries that participate, a small portion has  dominated the writing and editing of the IPCC reports. Roughly 21  countries account for 80% of all instances of participation (i.e.  contributions to a chapter as either CLA, LA, CA or RE) in the reports.   And 5 countries (the USA, UK, Germany, Canada and Australia) account  for over 50% of all instances of participation, although many emerging  economies, such as China, India and Brazil are playing  an increasing  role within the IPCC.

Fig. 4 Distribution of contributors of the three IPCC Working Groups
Fig. 4 Distribution of contributors of the three IPCC Working Groups

Another way to look at the IPCC, rather than cutting it into 5  Assessment Reports, is to represent it as 3 Working Groups, each with  its own population. This visualization indicates that Working Group  populations are relatively distinct and have low permeability. Only 7%  of contributors across 25 years of the IPCC participate in more than one  WG. The large majority of this subpopulation (5%) participate between  WGI and WG2, while very few participate between WGI and WG3 (>1%).  This is not entirely surprising, given that each Working Group deals  with separate issues of the climate crisis (WG1 – the physical science;  WG2 – impacts and adaptation; WG3 – GHG mitigation), but it does raise  certain questions about the impacts of this separation. During the 2009,  for instance, the WGII report was attacked by journalists and skeptics  for misinformation about the melt rates of Himalayan Glaciers, the  effects of climate on Amazon Rainforest fires and sea level rise in the  Netherlands. This launched a massive review process of the entire IPCC  rules and guidelines for reviewing literature and communicating its  findings, notably by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) 2011 Review of the IPCC  (in which the IPCC was entirely vindicated of any wrongdoing, as  claimed by its detractors). The IAC Review found, however, that each WG  used different communication guidelines, particularly with regards to  uncertainty, and called for a standardization of these guidelines. But  we can ask also whether this “silo-effect” between WGs influences how  the IPCC is able to coordinate the messages delivered by the different  groups?

Fig. 5 Geography of IPCC contributors by WGs
Fig. 5 Geography of IPCC contributors by WGs

Fig.5 – data available to download in csv format

We see clearly that between the 3 WGs (across all ARs), there is a  much more diverse population of contributors between the WG2 and WG3.  When normalized, we see that actually WG3 has the most diverse number of  contributors. This makes relative sense. WG1 covers the physical  science of climate change, so it requires a lot more resources to  participate in this WG (such as climate models, seafloor coring ships,  buoy and satellite detection systems, etc.). WG2 and WG3 are much more  reliant on regional knowledge, which gives an advantage to more  localized experts.

See  also, the article “Qui sont les scientifiques qui ont rédigé le rapport  du GIEC ?” by Audrey Garric for Le Monde.fr | 28.09.2013 à 12h11 |

Notes

1) On all visualizations, we do not yet have author information for  the Contributing Authors of AR5. We will incorporate these missing  authors as each Working Group’s Assessment Report is made available to  the public on the website of the IPCC. For instance, the IPCC  Secretariat has already noted that there are 600 Contributing Authors  for the WG1; We can estimate that we will add between 1000-1500  contributing authors to the overall database by the end of 2014. So  please stay tuned!
2) In all our figures, we define a “contributor” as an individual who  filled one or multiple of the following roles: Coordinating Lead Author,  Lead Author, Review Editor or Contributing Author in one of the IPCC  ARs. We define “participation” as an instance in which a contributor  intervened in a specific chapter in a specific WG of any AR. The same  contributor may have more than one participation in any given AR.
3) The geographic regions used in our visualizations represent the six  geographic regions designated by the World Meteorological Organization  (WMO), which are the official regions used by the IPCC to indicate  geographical origins of their contributors. These include Africa (Region  I), Asia (Region II), South America (Region III), North America,  Central America and Caribbean (Region IV), South-West Pacific (Region V)  and Europe (Region VI)
4) The images are released under the Creative Commons License  “Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported” but feel free to write  us is you’d like to make modifications to any of the visualizations  below.
5) Our database was constructed over 11 months by (Nicolas Baya-Lafitte,  Audrey Banyex, Ian Gray, Guillaume Plique and Tommaso Venturini). We  scraped all the names of the contributors of each Assessment Report from  the publicly available reports (nearly all in PDF format) and initially  entered them into spreadsheets. We copied contributor names directly  from AR pdfs, pasted this information into text editors, separated the  different lines of data for export into Excel and then began the long  and arduous task of correctly structuring our data as well as  harmonizing information across different data sources. To our additional  benefit, nearly all the authors, starting with the First Assessment  Report (FAR, 1990), were also associated in the documents with their  institutional affiliation, the country of origin of their institutional  affiliation, the Working Group WG(s) in which the author participated,  the chapter(s) in which they participated and their role in each of  these instance (CLA, LA, CA or RE). For the structure of our  data-sheets, we initially constructed two entirely separate excel files  to house information related to individual authors and their various  institutional and country affiliations, and a second file system to  capture their participation in specific chapters of ARs. Eventually,  this system became too cumbersome to manage, so we migrated all of our  data into a dynamic database designed in MySQL. We will eventually be  making this database publicly available, as well as integrating the data  into a user interface.