Editorial
Personal experiences with the governance of the policy-relevant IPCC and Millennium Ecosystem Assessments

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Introduction

Over the last few decades, many regional and global scientific assessments have been completed and published. These include, for example, the Assessment of Ozone Depletion (e.g. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2002), The LCTRAP and EMEP assessments for air pollution in Europe (EMEP, 1998), the various assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2001), the Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA, Heywood and Watson, 1995), The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (2004) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, e.g. 2005). Most of them have been successful in translating scientific understanding into policy-relevant information. For example, the earlier assessments of ozone depletion were instrumental in defining and implementing the Montreal Protocol and its subsequent treaties (cf. ozone.unep.org).

All these assessments are critical evaluations of the state-of-the-art scientific understanding of complex environmental issues for purposes of guiding policy decisions. The topics of these assessments are typically defined by decision makers. The assessments are often positioned in an international context, have been written by teams of renowned experts from various scientific disciplines, are based on the published scientific literature, are technically accurate, are improved through thorough peer review and are communicated to decision makers and sometimes also to the wider public. Uncertainties should be explicitly dealt with. Assessments relate to the situation at a particular time and in a given geographical domain, but are often repeated after some period. IPCC, for example, published its first reports in 1990 (Houghton et al., 1990) and recently finished its Fourth Assessment Report. Because these assessments are primarily targeted at policy makers, their ownership of the process and results is essential. This is often achieved by involving them in the preparation of the assessment and in the review process. Most assessments are thus conducted according to a balanced, open, transparent, representative and legitimate process. Assessments therefore strongly differ from scientific reviews (Table 1), which generally include (hidden) personal biases of the authors and are generally aimed at defining a research agenda. The preliminary drafts of assessment chapters often just resembled narrow reviews. The specific characteristics of an assessment had therefore to be explained to especially new contributors. Nowadays, scientific assessments have unquestionably matured. In summary, a scientific assessment applies the judgment of experts to existing knowledge to provide scientifically credible answers to policy-relevant questions.

I have been involved as lead and contributing author in all IPCC assessment reports, in several IPCC special reports, in the global biodiversity assessment and the MA-synthesis reports, and co-chaired (together with Kanchan Chopra) the Responses Working group of the MA. All these three assessments strongly differed in scope, in structure and in governance or control mechanisms. The GBA, for example, was initiated by an international group of scientists soon after the success of IPCC's First Assessment Report (i.e. Houghton et al., 1990) that strongly contributed to the formulation and rapid ratification of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (Agrawala, 1998a). When completed after a rigorous scientific review, the GBA was presented to the UN Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), but unfortunately ignored because the CBD had been excluded from the assessment process from the beginning. The CBD in fact stated that it had its own scientific advisory panels and that additional scientific information was not needed. The other two assessments (IPCC and MA) were from the beginning much more strongly linked to the policy community and the UN conventions but had very different governance structures, partly defining their impact.

In this Editorial, I describe the processes of the IPCC and MA assessments drawing on my own experience in the MA and, for the IPCC, on my own experience and a small body of published research on its structure and process. These two assessments focus on very different issues. IPCC addresses climate change and assesses its various causes, its impacts on sectors, ecosystems and regions, and possible adaptation and mitigation responses. IPCC thus follows a conventional causal chain, which has successfully quantified in, for example, integrated assessment models (e.g. Alcamo et al., 1996) and scenarios (Nakícenovíc et al., 2000). The MA addresses changes in biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being and assesses its consequences on society and regions. The MA has to tackle a complex set of drivers and their interactions that cause all these changes. This proved to be a challenge and resulted in the application of mainly qualitative approaches compared with the highly quantitative approaches applied by IPCC. Based on this fundamental structural difference and on my experience, I will discuss structure, procedures and governance of both these successful assessments. This comparison will allow me to draw some general conclusions on the effectiveness of these scientific assessments and on the flexibility to incorporate new issues (often identified by policy makers). I will further identify some major pitfalls and provide recommendations for improvements of future assessments.

Section snippets

The governance structure of IPCC

IPCC (www.ipcc.ch) was established in 1988 by UNEP and WMO as an intergovernmental body to provide comprehensive state-of-the-art information on climate and climate change and its consequences. The origins and practices of the IPCC are well described by Agrawala, 1998a, Agrawala, 1998b and Siebenhüner (2003). IPCC is open to all member countries of UNEP and WMO. The national delegates of the Panel meet annually in plenary. The Panel discusses and decides on structure, principles, procedures and

The governance structure of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, initiated the MA as an international assessment to provide scientific information on biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being for a series of UN conventions, such as the CBD, the convention to combat desertification (CCD), the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and the convention on migratory species (CMS), and several other organizations including the private sector and civil society. He invited representatives from all conventions and

Concluding remarks

Table 2 summarizes the differences between the IPCC and MA assessments. In contrast to the Global Biodiversity Assessment, both assessments achieved credibility, legitimacy and relevance with their user community. These are major factors of success (Siebenhüner, 2002; Tuinstra et al., 2006). Since its fourth assessment report, IPCC has also strengthened its outreach, similar to the MA. Both assessments have published targeted synthesis reports. All these publications received a lot of attention

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