英文摘要: | IPCC assessments present an unparalleled opportunity for climate science to speak directly to power. Re-thinking the summaries written for policymakers would enable scientists to communicate far more effectively with political leaders and the public.
IPCC assessments are the best opportunities that climate academics have to engage ministers, right up to heads of state and government, with their conclusions. Governments, after all, commission the assessments. No minister will ever read an assessment in full — hence the potential utility of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). What a shame, then, that SPMs are so ill suited to that audience, and to another that is even more important — the general public. The IPCC has shown a remarkably consistent capacity to turn out documents that defy comprehension by the non-specialist, despite the undoubted quality of the underlying assessments. The IPCC's failure to communicate its conclusions directly and effectively to policymakers and the public is perhaps one reason why the public in the United Kingdom1and elsewhere does not appreciate the scale of the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, with potentially profound consequences for policymaking.
The most important policymakers are not specialists in climate science or the economics of mitigation. They may employ bureaucrats or advisors who are, although that is not guaranteed, particularly in governments of small developing countries. If the SPMs are to allow science to speak directly to power, they must be appropriately constructed for time-poor generalists who spend virtually all of their working lives outside the climate 'bubble'. For some insights into how the SPMs could be re-tooled, we can usefully look at the norms and practices of a communication channel with which policymakers are inevitably familiar, as instigators, subjects and recipients: news media. Although it may not always appear this way from the outside, news writing is a mature discipline with its own set of rules. They govern the structure of the article or broadcast, and the sentences within it. These days, the rules can be found distilled into curricula by journalism trainers, but they principally exist as instincts that the new recruit develops through the simple method of being shouted at by dyspeptic editors. They exist because they work, shaped not by academic theorizing but by the Darwinian winnowing of the market for journalism. And the apotheosis of the reporter's craft is located in the radio newsroom. Consider the constraints of radio news. The listener hears the words only once; ergo, they must follow a logical order. The story must begin at the beginning and end at the end, taking the listener on a linear journey in between. If the broadcaster chooses words or syntax that engender even a few seconds of incomprehension, the listener loses the thread. There is no chance to re-read; no diagram or graph to clarify. News website writing increasingly follows similar principles, driven largely by the number of options that the audience possesses. Flicking to a new article is as easy as scrolling down the page. Readers can go back and revisit a phrase that they did not quite understand — but they may not bother. In any case, why should they need to? Principles from journalism can be applied to far more weighty projects, including IPCC SPMs. These documents too need to communicate effectively with an information-overloaded, time-poor, non-specialist audience — if the IPCC wants to reach the top branches of the policymaking tree directly.
For an example of how the IPCC needs to raise its game, we can look to the SPMs produced by each of the Working Groups of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). WGI highlights the really vital pieces of information by putting them in brown boxes and bold text2. So long as the time-pressed reader does not make the mistake of delving into the introduction or the first block of text following it, and instead homes in on the first highlighted box, (s)he will find an important message: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal... the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.” The next few boxes do not quite meet the same standard of clarity and importance, but still, the SPM is easily skim-read. WGI enhances the offering by drawing all of the highlighted boxes into a two-page 'headline statements' document3. Although a step forward, this falls short of the ideal in two ways. First, the fact that language is transposed directly from the SPM means that it contains a number of jargon phrases (“radiative forcing”, “RCP2.6”). Second, it does not have the cachet of being titled “Summary for Policymakers”. WGII opens with a contents page — a good idea — and the first sentence is an important one4: “Human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems.” But the rest of the segment explains the scope and approach of the Working Group rather than continuing with the important findings. Visually, WGII inverts the WGI approach by putting ancillary text, rather than key findings, in highlighted boxes. Some early paragraphs contain important conclusions (“Many terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species have shifted their geographic ranges...”), while others are a little baffling both in terms of their meaning and selection. Overall, the lack of structure makes 'do-it-yourself' summarizing difficult. The Introduction to the WGIII SPM5 gives us background; so does the next section (“Approaches to climate change mitigation”). When on page 5 we eventually reach something that looks like a set of important conclusions, we read: “Sustainable development and equity provide a basis for assessing climate policies... Many areas of climate policy-making involve value judgements and ethical considerations... Among other methods, economic evaluation is commonly used to inform climate policy design...” — all statements of the obvious. Nothing makes the semi-engaged or time-pressed reader move on faster. The Synthesis Report6 offers an even greater opportunity. Imagine the state of climate science, economics and policy options for adaptation and mitigation, distilled down to a two-page briefing of the type that world leaders are used to receiving from their aides. It could be done; but in 2014, it wasn't. Jargon continued to be a problem even in the most condensed statements, and the persistence of AR5's formal structure proved an impediment to streamlined communication — like a novel in which the locations of the various plot elements determine the narrative structure.
- Study Shows Widespread Misconceptions about Energy and Climate Change (ECIU, 2014).
- IPCC Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).
- Headline Statements from the Summary for Policymakers (IPCC Working Group I Technical Support Unit, 2013); http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WG1AR5_Headlines.pdf
- IPCC Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (eds Field, C. B. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).
- IPCC Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change (eds Edenhofer, O. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).
- IPCC Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report (eds Pachauri, R. K., Meyer, L. & Core Writing Team) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).
- Working Group 3 (Climate Nexus, 2014); http://climatenexus.org/learn/ipcc/working-group-iii
- Climate Change: Implications for Business (CISL, 2014).
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Affiliations
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Richard Black is at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, 40 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UD, UK, and is a former BBC News science and environment correspondent
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