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Qualifications of Experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Decent Essays

The meaning and understanding of climate change has been a critical issue of concern to development, scientific and environmental researchers in the world. All over the world, there have been a lot of issues surrounding the causes and impacts of the phenomenon which led to the establishment of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to help assess and provide information about climate change to society (Agrawala, 1998). This essay presents arguments on who is qualified to be an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expert and who should be qualified. It begins by describing the role of IPCC and its structure including the roles of the authors of the IPCC reports such as lead authors, coordinating lead authors, contributing authors, expert reviewers, review editors and government focal points (IPCC, 2008). It then concludes by arguing in favour of the need for the inclusion of other experts as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In 1988, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) together formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to ensure that, scientific opinions about the knowledge of climate change and its consequences are made available to the public (IPCC, 2014a). The Australian Government’s Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (2013) state that, new research works are not carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change instead, it

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