The IPCC´s six global reports assessing scientific climate knowledge are major achievements in the challenging climate science-policy interface. Yet the IPCC’s success as a scientific authority that produces credible, legitimate, and salient scientific reports for policymakers in an era when climate change is not universally acknowledged requires boundary work. This boundary work creates a highly regulated and rigorous process for producing reports, which reinforces the autonomy of scientific knowledge from politics, but it results in the exclusion of what the IPCC considers “non-scientific knowledge,” regardless of the importance of that knowledge. Indeed, despite its global influence and legitimacy, the IPCC´s knowledge production system has been increasingly criticized for underrepresenting non-Western scientific knowledges, including Indigenous Peoples’ ways of knowing. Because multi-source knowledge enhances societal capacity when it comes to responding to change, this marginalization likely hinders effective policymaking for the transition to adaptation and resilience. Reflecting on my experiences working with a group of IPCC authors´ to include Indigenous knowledges in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Working Group 2 (adaptation and vulnerability), I consider in this paper the ways the boundaries that guide IPCC knowledge production might be leveraged for engagement with, rather than the exclusion of, non-Western scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledges. In so doing, I chart a path toward a more comprehensive, multi-layered system through which to co-assess climate knowledge in future IPCC reports while protecting the reports’ legitimacy and capacity to guide international policy.
Julio C. Postigo (Tue,) studied this question.