The narratives of neutrality: The making of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a unique organisation mandated by the UNFCCC to provide “objective scientific and technical advice” (UNFCCC, 1994, Art. 21(2)). It does not create knowledge, but rather compiles and summarises the existing literature on climate change, which is why its reports are described to be “neutral, policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive.” (IPCC, 2024).

This research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the IPCC neutrality claims, and shifts the epistemological lens away from positivism. The project instead takes co-production as an epistemological starting point, understanding that scientific knowledge is produced by people and institutions with biases and political motives, but that science and technology can also legitimise power. Therefore, this research posits that there is no such thing as neutral policy advice and seeks to systematically explore and the environmental discourses that dominate the report.

The research uses supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques (Structural Topic Modelling and LLM finetuning) to process IPCC text and explore the distribution of topics and discourses in the IPCC Working Group III Mitigation of Climate Change report, which is part of the most recent Assessment Report 6 cycle.

In so doing, the contribution focuses on exploring the power dynamics in the summarising process from the Full Report to the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers (SPM), and on the influence of state and non-state actors in shifting discourses, by analysing the Second Order Draft (SOD) peer review comments.

The contribution will focus on the findings of the research project: despite the idea of sufficiency appearing in the IPCC Working Group III report, discourses focused on post-growth and justice are under-represented, in favor of market and techno-centric ones. The contribution will unpack the differences between scientist, civil society and government discourses in the IPCC writing process and showcase the biases of contemporary climate science, highlighting the role of global north countries and of orthodox economists in shaping the policy solution space. The contribution will feature interactive maps of discourse and stakeholder interactions, focusing on the position of post-growth in climate policy and the IPCC.