Push for Pacific nations to engage with IPCC

Transcript

There's a push for Pacific countries to have a stronger engagement with the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC.

The IPCC is the international body for assessing the science related to climate change, and was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and United Nations Environment Programme.

The IPCC's newly elected mitigation co-chair, Professor Jim Skea (ski), was in New Zealand recently and met with Pacific representatives at Victoria University.

Professor Skea told Moeara Tuilaepa Taylor, Pacific countries were instrumental in pushing the ambition of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century at the Paris climate change conference.

JIM SKEA: One of the big challenges now is the IPCC now has to respond to the challenge that has been set: How do you get back to 1.5 degrees and what would be the impacts associated with it?  And I think this is the stage, you know historically perhaps the Pacific Islands have had a lower participation in the IPCC then we would like, and that's the big challenge to get people involved.

MOERA TUILAEPA-TAYLOR: I know that part of the IPCC is to assess all the data from the research carried out by scientists.  It does look quite bad for some places in the Pacific.

JS:  In terms of the impacts of climate change?  Yeah, I mean absolutely.  We are very aware that the target of 1.5 degrees is not that faraway.  The World is already warm by 0-point-8 or 0-point-9 degrees, so we don't have very far to go.  And so, it's very likely that even if we wanted to get to 1.5 degrees we would have to self over shoot, the temperature would have to go up over 1.5 degrees and then come back down again, in order to reach the target.  And sea level rise is unfortunately is something we are committed too, even if we stop emitting right now, turned it all to zero, the sea level would continue to rise because of the cumulative effect of all the emissions we've had in the past, so undoubtedly the case is we need to learn to adapt to climate change as well as taking all the steps to of reducing emissions and bring it under control.

MTT: Do you notice whether there is a strong input by Pacific countries into the IPCC.

JS: Historically, I think the Pacific countries have been perhaps not participating as much as they could be. They [Pacific] are part of one of the IPCC regions which covers Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and plus all the Pacific Islands, and there are only a certain number places from that region which people can take up, and it's tended to be that you [Pacific nations] perhaps seen Australians, New Zealanders and Indonesia, taking these places with much lower input from people from the Pacific Islands.  I think it's really good we've got someone from Samoa at this meeting who takes a really active part in IPCC in previous cycles and it's that kind of experience, I think you want to build on to get more participation.