The Role of Assessments in the Science-Policy Interface

This presentation is based on my involvement with national and international scientific assessments on issues such as stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem services, and agriculture, and the science-policy interface as a science advisor in the US and UK Governments and at the World Bank.

Informed policy formulation, whether at the national, regional or global scale, requires state-of-the-art credible multi-disciplinary knowledge that recognizes the needs of society, decision-makers, the political context of decision-making, and that inter- and intra-generational equity issues are critically important. Consequently, it is crucial that assessments are trans-disciplinary and involve relevant decision-makers (governments, private sector, NGOs, media and civil society) in their co-design, co-production and co-delivery. However, it is important to recognize that while scientific evidence is necessary, it is not sufficient for informed policy formulation and implementation.

There is a long history of international scientific assessments addressing global environmental issues such as stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change and loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services, often complemented by national and regional assessments. To date, National (e.g., UK NEA and UK NEA-follow-on) and international scientific, technical and economic assessments (e.g., the GBA, MA, IPCC, and IAASTED) have provided much-needed knowledge to inform national and international policies. To address the issues of global environmental changes and sustainable development assessments need to be multi-thematic, multi-spatial, multi-temporal with multi-stakeholder involvement.

Susan Solomon has played a critical role in both generating critical scientific knowledge for both the stratospheric ozone assessments, including her ground-breaking research on the Antarctic ozone hole, and for the IPCC climate assessments. In addition, Susan has been a key contributor to these assessments, including being the co-chair of WG I for the fourth IPCC assessment, where she demonstrated outstanding leadership skills both scientifically and politically in ensuring the Summary for Policymakers was approved in Plenary. Susan’s contributions to these two issues is quite remarkable.

The key features required for success for assessment processes, include:

• credible, transparent and legitimate processes with approved principles and procedures covering all aspects of the scoping, preparation, review and approval of the assessments;
• ownership and participation by all relevant stakeholders in the scoping, nomination of experts, preparation, peer-review and governance structure;
• recognition of different world views and value systems (including those of indigenous peoples and local communities);
• intellectual balance (natural and social scientists, humanities, economists and technologists), with the appropriate utilization of local and indigenous knowledge;
• geographic balance of experts from all regions of the world and from all stakeholder groups, with experts operating in their individual capacity, nominated and selected through an open and transparent process;
• providing policy-relevant information, but not being policy prescriptive;
• expert and government peer-review involving all relevant stakeholders, overseen by independent review editors to ensure appropriate responses by the authors;
• risk assessment that critically evaluates the literature, reduces complexity but adds value by synthesizing;
• risk management assessing the consequences of action and inaction, and the complementary roles of technologies, policies and behaviour change;
• providing decision-makers with a consensus view of the evidence in a digestible form, including what is known, unknown and uncertain, and what the policy implications of uncertainty are;
• evidence-based, limiting the use of ideological value systems;
• presenting different views, identifying areas of certainty, uncertainty and controversy;
• an effective outreach and communications strategy; and
• a Summary for Policymakers that synthesizes the key policy-relevant messages for decision-makers.

The WMO/UNEP stratospheric ozone, IPCC and IPBES assessments have had a profound influence of national and international policy formulation. The stratospheric ozone assessments demonstrated that chlorine and bromine-containing chemicals were responsible for destroying stratospheric ozone, increasing the amount of UVB reaching the Earth’s surface, resulting in an increase of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer, and identified cost-effective substitutes for the ozone-destroying chemicals, thus providing the evidence underpinning of the Montreal protocol and its subsequent amendments and adjustments. IPCC assessments have demonstrated that it is unequivocal that human activities are responsible for the observed increased temperatures, changes in extreme weather events, resulting in adverse implications for socio-economic systems, biological and physical systems, and identified cost-effective and socially acceptable adaptation and mitigation actions, thus providing the evidence for the Kyoto Protocol and more recently the Paris climate agreement. IPBES and earlier biodiversity assessments have demonstrated how human activities are destroying biodiversity and degrading ecosystems, resulting in a reduction of key ecosystem services fundamental to human well-being, and identified the types of transformative changes needed to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity, thus providing the evidence needed for developing the post-2020 (post Aichi targets) biodiversity targets.

There is an urgent need to develop a fully integrated transdisciplinary web-based assessment process that recognizes the inter-linkages among all regional- and global-scale environmental and development issues that is spatially explicit, i.e., global, regional and sub-regional, and where possible national. Such a system could initially be used to assess the implications of climate change, loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services, and air pollution on issues such as food, water, energy and human security, key development issues. It would embrace the issues covered by the IPCC, IPBES, IAASTD, TEEB, the Global Energy Assessment, UNEP’s GEO and the CBD GBO assessments.

In summary, major challenges range from the practical to the philosophical. These include: (i) ensuring assessments are demand-driven and meet the needs of all relevant stakeholders; (ii) developing principles and procedures viewed by all relevant stakeholders as credible, legitimate and transparent; (iii) ensuring the assessments are transdisciplinary involving natural scientists, economists social scientists, humanities, law, business and engineers as appropriate; (iv) recognizing diverse world views and value systems; (v) integrating different knowledge systems; (vi) acknowledging power asymmetries; (vii) ensuring all relevant stakeholders participate in the scoping, preparation, peer-review and communication; (viii) ensuring adequate funding for all experts; (ix) ensuring the best experts are nominated by Governments and relevant stakeholder groups; (x) using the non-English language literature; and (xi) developing a web-based system. All of these are tractable and being addressed in most international assessment processes.