Podcast 7: Climate change science and policy-making

Climate change science is a science of complexity, and it is characterised by its exploration of the future through forecast models, and by the thorough treatment of uncertainty. However, it is also because of its features that its relationship with policy-making, which should translate the scientific warning into mitigation action, has been difficult. Here we explore the role and the operation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a unique case of successful science/policy interface, and we discuss the benefits and the limitations of “evidence-based policymaking”.

Andrea Tilche, UiT The Arctic University of Norway – Climate change science and policy-making

*Andrea Tilche is Senior Advisor and Adjunct Professor at UiT in Tromsø, and Adjunct Professor at NTNU in Trondheim.
Water scientist, after 20 years of scientific career in Italy he moved in 1998 to the European Commission where he covered different positions of responsibility within various European Framework Programmes of Research. From 2010 to the end of 2018, when he retired, he was in charge of the Climate Change programme, and he was the EU delegate at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

**Special tanks for the inspirations received not only from years of reading of scientific and non-scientific literature on climate change and sustainability, but also from discussions with my former European Commission colleagues, with the members of the High-Level Panel of the European Decarbonisation Pathways Initiative chaired by John Schellnhuber - of which I was the convener, with the many authors and delegates of the IPCC, with the many coordinators and partners of EU-funded projects, with the Arctic research scientific community, and with my co-author of recent papers Antonello Nociti.

Disclaimer: all authors of graphs and tables that are shown in the podcasts are cited. Permission to use the ones not from public sources is being requested.