Network Analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Introduction In 1988 the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations formed a joint organization: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This new organization, the IPCC for short, was charged to fairly and openly assess the science and socioeconomic challenges regarding climate change. collaboration structure of climate change researchers. The IPCC report is prepared through complex procedures to successfully synthesize all relevant issues related to climate change with agreement of stakeholders. Since climate change is a sensitive and controversial issue in policy and science, achieving credibility is an important and necessary goal for the IPCC report. Figure 1 briefly shows how the IPCC report is prepared. To develop scope and outline of the report, frequent experts meeting are held. In addition, policy makers are also encouraged to address currently important policy issues related to climate change. Once the scope and outline are defined, governments are invited to nominate experts and each working group selects authors/editors from the nominated experts for the relevant volume. Authors are in charge of the contents and work based on peer-reviewed and internationally available literatures. The draft written by the authors are sent to experts for review. After authors prepare final draft based on the experts review, governments review the draft and working groups of IPCC finally approves the report and published it. 3 Figure 1-The flow chart of actors for an IPCC report. The IPCC was chosen because it is often regarded as the definitive collection of research. UN members refer to the reports when negotiating treaties and discussing other possible courses of action. Since the IPCC report plays a vital role on the world stage, we focused our efforts to see how well the IPCC lives up to its mission of openness and fairness by: • Exploring how team collaborations differ in the many fields of expertise (e.g., economics and atmospheric chemistry). • Evaluating core network metrics, such as clustering coefficient and the degree distribution, for their relevance two to identifying IPCC characteristics. • Identifying the nationality of key authors to see if they represent the goal of the IPCC to included developing and developed researchers. • Understanding who are the most connected and least connected authors. More importantly, to understand characteristics of the least connected authors, including discipline, research labs, and nationality. By studying the IPCC, we choose a seminal work in the climate change field, which many researchers defer to on a …