On her first day as an expert author on the world’s most important climate reports, Prof Julia Steinberger knew nobody else, so she sat down at a stranger’s table for breakfast. I’m from the University of Lausanne,” she said. The man across the table replied: “I’m Mustafa Babiker.
I work with Saudi Aramco.” Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, is responsible for more of the carbon emissions driving the escalating climate crisis than any other company in history, and the kingdom has long been a major blocker of climate action. Wasn’t that a conflict of interest, Steinberger asked. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which they both now sat, produces the reports that underpin UN climate negotiations and inform national climate policy around the world.
No, Steinberger recalls Babiker saying: he had declared the relationship on the IPCC’s conflict of interest form. His appointment as a coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s coming Seventh Assessment Report sparked controversy in the climate science community last year. But a Guardian investigation, carried out in partnership with a team of international journalists, has now revealed that Babiker is far from an isolated case.
At least a dozen IPCC lead authors are employed by or linked to Saudi Aramco, Saudi institutions and other oil and gas interests, the investigation found. One IPCC vice-chair, part of the body’s leadership group, also represents the kingdom at global climate negotiations as a government employee. The IPCC is the world’s most authoritative organisation on climate science, with its reports approved by 195 countries.
They are produced by hundreds of lead authors from around the world with expertise ranging from atmospheric physics to the impacts of extreme weather. The Guardian examined the 223 lead authors in working group III, the part of the IPCC that assesses how emissions can be reduced or removed from the atmosphere. Its work evaluates emissions-cutting policies and technologies and so is directly relevant to the economic interests of countries and companies.
Working groups I and II cover the science of climate change and its impacts. The investigation identified 20 cases with strong conflict of interest concerns. More than half involved authors linked to Saudi institutions, a concentration that raises broader questions about the kingdom’s influence on how the reports are produced.
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