ABSTRACT
Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the past 30 years have issued increasingly dire assessments of the problem of climate change. While the first few IPCC assessment cycles included only a few anthropologists, recent reports have involved a growing number and have drawn more extensively on literature from our field. At the same time, anthropologists are increasingly turning their ethnographic gaze to understand the workings of the IPCC and other science-policy assessment bodies to understand how authority is produced and how knowledge travels. In this chapter, I discuss how anthropological knowledge is represented in recent IPCC reports, based on reviews of AR6 special reports and my own experience as an IPCC author. The chapter will also discuss how the IPCC has been treated as an object of ethnographic study and how anthropologists have interrogated the IPCC’s processes and outputs. The chapter concludes by discussing if more anthropological input would help IPCC address challenges like acknowledging uncertainty and improved inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge.
