Kenya roots for more Africans to join UN climate panel

Kenya is rooting to have more representatives from the African continent on the Climate change panel.

Environment and Climate Change PS Festus Ng'eno on Tuesday called for increased representation of African experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The PS spoke during the official opening of the Africa seventh assessment outline scoping meeting of the IPCC in Nairobi.

He noted that climate change adaptation was urgent for Africa because of her vulnerability and called for a special IPCC on adaptation indicators.

IPCC was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The objective of the IPCC is to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies.

Ng'eno said Africans needed more representation in the group because of her vulnerability to climate change.

"It is alarming that only 11 per cent of authors of the assessment report are from Africa, despite the continent being one of the world’s most vulnerable continents to the impacts of climate change,” the PS said.

"It is crucial to ensure that African voices are well represented when finding solutions, crucial too is the inclusion of the role of indigenous and local knowledge systems as well as adequate gender representation."

The PS has applauded IPCC for its reports saying they were regular, unbiased and informative, adding that the products in the 6th assessment cycle show an improvement in the representation of African issues.

IPCC reports are a key input into international climate change negotiations.

He, however, acknowledged that there is still major room for improvement, citing lack of awareness of IPCC processes, limited funding for research and prohibitive publishing costs as major setbacks to the process.

"It is my hope that this meeting of like-minded individuals will generate solutions that can immediately be implemented to curb some of these challenges," the PS said.

He further advised the IPCC scientists to embrace collaboration with sectors that consume their output and cautioned against top-down dissemination of research findings.

Ng’eno noted that in many cases, the wealth of knowledge that informs adaptation and mitigation planning, and decision-making is not used to its full potential.

"Top-down approaches to knowledge production are identified as one of the reasons for the gap between science and practice," he cautioned.

According to the PS, it would also be important to support or raise the need for a special report on among others adaptation indicators.

This, he said, will support Africa to adequately push for the operationalization of the Global Goal on Adaptation.

The IPCC is an organization of governments that are members of the United Nations or WMO.

The IPCC currently has 195 members. Thousands of people from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC.

For the assessment reports, experts volunteer their time as IPCC authors to assess the thousands of scientific papers published each year to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks.