Recently elected to head the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Jim Skea wants to be realistic and optimistic. Thursday, July 27, he said he was convinced that humanity is not powerless in the face of global warming. And it’s not the extreme temperatures seen around the world in July – “most certainly the hottest month ever measured”, according to the UN – that will make him say otherwise. For him, it is “a salutary lesson” for the task at hand.
But it’s also essential to offer humanity “positive” ways to address these challenges, not just “doomsday messages that can create a sense of existential dread about the future of the planet,” he said. he in an interview with AFP in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where the IPCC elections are being held. “We need to emphasize that humans have choices they can make and can decide their own future. »
Believing that governments are more than ever seeking advice on what to do in the short term, he wants his mandate to put a “double emphasis” on climate adaptation and climate change mitigation.
The 69-year-old Briton, professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, takes the helm of the organization in a crucial decade, where humanity must reverse the curve of greenhouse gas emissions to hope to limit the global warming.
With his decades of experience, Jim Skea assures that he is not “naive about the difficulty of getting the scientific message across”. His approach at the head of the IPCC “will be a judicious mixture of realism and optimism”, he assures, saying: “I am genetically optimistic. »
The task ahead is enormous. As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries pledged to cap global average temperature rise to “well below” 2°C, and 1.5°C if possible, since pre-industrial era. To achieve this latter goal, the IPCC estimates that greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 43% by 2030 and by 84% by 2050.
Jim Skea played a leading role in publishing a landmark report by the group in 2018 which concluded that only a warming cap of 1.5°C could ensure that the world would not be threatened by climate change, without risk ecosystem collapse and irreversible changes to the climate system.
Nor does it intend to multiply so-called special reports, such as the 2018 study on 1.5°C, which divert the group’s resources from its primary tasks. “I’m going to say something very strong: rather die than see the multiplication of special reports,” he says.
Jim Skea was elected over three other candidates, including two women, who hoped to become the first president of the organization, created in 1988 to inform the world’s decision-makers through the work of hundreds of experts. on climate change.
The new leader acknowledges that the IPCC has “big problems” around gender and diversity and assures that one of the priorities of his term will be to increase the number of women in his ranks.
