Blogger Ansel has written a wonderful post that will probably get attention for the pointed way in which it lays out the formulaic, and therefore ultimately useless, character of the vast majority of reporting on post-earthquake Haiti. I find it interesting because it screams out for one of my pet projects – the need to connect the global poor to one another and to those in wealthier countries in an unfiltered manner. Nearly-useless journalism is a huge problem if it is the only source of information emerging from a given place. The impact of this same problematic journalism, however, can be greatly lessened by the presence of many voices reporting from many angles on the same subject. At this time, despite the various platitudes about the wonders of mobile phone technology and the internet that are repeated in development circles, the enormous potential of these tools has yet to be realized. We need to be more honest about this, lest it sound like the technology is there and the only problem is the backward people who won’t use it.
I wonder, though, how comfortable the development industry will be with the gradual, inevitable emergence of many voices through these technologies. What will we do when the people in whose names we are ostensibly working start telling us no and begin to call out our failures – and do so in a public forum?
Category: policy
The difference between debt forgiveness and bailouts – no moral hazard here
In the news, recently, was the IMF’s decision to forgive its portion of Haiti’s debt – a substantial $268 million (BBC, CNN) However, it should be noted that this is hardly complete debt relief. According to the World Bank, Haiti owed $1,935,265,000 in 2008. So this relief really just lowers the debt from $1.9 billion to $1.67 billion – not a particularly huge thing, in the grand scheme of things. This outstanding chart from the World Bank shows who holds Haiti’s debt, and makes clear what a tiny sliver the IMF held (see the bottom of page 2). Certainly, the IMF was right to do this – but it won’t matter all that much to Haiti.
There are some who would argue that debt relief raises the specter of “moral hazard”, that much-discussed issue in the wake of the financial bailout in late 2008. However, applying this argument to debt relief in general is a terrible mistake resting on a faulty understanding of the sources of debt. On Wall Street, the bailout raised the issue of moral hazard because the money went to the very people who made the bad investments and created the problematic investment vehicles – in short, encouraging these people to take risks in the future, knowing that if they failed again the government would step in, rather than letting the economy tank completely (For an outstanding take on this, see Simon Johnston and James Kwak’s 13 Bankers – link below). This, I think, does raise a significant issue about who has to absorb risk when people take big chances with their (and other people’s) money – the bailouts we have seen, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, risk has been outsourced to taxpayers, many of whom did not benefit from (hell, they suffered greatly from) the very investments that they are now being asked to bail out.
Debt relief, by and large, is something entirely different – there are a lot of reasons why we should drop the debts of countries in the developing world, not least of which being that these debts are anchors that will never allow these economies to rise on the global economic tide. For example, in the late 1990s, Ghana was sending roughly half of its annual revenues overseas to service its totally unsustainable debt. In simple terms, this meant that every year, $500 million worth of schools, hospitals, roads and electrical grid could not be constructed because that money was being hovered out of the country to pay for a debt incurred before much of the population had ever been born.
This, to me, is why we need to drop many countries’ debts – including that of Haiti. These debts were not accrued in the name of the people of these countries, but in the name of particular leaders who often misused the funds. If you need an example, Google Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) – the United States (and the international community, at the behest of the US) dumped money into Mobutu’s hands in the form of development loans, knowing he was both stealing this money and killing a tremendous proportion of his own population, because we did not want him turning to the Soviets. So it takes a lot of gall to demand that the current population of the DRC pay back the debts incurred by Mobutu (who managed to die of cancer in 1997 before he could answer for any of this). There is no moral hazard in offering debt relief here – the current population of the DRC had little or nothing to do with accruing this debt, and the lenders always knew the loans were really bribes. Haiti is really not all that different from the DRC – Haiti too has a history of problematic leaders propped up by “loans” from the developed world. However, here there is a wider guilt, as a good portion of why the country is so poor is because the US has forced its economy to open to global markets where small Haitian farmers cannot compete with the economies of scale of large, multinational agribusinesses.
It shouldn’t have taken an earthquake to put debt relief on the table for Haiti. There are many other countries, equally deserving of relief, who wait. It shouldn’t take an equivalent disaster for them to make it happen.
Yes, cell phones can make a difference in development
Via Mashable: How Mobile Technology is a Game Changer for Developing Africa.
There are a lot of initiatives out there that engage with mobile phones for development. The most impressive I have seen is Lifelines India, in part coordinated by some friends and colleagues at Development Alternatives. Volunteers bring the phones to villages, and for a small fee they can call a number and record their questions. Each farmer receives a reference number for the query and can call back in a day and use that reference number to access the reply. The project promised and delivered rapid replies to queries (less than twenty-four hours) and provided information of great value to farmers. Today it reaches around 150,000 farmers in four Indian states.
This is but one of many initiatives. The Global Adaptation Information Network project I have been part of for the past four years is heavily predicated on using mobile phones to connect communities throughout the Global South. And Mickey Glantz has toyed with the idea of expanding Sparetime University to mobile platforms to expand access,
What this article failed to recognize, though, is the interesting boom in cell phone app development in Africa right now – app developers in Kenya are recognized as some of the best in the world at designing lightweight apps for low bandwidth networks. For those who are fed up with lazy, bloated coding of software here in the US (why your programs run so slowly, even on new computers and fast internet connections), it may be that Africa is the future . . .
Availability isn't validity . . .
So, to clarify one one my points from my previous post, let me use an example to show why building an index of development (or an index of anything, really) on data based on its availability can lead to tremendous problems – and result in a situation where the index is actually so misleading as to be worse than having no index at all.
A few years ago, Nate Kettle, Andrew Hoskins and I wrote a piece examining poverty-environment indicators (link here, or check out chapter 9 of Delivering Development when it comes out in January) where we pointed out that the data used by one study to evaluate the relationship between poverty and the environment in Nigeria did not bear much relationship to the meaningful patterns of environment and livelihood in Nigeria. For example, one indicator of this relationship was ‘percentage of irrigated area in the total agricultural area’, an index whose interpretation rested on the assumption that a greater percentage of irrigated area will maximize the environment’s agricultural potential and lead to greater income and opportunity for those living in the area. While this seems like a reasonable interpretation, we argued that there were other, equally plausible interpretations:
“While this may be a relatively safe assumption in places where the irrigated area is a very large percentage of total agricultural area, it may not be as applicable in places where the irrigated area is relatively small and where the benefits of irrigation are not likely to reach the entire population. Indeed, in such settings those with access to irrigation might not only experience greater opportunities in an average year, but also have incomes that are much more resistant to environmental shocks that might drive other farmers to adopt severe measures to preserve their livelihoods, such as selling off household stocks or land to those whose incomes are secured by irrigation. In such situations, a small but rising percentage of area under irrigation is as likely to reflect a consolidation of wealth (and therefore declining incomes and opportunities for many) in a particular area as it does greater income and opportunity for the whole population.” (p.90)
The report we were critiquing made no effort to control for these alternative interpretations, at least in part because it had gathered data at the national scale for Nigeria. The problem here is that Nigeria contains seven broad agroecological zones (and really many more subzones) in which different crops and combinations of crops will be favored – averaging this across the country just homogenizes important differences in particular places into a general, but meaningless indicator. When we combined this environmental variability with broad patterns of land tenure (people’s access to land), we found that the country really had to be divided up into at least 13 different zones – in each zone, the interpretation of this poverty-environment indicator was likely to be consistent, but there was no guarantee that it would be consistent from zone to zone. In some zones, a rising area under irrigation would reflect a positive shift in poverty and environmental quality, while in others it might reflect declining human well-being.
To add to this complexity, we then mapped these zones against the smallest administrative units (states) of Nigeria at which meaningful data on poverty and the environment are most likely to be available. What resulted was this:
As you can see, there are several states with multiple zones inside their borders – which means a single indicator cannot be assumed to have the same interpretion across the state (let alone the entire country). So, while there might be data on poverty and environmental quality available at the state level such that we can identify indicators and build indexes with it, the likelihood is that the interpretation of that data will be, in many cases, incorrect, leading to problematic policies (like promoting irrigation in areas where it leads to land consolidation and the marginalization of the poor) – in other words, making things much worse than if there was no index or indicator at all.
Just because the data is available doesn’t mean that it is useful, or that it should be used.
Polishing a turd? Another day, another index
UNDP and the Oxford Environment and Human Development Initiative recently announced the launch of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), the newest rapid poverty assessment tool. This is the latest effort to expand the measurement of poverty beyond indicators of economic productivity, and is being hailed (at least by UNDP and OEHDI) as a significant advance in our efforts to understand the nature of poverty. I’m not so sure . . .
We have tried to come up with quick measures (often referred to as indicators) of things like development, poverty and food insecurity for decades. We chase after such indicators because, if they provide us with quick, cheap understandings of the human condition in particular places, they can guide policy and program design, thus maximizing the benefit of the aid money we spend around the world. Since the mid-twentieth century, development thought has attached to various indicators of poverty and development. For example, one of the earliest (and still prevalent) indicators of development is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which measures the value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year. GNP per capita is the number you get when you divide this value by the population of the country at hand, thus getting a measure of average per-person economic productivity. The presumption here is that this average economic productivity reflects wages, and thus the ability of individuals to meet their material needs. It certainly means something that the per capita GDP of the United States was $46350 in 2008 (the last year for which the World Bank has data), while Malawi’s per capita GDP was $288 in that same year (no, that is not a typo). But what that means in terms of people’s real quality of life, their opportunities, etc. is not at all clear. Clearly, Malawians are far less economically productive than Americans – but to address this issue, we have to understand why this is so. Once we start to explore the different levels of economic productivity, we find that the causes of these differences are many, leading to other questions, such as why are so many Malawians engaged in subsistence farming, while Americans are engaged in the wage economy? In short, per capita GDP is an interesting starting point for analysis, but it does not really capture the dynamics of poverty and human well-being in a manner that allows us to do anything about these situations.
To address this issue, other indicators and indexes (indices) that aggregate various indicators into a single value have emerged. Perhaps the most famous is the Human Development Index, pioneered by UNDP’s Human Development Reports. The HDI blends four indicators (life expectancy at birth, the adult literacy rate, the combined enrollment rate for primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, and a purchasing power parity adjusted measure of per capita GDP) to capture three different issues (health, education and income) which are then aggregated into a single score that runs from 0 (no human development) to 1 (presumably some sort of ideal human development). This measure of well-being certainly moves beyond the purely economic, and probably does a better job of capturing the dynamics of poverty and well-being than any single measure, economic or otherwise, might. But still, this is a limited index – there is no way to capture things like gender disparities that greatly impact people’s well-being and opportunities.
And now comes the MPI, the latest effort to get a development index right. The MPI has quite a few more variables, and it has moved away from any reference to the economy in its measurement of poverty:
1. Health (each indicator weighted equally at 1/6)
- Child Mortality: If any child has died in the family
- Nutrition: If any adult or child in the family is malnourished
2. Education (each indicator weighted equally at 1/6 )
- Years of Schooling If no household member has completed 5 years of schooling
- Child Enrolment If any school-aged child is out of school in years 1 to 8
3. Standard of Living (each of the six indicators weighted equally at 1/18)
- Electricity If household does not have electricity
- Drinking water If does not meet MDG definitions, or is more than 30 mins walk
- Sanitation If does not meet MDG definitions, or the toilet is shared
- Flooring If the floor is dirt, sand, or dung
- Cooking Fuel If they cook with wood, charcoal, or dung
- Assets If do not own more than one of: radio, tv, telephone, bike, motorbike
There is a lot to like here – moving toward standard of living, and away from income, does a lot to make different situations comparable across countries and continents. And shifting measures of health from life expectancy, which can be compromised by any number of issues in the life cycle, to child mortality and nutrition, which are highly correlated to health outcomes, is also a good idea. But in the end, what will the MPI really add to our understanding of the dynamics of poverty and well-being that we could not have gleaned through the HDI – or through GDP, for that matter? Put another way, I am worried that a lot of time and effort has gone into polishing a turd.
In my forthcoming book, I make an extended argument for doing away with these indicators altogether. They are top-down efforts to organize and classify human experience in a manner that gives the illusion of actionable information, but none of the analytic purchase we actually need to do something in the world. A close look at the MPI and its constituent indicators illustrates my point*. Let’s examine Standard of Living – recall that I really like this category, and this reframing of this component of human well-being. But what, exactly, do the indicators have to do with standard of living? For example, why are radios, tvs, telephones, bikes, and motorbikes such critical assets in this index? First, this presumes that these commodities are proxies for people’s standard of living, which is questionable at best. Second, even if we accept that commodity ownership is an important part of the standard of living, why are we focused on these commodities? For example, surely cattle ownership is far more important than any of these when evaluating people’s assets in East Africa. And why does flooring matter so much? Yes, it is possible that worms or other insects and animals could find their way into an earth-floored house, why not focus on roofing or wall materials (which are much more important in keeping out insects, and therefore dealing with issues like malaria)?
Why did the designers of this index choose these variables? The answer, in part, lies in their explanation for their selection of variables “The ten indicators are almost the only set of indicators that could have been used to compare around 100 countries.” (p.13) While you have to work with the data you have, availability is not a valid criteria for evaluating the usefulness of a particular measure. In other words, if you are using an indicator variable as a proxy for a much larger process or issue, you have a responsibility to make sure that indicator actually says something meaningful about that process. It is not at all clear to me that these variables have a meaningful link to the standard of living in many parts of the world.
To the credit of those who designed the MPI, they note that “one of the main lessons of this first exercise of estimating multidimensional poverty for developing countries is the urgent need to start collecting information on key internationally comparable indicators at the individual level” (p.13). I’ve been part of an effort to rethink just how we identify and access this information, by building an information network that allows communities in the Global South to communicate with one another and with “experts” in the Global North – a bottom-up collection of data on the global state of human well-being. Our estimates suggest that this approach would, in the relatively short term, become much more accurate and cost-effective for identifying and addressing the challenges that limit human well-being around the world than current top-down efforts, as embodied in large indices like the MPI.
If indices like the HDI, and now the MPI, tell us very little about the causes, and therefore the solutions, for the problems and challenges that the global poor deal with on a daily basis, they are not useful analytical tools – at best, they are a first step in a process of inquiry that identifies an interesting trend for future analysis. So why are they still around? At least in part because they are great PR vehicles – they make for interesting maps that ostensibly show how bad things are for so many people, and which justify continued development efforts to donors. That is simply not good enough to justify the continued time and effort required to refine these indices.
*I’m not going to even get into the issue of weighting – basically, every individual variable listed above is weighted equally in this index. So, infant child mortality rates have the same impact on the MPI score as using wood fuel, having a dirt floor, and television ownership. Stop and think about that for a second.
On clean coal and optimism . . .
Mickie Glantz has an interesting musing about clean coal on his FragileEcologies blog today. What I like about it is his focus on how clean coal is a nice goal – that is, those of us working on issues of global environmental change should not reject coal as an energy source if there ever comes a day where it can be mined and burned in a manner that greatly diminishes, if not completely eliminates the horrible side effects, such as mountaintop removal and massive greenhouse gas emissions. Current energy regimes and costs are a critical limiting factor in global development today, and anything that might bring us cheap, abundant energy in a manner that does not decimate the environment should be taken seriously.
That said, I have been a harsh critic of the clean coal movement thus far . . . because it is completely disingenuous. Current marketing suggests that the technology is here, that coal is already clean, and that environmental concerns about coal are merely a mask for some sort of ill-defined, radical agenda. However, the technology is not here yet and coal remains a remarkably dirty source of energy, from mining to burning. So I give full support to Mickie’s idea – let’s talk about Clean Coal, where “clean” is not an adjective, but a verb – and a verb in the command tense. Clean that coal!
Development is not the same thing as adaptation
One of the most interesting and distressing trends in recent development thought has been the convergence of adaptation to global change (I use global change as a catch-all which includes environmental and economic change) and development. Development agencies increasingly take on the idea of adaptation as a key component of their missions – which they should, if they intend to build projects with enduring value. However, it is one thing to incorporate the idea of adaptation into development programming. It is entirely another to collapse the two into the same mission.
Simply put, development and adaptation have two different goals. In general, development is about improving the conditions of life for the global poor in some form or other. Adaptation implicitly suggests an effort to maintain what exists without letting it get worse . . . which sounds great until you think about the conditions of life in places like rural sub-Saharan Africa, where things are often very bad right now. A colleague of mine at USAID, in the context of a conversation about disaster relief and development, said it best: the mandate of disaster relief is to put things back to the way they were before the disaster. In a place like Haiti, that isn’t much of a mandate.
All of this becomes pretty self-evident after a moment of thought. Why, then, do we see the collapse of these two efforts into a single program in the world of development practice? For example, what does it mean when food security projects and programs start to define themselves in terms of adaptation? It seems to me that the goal shifts for these programs – from improvement to the maintenance of existing situations. If a development agency was there in the first place, the existing situation is likely unacceptable. To me, this means that this subtle shift in mission is also unacceptable.
Why am I going on about this? I am about to take up a job as the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. In this job, I will have to negotiate this very convergence at the program level. How we work out this convergence over the next few years will have tremendous implications for development efforts for decades to come – and therefore huge implications for billions of people around the world. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers . . . but I will think out loud in this space as we go.
Clarification required . . .
Well, it has been an eventful day – the blog has been in existence for something like three days, and I’ve already been blown up by traffic over a post. Which, of course, is better than complete silence from the blogosphere. However, I am not one to subscribe to the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity, so I wanted to clarify a few things.
First, from my perspective the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is very, very clear. This is NOT to say that all debate about the subject is over – after all, the climate is a tremendously complex system that we cannot know fully under existing methods (unless someone here has the means to locate every molecule in the atmosphere, and record their state, vectors and velocities simultaneously . . . oh, and then do the same for the oceans, land, and all life on earth, as the atmosphere interacts with all of that) – so we work in ever more refined approximations (the models of which, by the way, continue to converge with observed reality as we refine them, a strong sign that our approximations are at least on the right track). That leaves room for error, and surely we are making some errors now that will have to be corrected over time. Then again, there is room for error in our understanding of gravity, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for trying to fly from my roof. Remember, the scientific method never proves anything – all you can ever do is fail to disprove something so often that it becomes very, very likely that you accurately understand whatever it is you are testing.
That said, I am not a climate scientist. I do understand the physics of climate change reasonably well, as I have had to pick up quite a bit in the course of my research and teaching. I also understand modeling reasonably well – I even sat in on a colleague’s graduate seminar on biogeographic modeling to refine my knowledge base. But again, I am not a climate scientist. So I am not going to dedicate a lot of blog space to the nuances of climate science, not when far more qualified people run outstanding blogs on the subject (check some of the sites in my sidebar). Those are the correct fora for such discussions. This, I hope, will be a forum for the discussion of the intersection of development and global change thought broadly – both economic and environmental change.
Second, the question of why I wrote the post in the first place. Contrary to Steve Bloom’s comment (whose comments were generally quite good), there was no unintended irony in my posting a complaint about IPCC communication that would become fodder for the climategate crowd. When I received that letter, I read the first two paragraphs congratulating me on my appointment to the IPCC and though “how nice”, and then my stomach dropped when I read the third paragraph (the focus of my post). If there is one truism about e-mail, once you hit “send”, it is out there for everyone to see. I knew immediately that it was only a matter of time until this letter, and its poorly-worded paragraph, was in the hands of people who already mistrusted the IPCC, to be used as yet another attack on the process. In my mind, it came down to this – should the complaint come from someone with credibility in the global change community, who clearly wants the IPCC to succeed, and who can frame the complaint around the idea of failed communication strategies (which is really what is at issue here), or should I wait until someone with the opposite agenda unloaded on the entire process? I believe I made the right choice.
Third, I think it is important to note that by the time Mickey Glantz posted my comments on his blog (which is great reading) and forwarded my post to Andy Revkin at Dot Earth, Revkin already had a copy of the letter. In other words, Mickey and I were not the only ones concerned with this paragraph – we’re just the ones who allowed ourselves to be named. I believe that by jumping in, Mickey and I helped shape the discussion of this paragraph, and moved it down a productive path toward a discussion of how we interact with the media and the general public. It is of some interest to note that by mid-day Saturday, all of the IPCC WG II members had been e-mailed a guide to interacting with media (Revkin posted a copy on his site). The guide is pretty polished – in other words, they had this ready, but had not yet circulated it. I cannot say that this little firestorm caused the secretariat to send this out, but its existence actually supports my complaint – the organization actually has very reasonable public outreach guidelines in place that do nothing to curtail our freedom to interact with the media or the public. But the letter made it seem like things were quite the contrary.
Hopefully this is clarifying. Or entertaining. Or something in between. Please resume your regularly scheduled websurfing.
The food bubble?
Frederick Kaufman has a very interesting piece (subscription required) on an underreported phenomena in the 2008 spike in food prices – what he calls a “food bubble” caused by commodities investment vehicles structured around wheat futures.
While I think this article is worth reading and considering carefully, it is important to recall that Kaufman is trying to make a particular point about the pervasiveness of problematic investment vehicles in our economy, and the ways in which these vehicles seem to hurt everyone but the people who invent them. This point is well-made. However, in making this point Kaufman underplays a couple of really important points:
1) Wheat is but one of the staples that saw a price spike in 2008. And while price stress on one staple (wheat) can lead people to start shifting into another (corn), driving the prices of the second commodity up, it would take some serious research to substantiate the (implicit) idea that a price spike in wheat could have a dramatic impact on corn prices in Africa (where wheat is the 8th most important crop, at 3.2% of total agricultural production) (via FAOSTAT). Wheat is important, but maize is the crop that links the world together . . . which leads to my second point:
2) There was a convergence of factors that created the price spike in 2008. In one sentence, Kaufman acknowledges several important factors:
“By the time the normal buying season began, drought had hit Australia, floods had inundated northern Europe, and a vogue for biofuels had enticed U.S. farmers to grow less wheat and more corn.”
But this is only one sentence in the whole article. In an effort to point out the impact of investment vehicles on global food security, Kaufman’s narrative underplays just how important these other factors were in driving up the price of other staples like corn (the extra corn was largely rerouted to biofuels, and the drought in Australia removed a great deal of expected production from the world supply).
The point here: food insecurity is enormously complex, and caused by the intersection of processes and events operating at multiple scales. Even as we tease out some of these processes and events, we must also highlight how each specific process or event intersects with other causes to produce particular outcomes in particular places.
Apparently, we have learned nothing . . .
So, as I have mentioned in my first post, I am part of Working Group II of the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As some of you might know, Working Group II of the previous Assessment Report (AR4) was the one that caught a lot of flak for problematic conclusions and references regarding Himalayan Glacier melt and whatnot. On one hand, these were stupid errors that should have been corrected in the review process (which will be part of my job in AR5). On the other, they really did not affect the overall conclusions or quality of the report – they just gave those who continue to have an issue with the idea of climate change an opening to attack the report.
Part of the problem for the IPCC is a perceived lack of openness – that something is going on behind closed doors that cannot be trusted. This, in the end, was at the heart of the “climategate” circus – a recent report has exonerated all of the scientists implicated, but some people still believe that there is something sinister going on.
There is an easy solution to this – complete openness. I’ve worked on global assessments before, and the science is sound. I’ve been quite critical of the way in which one of the reports was framed (download “Applying DPSIR to Sustainable Development” here), but the science is solid and the conclusions are more refined than ever. Showing people how this process works, and what we do exactly, would go a long way toward getting everyone on the same page with regard to global environmental change, and how we might best address it.
So I was dismayed this morning to receive a letter, quite formally titled “Letter No.7004-10/IPCC/AR5 from Dr Pachauri, Chaiman of the IPCC”, that might set such transparency back. While the majority of the letter is a very nice congratulations on being selected as part of the IPCC, the third paragraph is completely misguided:
“I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC.”
This “bunker mentality” will do nothing for the public image of the IPCC. The members of my working group are among the finest minds in the world. We are capable of speaking to the press about what we do without the help of minders or gatekeepers. I hope my colleagues feel the same way, and the IPCC sees the light . . .
UPDATE (16 July 2010):
The members of the IPCC AR5 received a letter from Dr. Pachauri today. In it, he made clear the position of the IPCC with regard to media communications. I find this letter articulate, clear and eminently reasonable – everything the original letter was not. To quote Dr. Pachauri
“In my letter, I cautioned you to “keep a distance from the media” if asked about your work for the IPCC. This was a poor choice of words on my part and not reflective of IPCC policy. My only intent was to advise new authors not to speak “on behalf of the IPCC” because we are an inter-governmental body consisting of 194 states.
I want to reassure everyone the IPCC is a transparent organization. At a time when the work of climate scientists is undergoing intense scrutiny, it is essential that we promote clear and open communication with the media and the public.
While the media have at times been critical of the IPCC, I have a profound respect for their responsibility to inform the public about our activities. A free flow of information is a fundamental component of our commitment to transparency.”
I believe this puts to rest the idea that the letter was meant to muzzle the members of AR5. As I argued, the original letter was poorly worded and thought through, not nefarious. However, I am still a bit concerned about another part of the letter:
“Last weekend, a guide entitled “Background & Tips for Responding to the Media” was circulated to several hundred Working Group II authors. This document was produced to help scientists communicate effectively with journalists. However, I was unaware of its distribution.”
At some point, you do have to ask who is driving this bus. The PR situation at IPCC is clearly uncoordinated and still pretty amateurish. At least they are trying, though. That gives me hope for the process . . .