In a sudden and unexplained change from previous decades, the federal government has stopped covering the travel costs of Canadian experts volunteering for the next major global climate science assessment.
The decision to end travel funding means that Canadian scientists are now wondering whether they can still participate in the United Nations climate science process, perhaps by using their own money or diverting grant funds that could be going toward research and students.
“It’s almost insulting to all of the Canadian scientists who have volunteered all those hundreds of hours each year of their personal lives,” said Robert McLeman, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) during its last assessment.
Canadian scientists who participate in the IPCC’s reports don’t get paid for their work, most of which they do remotely through emails and calls. But they do need to travel about four to five times to meet their scientific collaborators, who are other experts from around the world.
The government used to cover those travel costs — economy class airfare, food and hotel stays to cities as far away as Singapore or Osaka, Japan — but researchers are now left scrambling to find the money elsewhere.
In a statement to CBC, Environment and Climate Change Canada said it is “not able to commit to providing long-term travel funding for academics to participate in IPCC meetings.”
Scientists left in the lurch
Sarah Burch, a professor at the University of Waterloo who studies climate adaptation, urban planning and governance, is a lead author on the IPCC’s upcoming report on climate change in cities. In this role, she’s had one trip — to a meeting of fellow lead authors in Osaka — that was partially covered by the government.
But she’s been told no further meetings will be covered. Burch says she will have to tap into her Canada Research Chair funding for what she estimates will be four more trips.
“Typically, I would spend that on hiring a graduate student to serve as a research assistant so I could send them to a conference or help them publish papers,” Burch said. “So I have to redirect funds away from students … and towards this commitment to the IPCC.”
Deborah McGregor, a researcher on Indigenous environmental justice at York University in Toronto, is also a part of the upcoming IPCC report on cities, and says she will have to rely on funds through her Canada Excellence Research Chair position.
She said that earlier in her career, when she was an assistant professor, she wouldn’t have been able to find those funds.
“That would be the case for some early-career researchers, or maybe researchers who are more in the social sciences or particularly the humanities. They don’t have a lot of research funding to be able to go to four mandatory meetings in person,” McGregor said.
That sentiment is echoed by Patricia Perkins, an ecological economist and professor at York University, who volunteered as a lead author in the previous IPCC assessment, which she said was the first time the agency included social scientists in a big way.
She said that academics in the social sciences — such as anthropology, geography and economics — would have a harder time finding travel funding.
“What that means is that there’s a disciplinary imbalance in who has access to more money, because the bigger your grant, the more likely there could be little bits and dregs around the edges that you can reallocate for a trip that relates to your IPCC work,” she said.
In its statement to CBC, ECCC said that the government provided about $424,000 of travel funding to support Canadian IPCC authors in the last assessment cycle, which happened partly during the pandemic years and involved a little less travel as a result.
The department said that if the usual amount of travel had occurred, estimated costs would be about $680,000 to support Canadian experts at the IPCC.
Why is the IPCC important?
The IPCC’s assessment cycles, which happen about every five years, are considered the gold standard for the world’s latest understanding of climate change — what’s causing it, how it’s affecting countries and people, and how to combat it.
The IPCC’s first assessment led to the first global treaty on climate change in 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Since then, the IPCC’s influential reports have led to many major advances in global climate diplomacy. Most recently, its assessment of how climate change would cause unavoidable damages for developing countries led to a new multi-billion-dollar deal to compensate them.
“They’re published in all the official UN languages, which makes them a really important resource … in nations where they don’t have the advanced research infrastructure that we have here in Canada,” McLeman said.
“IPCC reporting provides them with current information about climate change risks in their own language and is freely accessible.”
But it’s a difficult task and a huge personal undertaking for the hundreds of scientists who volunteer for each assessment. McLeman called it “having a second job that you’re not being paid for.”
“You spend hundreds of hours a year doing this work,” he said. “On top of my day job, I had to work long into the night, long after my wife and family were asleep, hunched over a laptop, reading through densely worded scientific articles one after another.”
Burch said that while the work is a huge commitment, the IPCC assessments have been “career-shaping” for her. She’s been involved for 15 years, and said that government support for the travel made it possible for her to attend the meetings and build a career in climate research.
“Canada is warming at twice the global average rate. We’re seeing the effects of floods and fires and all sorts of extreme weather events here,” she said.
“We want Canadian experts to bring that place-based knowledge, that context and that rich experience into the IPCC.”
