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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Meeting in Brazil Patrick Gonzalez
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Introduction
In 2011, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) invited the National
Park Service (NPS) Climate Change Scientist, Dr. Patrick Gonzalez, to serve as a lead author for
the 2013 Supplement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories:
Wetlands. IPCC is producing the report to provide scientifically robust international standard
methods to quantify greenhouse gas emissions and storage in wetland ecosystems and organic
soils. To assess the scientific literature and write the report, IPCC convened a series of four
meetings of the lead authors. Dr. Gonzalez participated in the fourth lead authors meeting, hosted
by the Government of Brazil at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (National
Institute for Research in Amazonia) in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, May 20-24, 2013.
Greenhouse gases from power plants, motor vehicles, deforestation, and other human
activities cause climate change, which is reducing snowpack, melting glaciers, raising sea level,
increasing tree mortality, and shifting vegetation in U.S. national parks (Gonzalez 2011) and
around the world (IPCC 2007a, b). The service of Dr. Gonzalez on the IPCC advances the NPS
mission by contributing to the reduction of climate change, its impacts on national parks, and the
scientific basis for managing resources under climate change. NPS uses the IPCC Guidelines on
National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (IPCC 2006) as a rigorous scientific basis to quantify and
reduce greenhouse gas emissions from park operations and to quantify carbon storage in
ecosystems, a benefit of resource management actions such as forest conservation and wetland
habitat restoration. Wetland ecosystems (Figure 1, page 10) cover 3% of the area of the National
Parks and organic soils (Figure 2, page 11) underlie 23%. Together, wetlands and organic soils
cover 24% of the area of the national parks. So, the new IPCC guidelines for wetlands will be
applicable to one-quarter of the National Park system.
Service of Dr. Gonzalez on the IPCC addresses science and mitigation goals of the NPS
Climate Change Response Strategy (issued by the NPS Director in 2010) and directly implements
an action in the NPS Climate Change Action Plan (issued by the NPS Director in 2012):
“Participate in international and national climate change science and adaptation synthesis and
assessment studies.” Participation of Dr. Gonzalez in the IPCC directly links NPS to scientists in
26 countries (Figure 3), provides positive exposure for NPS, and enhances its scientific credibility
by placing an NPS scientist on the most respected climate change science panel.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment
Programme established IPCC in 1988 to provide a scientifically rigorous understanding of
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Meeting in Brazil Patrick Gonzalez
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climate change. IPCC is a United Nations panel and the United States is one of 194 IPCC
member nations. IPCC produces peer-reviewed published methods to quantify the greenhouse
gases that cause climate change (IPCC 2006) and assessments of the physical science, impacts,
adaptation, and reduction of climate change (IPCC 2007a, b, c). These publications comprise the
most comprehensive scientific treatments of climate change and constitute the standard references
for scientists and policymakers worldwide. IPCC reports are independent scientific assessments
that are policy-relevant, but not policy prescriptive. The Nobel Committee awarded IPCC and
former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore equal shares of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts
to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the
foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
The core of IPCC is a group of scientists nominated for their expertise in climate change
science. Dr. Gonzalez served as a lead author for two previous reports of the IPCC – Climate
Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Desanker et al. 2001) and the IPCC
Guidelines on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (Aalde et al. 2006a, b) – prior to joining the
NPS. With this third report, Dr. Gonzalez becomes the first NPS scientist to serve as an IPCC
author. Dr. Gonzalez also serves as a contributing author to two chapters of another upcoming
IPCC report, Climate Change 2013: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.
The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which the U.S. is a
party, periodically requests IPCC to answer key scientific questions on climate change. IPCC
provides the requested information in the form of peer-reviewed scientific publications. It
organizes scientific author teams for two main series of reports: the climate change assessment
reports and the guidelines on greenhouse gas inventories. IPCC also produces special reports on
specific subjects. Author teams meet to assess the published scientific literature, resolve scientific
issues, draft text, and respond to scientific and government review comments.
IPCC guidelines call for the nearly exclusive use of peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Each report goes through three rounds of review before publication: (1) Scientific review of the
entire report, (2) Scientific and government review of the entire report, (3) Government review of
the summary for policymakers. In the first review, scientists conduct a peer review of the first
draft for scientific accuracy and completeness. In the second review, scientists review a second
draft for scientific accuracy and completeness and government representatives review the second
draft for issues specific to countries and regions. In the third review, government representatives
review the summary for policymakers or overview section of the report and approve it word-for-
word. After each of the first two reviews, IPCC authors examine and write a reply to each
comment, and, if necessary, edit the report based on scientific considerations. In the third review,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Meeting in Brazil Patrick Gonzalez
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government representatives do not change any of the main scientific findings. They only address
how IPCC summarizes those findings for policymakers.
After publication of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC 2007 a, b, c), consisting
of thousands of pages written and reviewed by hundreds of scientists, readers found two technical
errors. An independent analysis published by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
(2010) found that “Overall, the summary conclusions are considered well founded and none were
found to contain any significant errors. The Working Group II contribution to the Fourth
Assessment Report shows ample observational evidence of regional climate change impacts,
which have been projected to pose substantial risks to most parts of the world, under increasing
temperatures.” The technical errors were too minor to affect the fundamental scientific
conclusions of the IPCC.
In addition, IPCC requested a scientific review of its procedures by the InterAcademy
Council (IAC), a multinational organization of 18 science academies, including the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences. IAC reported “The Committee found that the IPCC assessment process has
been successful overall” (IAC 2010). IAC recommended changes to the IPCC review process and
other procedures. IPCC in 2010 and 2011 formally adopted changes that strengthened scientific
review and are helping to prevent technical errors based on non-peer reviewed sources and
upgraded other procedures to improve the rigor of IPCC reports.
IPCC Lead Authors Meeting
Carbon in wetland ecosystems has emerged as an important area of scientific inquiry and
resource management. Consequently, the UNFCCC requested IPCC to refine the scientific
methods for quantifying carbon in wetlands and organic soils. IPCC requested nominations for
authors from all member countries and selected the final authors for the 2013 Supplement to the
2006 IPCC Guidelines on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories: Wetlands. The report will
provide scientifically robust international standard methods to quantify greenhouse gas emissions
and storage in wetland ecosystems and organic soils. To assess the scientific literature and write
the report, IPCC planned a series of four meetings of the lead authors.
The Government of Brazil hosted the fourth lead authors’ meeting at the Instituto
Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (National Institute for Research in Amazonia) in Manaus,
Amazonas, Brazil, May 20-24, 2013. Brazil manages extensive areas of wetlands throughout the
Amazon River basin and in the Pantanal. Over sixty authors from 26 countries (Figure 3), review
editors, and IPCC and Brazil government staff participated in the meeting. Authors organized into
the groups writing the seven chapters: (1) Introduction, (2) Drained Inland Organic Soils, (3)
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Meeting in Brazil Patrick Gonzalez
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Rewetted and Restored Peatlands and Organic Soils, (4) Coastal Wetlands, (5) Inland Wetland
Mineral Soils, (6) Constructed Wetlands for Wastewater Treatment, and (7) Cross-Cutting Issues
and Reporting. Two Coordinating Lead Authors lead a team of Lead Authors for each chapter.
Dr. Gonzalez serves as a Lead Author for Chapter 7, which presents scientific guidelines
for data quality assurance and quality control, consistency of time series, quantification of
uncertainties, and data reporting standards. This work takes advantage of previously published
research by Dr. Gonzalez on carbon (Aalde et al. 2006a, b, Baker et al. 2010, Gonzalez et al.
2010a). The authors wrote guidelines and laid out equations for methods on scientific selection of
key carbon pools, prevention of double counting, maintaining consistency of time series, and
characterization of uncertainties. In the first three meetings, the Chapter 7 team assessed the
published scientific literature, drafted report text, responded to comments from the global
scientific peer review, and revised the first draft.
IPCC sent the second-order draft to scientists and governments for its second review
from February to April 2013. The IPCC then compiled all the comments into Excel spreadsheets.
During the Manaus meeting, the authors examined each comment, discussed the scientific issues
involved, and decided on the approach for responding to the comment and, if necessary, for
editing the report. For the 63 page second draft of Chapter 7, reviewers submitted 82 chapter-
specific and 57 general comments. By the end of the meeting, the team had reviewed each
comment and assigned the work for each comment to a specific author. The authors need to
complete the final draft by July 31, 2013. IPCC member governments will consider the report for
approval in October 2013. IPCC will publish it afterward and post the pdf files of the report on
the IPCC web site <http://www.ipcc.ch> for any user to download.
U.S. National Parks, Carbon, Wetlands, and the IPCC
Ecosystems can naturally reduce global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere and storing it in biomass, one of many ecosystem services that national parks provide.
In California, measurements of coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) south of Redwood
National Park (Busing and Fujimori 2005) shows that redwood groves contain carbon at the
highest densities in the world (Aalde et al. 2006b), up to ten times the carbon density of tropical
rainforest. Groves of giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in Sequoia National Park contain
carbon at the second highest density in the U.S. (Blackard et al. 2008).
Wetlands ecosystems can both store and emit substantial amounts of carbon (Mcleod et al.
2011). The National Park Service manages 10 400 km2 of wetlands (3% of the area of the
National Park System, Figure 2, page 10) and 80 000 km2 of land with organic soils (23% of the
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area of the National Park System, Figure 3, page 11). The majority of the area of wetlands –
8300 km2 – has organic soils. Together, wetlands and organic soils cover 24% of the area of the
national parks. So, the new IPCC guidelines for wetlands will be applicable to one-quarter of the
national park system. These results come from original spatial analyses of remote sensing-derived
land cover data (North American Land Cover 2005; Canada Centre for Remote Sensing,
Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad, Comisión Nacional Forestal,
Insituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, U.S. Geological Survey,
http://www.cec.org/naatlas) and global soil survey data (Food and Agriculture Organization et al.
2009, Hiederer and Köchy 2011).
Mangrove forests can contain carbon at densities up to four times the carbon density of
upland tropical rainforest (Donato et al. 2011). NPS manages some of these globally important
mangrove forests at Everglades National Park, where NPS scientists and colleagues have
published research that quantifies carbon cycling in wetlands ecosystems (Amiro et al. 2010, Barr
et al. 2010). On the other hand, oxidation of organic matter in wetlands sediments and surface
waters emits carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), a stronger greenhouse gas. Streams and
rivers in the U.S. alone may emit as much as 100 million tons of carbon per year to the
atmosphere (Butman and Raymond 2011), equivalent to nearly one-tenth the amount of emissions
from global deforestation (Pan et al. 2011).
NPS has used inventories of fossil fuel emissions from vehicles, buildings, and other
infrastructure in the first 18 national parks in the Climate Friendly Parks program (a nonrandom
sample that covers one-tenth of NPS land area and accounts for one-fifth of NPS visitors) and
estimated total emissions equivalent to a U.S. city of 21 000 people (Steuer 2010). Visitor car
driving within parks accounts for two-thirds of estimated emissions.
NPS scientists and partners use IPCC methods to quantify carbon in ecosystems and
carbon emissions from vehicles, buildings, and other infrastructure. A key science objective of
the NPS Climate Change Response Strategy is improving the quantification of ecosystem carbon
storage, which naturally reduces climate change and is a side-benefit of resource management
actions such as forest conservation and wetland habitat restoration. Key mitigation objectives of
the NPS Climate Change Response Strategy are reducing carbon emissions from park operations
and promoting biological carbon storage. Therefore, the IPCC Guidelines on National
Greenhouse Gas Inventories and service of Dr. Gonzalez as an IPCC lead author for the
guidelines advances the NPS mission by contributing to the reduction of climate change and its
impacts on national park resources.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Meeting in Brazil Patrick Gonzalez
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