The World's Most Important Science Advisory Committee

Climate research has a serious governance gap

“Those who rule data will rule the entire world.”

— Masayoshi Son, CEO Softbank

Note: This post documents relationships between science advisors, their funders, NGOs, finance, and governments. I make no allegations of wrongdoing or anything close. What I document is a scientific ecosystem that has developed into having profound global economic and political significance, but institutional accountability, transparency, and governance have not developed in parallel — leaving a sizeable good-governance gap. The governance of climate research requires a rethink.

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), now in its seventh phase, is the international scientific group under the World Climate Research Program¹ that oversees official projections of climate futures. CMIP scenarios drive the temperature and emissions projections that anchor every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment and much more:

• The projections inform national climate-impact assessments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, and many more.

• They drive sea-level-rise estimates that local governments use to plan coastal infrastructure.

• They also shape projections of future climate damages, such as in estimates of the “social cost of carbon,” which has played a key role in U.S. federal regulatory analysis.

• The projections also inform the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) scenarios that more than 140 central banks and supervisors are required to use to stress-test commercial bank capital requirements.

• They form the climate diagnostics that the World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal provides for over 100 client countries, informing national and local decision making related to climate risk.

It is no exaggeration that the CMIP climate projections influence trillions of dollars in investment and regulation. They are, in functional terms, among the most consequential 21st century scientific products designed to inform policymaking, economics, and regulation.² They are not just about science, but about science advice to policymakers in government, business, and civil society.

Last week I revealed that CMIP had released illustrative versions of its new scenario set and that it had retired — finally — the out-of-date and implausibly extreme RCP8.5 scenario that has dominated climate research and policy for over a decade.

You might wonder: Who produces this critical scientific guidance for policy? Who participates? Who does not? Who decides who gets to participate? To whom are they accountable? Who supports their work? How is quality control ensured? Who decides what values are prioritized — who wins, who loses in the scenarios?

Remarkably, answers to questions such as these are not at all easy to find, if they exist at all.

Today, I take a look behind the curtain of the most important committee that most people have never heard of, yet has influence that impacts each of us.

The CMIP scenarios are developed by a community of integrated assessment modellers numbering perhaps two hundred people worldwide, working in roughly fifteen institutions, and concentrated heavily in two: the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) outside Vienna, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany.

Last month, this community released the illustrative versions of scenarios that will drive the next round of climate-model simulations that will be used in tens of thousands of research papers that project climate, climate impacts, economic consequences, and evaluate policy alternatives. These scenarios will underpin the next IPCC assessment due later this decade.

The illustrative scenarios are described a design paper in Geoscientific Model Development with 44 authors, and a follow-on Zenodo dataset lists 29 creators of that dataset.³ Sixteen of the 29 carry an IIASA or PIK affiliation.

Many of these researchers have been at the center of scenario development for two decades or more, spanning three iterations of scenario families.

I cross-referenced the 64 unique CMIP7 authors and dataset creators against the 13 papers that established earlier generations of scenarios: the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) in 2011 and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) in 2014 and 2017 yields:

• 21 of the 64 (33 percent) CMIP7 participants co-authored at least one foundational RCP or SSP paper.⁴

• Five participants co-authored all three foundational frameworks.

• Two of the three ScenarioMIP-CMIP7 co-chairs co-authored all three foundational frameworks.

The table below shows that those responsible for climate scenario generation have come from a very small group of individuals and institutions, and have maintained their role over multiple iterations of scenarios, especially the SSPs and CMIP7.

CMIP7 Authors Who Also Created the RCPs and SSPs — each of the 21 individuals who co-authored a foundational RCP (2011) or SSP (2014/2017) paper, mapped against their participation in the new CMIP7 ScenarioMIP paper and scenario dataset.

Two institutions in particular play an outsized role in scenario development: IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and PIK, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Germany.

• IIASA, founded in 1972 as a Cold-War scientific-cooperation initiative between the United States and the Soviet Union, now operates as an international research institute funded by the scientific organisations of its 23 member countries.⁵ Its 2024 budget was €32 million, a little under 40 percent from member contributions. Since July 2023 it has been led by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who founded PIK in 1992 and ran it for a quarter-century before moving to Vienna to lead IIASA.

• PIK is a Leibniz Association member, funded jointly by the German federal government and the German states. In 2024 its institutional funding was €14.8 million; external project funding (largely European Commission) exceeded €25 million. It is led by economist Ottmar Edenhofer (former IPCC Working Group III co-chair) and earth-system scientist Johan Rockström. Since November 2024 PIK has been a registered entity in the Bundestag’s Lobby Register — which means that in addition to being a research institute, PIK is also a lobbying group that seeks to influence German government policy.⁶

The leaders of IIASA and PIK are collaborators in a shared political project. Schellnhuber directed PIK for 26 years (1992–2018) and was succeeded by economist Ottmar Edenhofer and Earth-system scientist Johan Rockström as co-directors in late September 2018. Both Schellnhuber and Rockström are co-authors of the 2009 paper that introduced “planetary-boundaries” — the framework that proposes a "safe operating space for humanity" defined by quantitative thresholds beyond which Earth-system change is held to be catastrophic. Rockström has explicitly connected the “planetary boundaries” concept to the neo-Malthusian ideas of Dennis and Donella Meadows of the Club of Rome (Limits to Growth).

The same individuals who lead the institutions that sit at the center of the production of CMIP7 marker scenarios are also among the leading public proponents of a very particular policy-relevant framing of what those scenarios should imply in policy.

The figure below shows the primary and secondary affiliations of the authors of the new paper describing the new CMIP scenarios (left) and the creators of the new scenario dataset (right). You can see the outsized role of IIASA and PIK.

Not only do IIASA and PIK play a central role in CMIP and IPCC, but they also have received substantial funding from climate advocacy philanthropy — ClimateWorks and Bloomberg Philanthropies. This funding supports the development and promotion of scenarios that are central to the regulation of central banks and businesses around the world — under the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS),⁷ a non-governmental consortium of central banks.⁸

• ClimateWorks Foundation is a San Francisco–based regranting hub founded in 2008 by the Hewlett, Packard, and McKnight foundations. Their goal is to keep warming to 1.5°C by directing philanthropic capital to the highest-leverage sectors and geographies for emissions reduction. It has awarded over $1 billion to more than 500 organizations since its founding, and was the sole philanthropic funder acknowledged in the NGFS Phase V Technical Documentation.

• Bloomberg Philanthropies is among the largest US private funders of climate advocacy. Its flagship initiative, Beyond Carbon — launched in 2019 with $500 million and doubled to $1 billion in 2023 — aims to retire every US coal plant, halve US natural gas capacity, block all new gas plants, and making “clean energy” 80 percent of US electricity generation by 2030, pursued through litigation, state-level lobbying, and grassroots advocacy. Michael Bloomberg also serves as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions. Bloomberg Philanthropies funded NGFS scenarios in Phases 1–3 but was not acknowledged in Phase V.

The Bloomberg and ClimateWorks funding of NGFS has downstream impacts on virtually every financial institution on the planet. An IIASA researcher — who has played a role in the development of the RCPs, SSPs, and CMIP7 scenarios — explains:

“Central banks obligate commercial banks to use our scenarios for climate financial stress testing and to assess the stability of the financial system against climate transition risk and climate physical risk. These scenarios will help banks make the economy more resistant to climate stress and navigate the financial sector toward the green transition.”

The lead modellers in creating the NGFS scenarios are also lead authors of the CMIP7 scenarios, and are funded by advocacy organizations with a stated interest in specific climate policies, with a rack record in promoting extreme, implausible scenarios. If that sounds odd or troubling — It is!

These cozy relationships among a very small group of institutions and individuals coupled with their outsized influence in global science, finance, amd policymaking raise a lot of questions.

Let’s look closer.

The figure below shows that across the new CMIP7 scenario paper and dataset, 36 unique institutions appear as primary affiliations.

• Fifteen are in Europe (42 percent of the total).

• Six are in the United States, the only North American country represented (another 17 percent).

• Five are elsewhere in Asia (Japan and Pakistan);

• Two are in India;

• One is in China; three in South America; two in Africa; two in Oceania.

Sixteen of 29 listed creators of the CMIP7 scenario dataset are at IIASA or PIK.⁹

Other researchers have raised questions about the concentration of climate scenario developers in European and North American institutions.

Tejal Kanitkar and colleagues showed in their 2024 Climate Policy analysis of 556 IPCC AR6 mitigation scenarios, the assumptions embedded in the IPCC scenarios systematically perpetuate and even expand North-South inequality.¹⁰ Across every scenario examined, per-capita GDP in regions containing 60 percent of the world’s population — Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, West Asia, and the rest of Asia — remains below the global average even in 2050.

They argue in that paper:

“A large majority of scenarios that are finally assessed in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report are submitted by modelling teams based in the global North… the pervasiveness of the absence of equity raises serious questions about the lack of diversity in the model building community, including the absence of perspectives from the global South.”

In the CMIP7 process China — responsible for over a quarter of global emissions — has just one institution represented. India, the world’s most populous country, has two. All of Africa has two. The communities whose long-run development paths are most at stake have the least input into the scenarios that describe those paths.

I am puzzled why the governments of these countries and regions have not already acted in response to their lack of input and influence on these incredibly important scientific advisory processes with broad global influence.

Consider typical expectations for any expert advisory body — much less one whose outputs move trillions of dollars and frame global energy and climate policies. Among those expectations:

• published Terms of Reference;

• a transparent procedure for selecting members;

• membership representative of nations and interests impacted by the expert advice;

• clearly stated criteria for how scenarios are created, included or excluded;

• an external peer community of comparable expertise to assess the choices made;

• opportunity for public comment on proposed products;

• conflict-of-interest disclosure and management.

I can locate no public documents from CMIP describing procedures for meeting these very basic expectations of good governance of institutions that provide influential scientific advice to policy makers. If they exist, they are well hidden.

The CMIP Panel itself appears to have acknowledged the good governance gap in its March 2025 report to the World Climate Research Programme’s Joint Scientific Committee:

“With the broadening of involvement across the CMIP project there is a need for more consistent and granular governance and guidance… CMIP is keen to discuss securing a mandate and discussing governance options for the informal consortium producing these datasets.”¹¹

To put the governance gap in context, consider how comparable expert advisory bodies are governed.

• In the United States, the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 (FACA) governs panels that give advice to federal agencies — bodies like the EPA's Science Advisory Board or the FDA's drug-approval panels. Under FACA, every covered committee must file a public charter spelling out its mission and membership rules; it must publish notice in the Federal Register at least fifteen days before each meeting; meetings must generally be open to the public, with members of the public allowed to file written statements and, at the agency's discretion, to address the committee directly; transcripts and working papers must be made available; and the committee's membership must be "fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented."

• In the European Union, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which assesses the safety of food additives, pesticides, and GMOs and whose opinions feed directly into Commission regulatory decisions, requires every expert on its panels and working groups to file an annual Declaration of Interests covering financial holdings, employment, consultancies, and research funding for themselves and their immediate families over the preceding five years; EFSA's Legal Affairs office screens each declaration for conflicts before each meeting, and experts with active commercial ties to the affected industries are excluded outright.

• The World Health Organization requires the same of every member of its expert panels, advisory committees, and guideline development groups; declarations are reviewed before appointment and again before each meeting, summary information is published with the resulting reports, and the WHO can require recusal or termination if a relevant interest emerges. Each of these regimes covers bodies whose individual decisions are typically narrower in consequence than the marker emission scenarios that anchor the next IPCC assessment, the climate stress tests run by every commercial bank, and national regulatory analyses.

The contrast between the governance of these important science advisory organizations with how CMIP scenarios are produced — without a public charter, without published Terms of Reference for the body that selects them, without standardized declarations of interest, with no transparency on how participating experts are selected, and with no opportunity for public input to proposed products — indicates that institutions of climate research created to inform policymakers needs to significantly improvements in their governance.

Comments, questions, suggestions, critique, debate, discussion — All welcome! Anyone from inside the processes or institutions that this post discusses is welcome to participate and share views, agree or disagree. Don’t want to be publicly acknowledged? No worries — send me a confidential email and you will remain anonymous.

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1. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) sits inside the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). Day-to-day, CMIP is run by the CMIP Panel and the WGCM Infrastructure Panel, which report to WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM); WGCM in turn answers to WCRP’s Joint Scientific Committee, an 18-member panel of volunteer scientists chosen by mutual agreement of WCRP’s three sponsors. WCRP itself is a joint programme — not a UN agency — co-sponsored and partly funded by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the International Science Council (ISC, the merged successor of ICSU since 2018), and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC-UNESCO), with additional contributions from national governments and donors. Its small secretariat (~8 staff) is hosted by WMO in Geneva, and operational support for CMIP is provided by the CMIP International Project Office at the European Space Agency’s ECSAT facility in the UK.

The three WCRP sponsorsare the WMO, UNESCO IOC, and ISC:

• The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations, governed by the World Meteorological Congress of its 193 member states and territories — which meets every four years and elects the Executive Council and Secretary-General — and funded through assessed contributions from those member states plus voluntary and extrabudgetary funding (CHF 29.4 million in 2024).

• The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO is a body within UNESCO — itself a UN specialized agency — governed by an Assembly of its 153 member states with an Executive Council of 40 elected member states, and funded primarily from the UNESCO regular budget plus member-state extrabudgetary contributions.

• The International Science Council (ISC), formed in 2018 by the merger of ICSU and the International Social Science Council, is not a UN body at all but an international non-governmental organization of 250 member organizations — mostly national science academies, research councils, and international scientific unions — governed by an elected Governing Board, with core funding from membership dues and a host-country grant from the Government of France, supplemented by project grants from foundations, governments, and UN bodies (annual budget on the order of €8 million).

So while WCRP is sometimes described in shorthand as a "UN programme," only one of its three sponsoring bodies is squarely inside the UN system, a second is hosted within a UN agency, and the third is a private-membership scientific NGO with no direct governmental oversight at all.

If accountability of this alphabet soup of organizations seems complex or elusive, that’d be correct.

2. NGFS, membership: as of mid-2025, 145 central banks and supervisors plus 23 observers. The NGFS Phase V Technical Documentation (Nov 2024) notes the work was “made possible by grants from the ClimateWorks Foundation”; earlier vintages also acknowledged Bloomberg Philanthropies. The database is hosted at IIASA. The three IAM teams are PIK (REMIND-MAgPIE), IIASA (MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM), and JGCRI at PNNL/UMD (GCAM). Elmar Kriegler of PIK is identified as academic-consortium coordinator at UMD School of Public Policy.

3. Van Vuuren, D.P., et al. (2026), “The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP7”, Geosci. Model Dev. 19(7), 2627–2656, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-2627-2026. Companion dataset: Kikstra, J., et al. (2026), CMIP7 IAM quantification dataset, Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19825038.

4. Foundational papers cross-referenced: Van Vuuren et al. 2011 RCP overview; Van Vuuren et al. 2011 RCP2.6; Thomson et al. 2011 RCP4.5; Masui et al. 2011 RCP6.0; Riahi et al. 2011 RCP8.5; O’Neill et al. 2014 SSP concept; O’Neill et al. 2017 SSP narratives; Riahi et al. 2017 SSP overview; and the five SSP marker IAM papers (Glob. Environ. Change 42, 2017): Van Vuuren et al. SSP1/IMAGE; Fricko et al. SSP2/MESSAGE-GLOBIOM; Fujimori et al. SSP3/AIM; Calvin et al. SSP4/GCAM; Kriegler et al. SSP5/REMIND-MAgPIE.

5. IIASA, "The institute": "In 2024, the Institute’s annual budget rose to nearly €32 million, of which a little under 40 % came from IIASA National and Regional Member Organizations." 23 NMOs are listed at iiasa.ac.at/members. Schellnhuber founded PIK in 1992; appointed IIASA Director General in July 2023.

6. PIK, “About the Institute”: 2024 institutional funding of €14.8 million plus over €25 million in external project funding (largely from the European Commission). Registered in the German Bundestag’s Lobby Register since November 2024.

7. It is worth noting here that the NGFS continues to utilize the apocalyptic results of the retracted Kotz et al. study on future climate damages — for which it was the primary funder.

8. IIASA hosts the IPCC AR6 scenarios database under a cooperation agreement with IPCC Working Group III; the text of that agreement does not appear to be public. Since 2024 IIASA has served as the secretariat of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (see IIASA at the Seventeenth IAMC Annual Meeting). IIASA also coordinates CMIP7 emissions and concentrations processing under EU/ECMWF contract (see ECMWF DestinE project).

9. CMIP, “ScenarioMIP”. The current 21-member SSC (with affiliations: 9 in Europe, 5 in Asia, 4 in North America, 2 in South America, 1 in Africa, 0 in Oceania), the ~75-member Advisory Group, and the three co-chairs (Brian O’Neill, Claudia Tebaldi, Detlef van Vuuren) are listed there.

10. Kanitkar, T., Mythri, A., & Jayaraman, T. (2024), “Equity assessment of global mitigation pathways in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report”, Climate Policy 24(8), 1129–1148, https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2024.2319029. The authors are at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, and the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. They analyse 556 IPCC AR6 WGIII scenarios and find that across all of them, the per-capita GDP of regions containing 60% of the world’s population (Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, West Asia, and the rest of Asia) remains below the global average even in 2050. I discussed this paper in “Climate Policy Rethink” (THB, March 2024).

11. CMIP Panel and WGCM Infrastructure Panel, “JSC-46 reporting” (March 2025). Background: WCRP delegates day-to-day governance of CMIP to the CMIP Panel and the WGCM Infrastructure Panel; the WIP has public Terms of Reference; equivalent documents for the CMIP Panel itself and the ScenarioMIP SSC do not appear to be publicly indexed.