Tracking all the relevant publications on climate change has become impossible. Climate science and policy need a new approach for an age of big literature
Oxfam activists portrayed the G7 leaders, including US President Donald
Trump, standing next to a burning Earth during the G7 Summit in Quebec
City, Canada in June 2018.
Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA
When
the lines between scientific facts, legitimate disagreements and
uncertainties about climate change are being deliberately blurred – not
least by world leaders like Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) has never been more important.
It is the IPCC’s task to make
sense of the landscape of scientific findings, where they agree, and why
they may differ.
The authors of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report – hundreds of scientists across many disciplines – have a massive task on their hands, ahead of its publication in 2021.
When the volume of scientific information continues to grow
exponentially, so does the difficulty of maintaining a clear overview.
Tracking and reading all of the relevant publications on climate change
has become impossible, as more emerge in a single year than was
previously the case over an entire, or multiple, assessment periods.
Even if there was no further growth over the next three years, the
relevant literature to be reviewed for the IPCC’s sixth assessment will
be somewhere between 270,000 and 330,000 publications. This is larger
than the entire climate change literature before 2014. So conducting a
scientific assessment is increasingly a “big literature” challenge.
Exponential growth in
scientific publications on the topic of climate change. The numbers
shown refer to the Web of Science database for scholarly literature. The
overall climate change literature relevant for assessment will be much
larger. Figure by
Max Callaghan, updated from
Minx et al. (2017). Photograph: Max Callaghan
Managing the literature is vital if we are to ensure the credibility
of the IPCC in future. We need to let computers help us to read and
digest information we can no longer comprehend on our own.
The
IPCC needs to lead the way towards a new era of computer-assisted
assessments. Machine learning and natural language processing must be
used to understand and synthesise a huge volume of relevant material.
New categories of experts – from scientometrics, computational linguistics and data analytics – will need to be involved.
Decision-makers also want knowledge from the research community that
can contribute to meaningful solutions. But systematic progress in
learning about climate solutions has been limited within the IPCC to
date. The quest to understand what policies work well – and under what
conditions – remains in its infancy.
This problem is particularly acute in the social sciences.
Some argue that social science evidence doesn’t lend itself to
generalization. But a bigger challenge is the lack of appreciation for
research synthesis as a scientific endeavor in its own right.
The dearth
of synthetic evidence in policy and social science literatures makes it
impossible for the IPCC to aggregate the knowledge that is diffused
across thousands of individual studies.
Changing the culture of the social sciences to better support
scientific assessment and accumulated learning about climate change
solutions won’t be easy.
While the IPCC can act as a catalyst, any shift
will also require more capacity in synthesis methods, and support for
collaborative networks. Research funders and governments also need to
direct more funding towards research synthesis.
The good news is that there are models for such a transformation.
Researchers in medicine, education and psychology have been forced to
grapple with similar challenges over recent decades –and systematic
research synthesis is now well established within these fields as a
basis for policy advice.
The misleading impression that any single scientific study has the
same standing as all others is toxic for a culture of evidence-informed
policymaking.
By elevating research synthesis to the gold standard of
scientific policy advice – and using big data and machine learning
techniques to deliver it – we can strengthen the IPCC and provide a
stronger response to the Trumps and Erdogans of this world, who want to
cherry-pick evidence to suit their own agendas.
The Republic of Kiribati, a group of 33 Pacific Islands home to 100,000 people, sits on average six feet above sea level. Scientists believe that at some point this century, these islands may become uninhabitable as ocean levels rise due to climate change. The film Anote’s Ark, showing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York, tells Kiribati’s story through the eyes of now-former president Anote Tong, as he advocates with world leaders for help for his people, and a Kiribati woman named Sermary, who emigrates with her family to New Zealand after her home floods. Amy Braunschweiger talked with the filmmaker, Matthieu Rytz, about his film and his attachment to a country that may soon no longer exist.
Anote Tong, then president of Kiribati, swims in the lagoon near his home.
The whole thing started on Panama’s San Blas islands, which are
expected to be covered by rising sea water due to climate change. I went
there on assignment from the New York Times to cover the issue, and I
was so upset by it. And I thought, where else on the planet are people
experiencing this? So I looked at a world map, and I heard about
Kiribati. I wasn’t even aware of its existence. Here was a country whose
ocean territory was as wide as the United States, in the middle of the
Pacific, and I never heard of it. I was just amazed. I went there for
two weeks to work as a photographer. I didn’t plan to make a movie. How did you meet President Tong?
I had chartered a plane to take aerial photographs, and the pilot was
a close friend of his, and he introduced us. I was quite shy. He was a
head of state that knew that within a century, he won’t have a state
anymore. What’s a bigger challenge than that? I just spontaneously asked
him about making this movie. And he said yes. I had never made a movie
before, never even done a short film. So I figured, “OK let’s do this,
let’s figure out how to make a film.” It was the start of a four-year
journey.
Throughout the movie, Tong eloquently speaks to world leaders
about climate change and his country. What was it like to film this?
When I learned he would meet with the pope, I flew to the Vatican and
met him. I did that whenever he met heads of state, was at the UN Human
Rights Council, or any important moment. I basically covered every
important meeting he had for the whole three years. I can tell you, in
this political arena, the action is really fast and extremely boring.
You go there, shake hands with Obama, and that’s it. It’s waiting hours
and hours for the next meeting. What’s your relationship like with Tong?
I was a one-man show, and because I was just a regular guy with a
camera, I got more and more access. It got to the point where I was
sharing dinner and having wine with him. Now we have almost like a
grandfather-grandson relationship.
When I look back over the past five years, I see how I tried to keep
my professional distance from the story, and I wonder, what just
happened? How in the world did a Swiss white guy just become so close to
the president of Kiribati? What is Tong like in person?
You go to his home, what you’ll discover is that he is a traditional
fisherman, living in a simple house with his grandchildren. There is
only cold water. He spends his days on the lagoon fishing, and at night
he spends time with his family and tells stories. He’s an elder
respected by the community, and he drinks Kava, a traditional drink, and
has a very important relationship to the spiritual world. So, he’s a
mix of a traditional fisherman and something like a shaman. You would
never ever think of him as the same guy hanging out with the pope. It’s
an incredible contrast.
Trailer for the movie Anote’s Ark, an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival 2018.
Your story also focuses on a Kiribati woman named Tiermeri
Tiare, known as Sermary, who was able to get a visa to live in New
Zealand with her family. Why did you choose her?
Through Sermary you can understand the legacy of the people in
Kiribati and what they’re going through. They have this program called
“Pacific access category.” Every year they pick 75 people from Kiribati,
a bit like a lottery, and those people can migrate to New Zealand. I
basically got in touch with one of my friends in Kiribati who had
contacts with the high commissioner, and from them I got the list of
people who had won. All people still living in Kiribati who in a year or
two would be in New Zealand. Sermary She was the first person I called.
I just knew she was perfect.
In the movie, you see Sermary struggling to adjust to life in
New Zealand. In one scene you see how, right after she landed in
Auckland, she’s completely overwhelmed by the airport’s parking lot.
There is only one road in Kiribati, and it’s 23 kilometers long.
That’s the only place on Kirbati with a few cars. In another scene we
cut from the movie, Sermary and her friend drive out of the airport and
into an Auckland suburb. Sermary looks at the houses and asks, “Why are
there so many classrooms in this country?” In Kiribati, the only
buildings with walls are classrooms, built by the church. People there
don’t live in houses. And I think that’s an important perspective. All
their lives they didn’t have walls. And they don’t have worry about the
rent or buying food. There’s nothing to buy on the islands, although
they do trade some coconuts for tea or sugar. When I was there, I wanted
a cup of tea, and the vendor asked me for half a coconut. I only had an
Australian dollar and offered it to him, but he had no use for the
money. And I thought, ”Wow.” Leaving this culture is an incredible life
change.
Before she left for New Zealand, Sermary’s home flooded for the
first time in an unusual storm. But when she talked to her friends of
the rising water and the need to leave Kiribati, no one agreed.
President Tong also spoke of people in Kiribati not believing climate
change endangered their islands. Were you surprised to find those views
there?
For me, this is the very point of the movie. Tong says again and again,
“Climate change should not be a political issue.” Meanwhile, politicians
play their electoral games. In Australia, in Kiribati, politicians deny
the existence of climate change to win some votes, and they’re playing
with the future of this planet. The story of Kiribati is a warning to
the rest of humanity. It’s too late for Kiribati. It’s too late for
Manhattan, too. It’s just a question of time. And a very important
question is, how are you going to deal with that? For me, the main point
about the movie is not “Kiribati is going under water so I should take
action and buy a Tesla and it’s going to be better.” It’s way deeper
than that. What we need now is a real paradigm shift. It’s a question of
re-connecting to our land and the nature around us. And that’s
something Tong is deeply concerned with. We are basically disconnected
and the climate is in crisis.
Anote’s Ark is a quiet film with many meditative shots of water,
as opposed to the dramatic floods shown in other climate change films.
Why did you choose to make the film this way?
Because I respect nature. For me, the first director of this film is
nature and the island itself. It has its own voice. Climate change
movies in general are dramatic and fast and show destruction. It’s easy
to show these powerful images. But they don’t resonate for me. For me,
climate change is much more subtle. Like erosion. It takes time, but
it’s happening. Take the example of Manhattan. Every day, every single
day, some rock is worn away. It’s not dramatic. And it will eventually
destroy everything. It’s deep and subtle and unstoppable. Meanwhile, though, Kiribati has a new president who has undone many of Tong’s climate-oriented policies.
This new government are basically climate deniers. I think they took
the climate-denier position to get elected. I went with my partner to
Kiribati over Christmas, and I took my projector and my laptop and
started showing the movie in different communities. The people loved the
movie. But I was stopped by immigration and the police and they took my
laptop and projector, and we were deported. I cannot go back now. But
the thing is, when this happened the UN Ambassador from Kiribati in New
York sent an official letter to the Sundance Film Festival, asking them
to take the movie. And they did.
How is Sermary now?
Sermary is good. The Kiribati have such a powerful community, they
just stay together and hang out together in Auckland. I was with them
two weeks ago, and it was beautiful. It could be better of course, but
they have a good life there. If I had scripted the movie, and said at
the end, Sermary would have a baby in New Zealand, and we would film her
saying to her baby, “Are you a Kiwi?” I would say it’s too much. But
that happened. I didn’t want the movie to have a positive end, but it’s
just life, and it goes on. Is there anything else you’d like to say?
For me, the next question will be climate justice, and who has access
to these funds and resources. Which is why this movie belongs in a
human rights film festival.
