From climate adaptation to climate justice: Critical reflections on the IPCC and Himalayan climate knowledges

The IPCC reports represent a powerful discursive and institutional undertaking. However, the IPCC has faced criticism for its different organizational and functional biases which include a geographical bias favoring experts from the global north, a gender bias in favor of men, a disciplinary bias in favor of the natural sciences over the social sciences and humanities, and finally, a cosmological bias favoring western science over indigenous knowledges. In recent years, scholars have noted changes in the IPCC, pointing at the inclusion of social science/humanities perspectives and a growing engagement with plural worldviews. Despite such forays, all aspects of knowledge production within the IPCC still echo the aspirations of nation states and quantitative models of attribution and detection. Climate knowledge production in the Himalayan region reflects this reality. In this essay, we focus on our personal experiences with local communities from the Himalayas and bring it in dialogue with our experiences with the IPCC knowledge production process. In doing so, we have two objectives: first, to highlight marginalized stories of climate-society relationships that challenge normative climate science/policy and, second, in light of these stories, suggest some salient considerations required to foreground justice and equity in futureengagements with the IPCC, which explores the production of democratic knowledge and how such knowledge can be wielded to achieve regional climate justice.