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The IPCC is running out of money, but Australia is well placed to push for reforms to protect climate-vulnerable nations
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An IPCC funding crisis threatens the Asia-PacificAn IPCC funding crisis threatens the Asia-Pacific
At a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Bangkok, Chair Jim Skea delivered a stark warning. Government contributions fell in 2024 and 2025, and without a substantial increase the organisation could run out of money by 2028. Cost-cutting measures now under discussion include switching to fully virtual meetings, suspending travel for outreach, and scaling back translation and report production. These are not minor bureaucratic issues; they would limit the IPCC’s ability to reach the regions that need its findings most, especially climate-vulnerable areas such as the Asia-Pacific.
The funding problem has a clear proximate cause. Under the Biden administration, the US contributed an average of US$1.7 million per year to the IPCC. Under President Donald Trump, that figure dropped to zero. The resulting shortfall, roughly 30% of the IPCC’s trust fund value, is, as Skea himself noted, small enough for a handful of willing governments to cover. But no such rescue has materialised. The deeper problem is structural: more than 80% of the IPCC’s 195 member governments have never made a financial contribution at all, leaving the organisation perpetually dependent on a narrow and politically volatile base of donors.
Indonesia illustrates the stakes more sharply than most. The country faces simultaneous pressures from coastal flooding and land subsidence across its cities, Jakarta is sinking at up to 25 centimetres per year in some areas, while shifting rainfall patterns threaten agricultural output across an archipelago of 270 million people. In these conditions, the country depends on credible long-range projections to plan infrastructure, allocate adaptation finance, and defend its positions in international climate negotiations. When the IPCC’s capacity weakens, its reports delayed, its outreach contracted, its regional data coverage thinned, Indonesia is left arguing its case from a weakened evidentiary base, precisely when the stakes of those negotiations are rising.
Canberra has both the forum and the motivation to push for more predictable, treaty-like funding arrangements.
The same logic extends to the broader Asia-Pacific. Wealthier states, including the US, Japan, and Australia, can draw on their own research institutions and continue generating domestic climate assessments regardless of what happens to the IPCC. Smaller, less resourced economies cannot. For them, IPCC reports are the primary mechanism through which their scientists participate in global climate knowledge production. When the trust fund shrinks, that participation contracts first: fewer translations, fewer working group seats, less regional data reflected in global findings. The result is a perverse inversion where those most exposed to climate change become least influential over the science that shapes the response to it.
There is also a geopolitical dimension that governments in this region should not underestimate. As competition for influence in the Indo-Pacific intensifies, control over credible scientific information becomes a strategic asset. A financially constrained IPCC does not simply become less useful; it creates a vacuum that other actors, whether states or non-governmental bodies, can fill with narratives shaped by their own interests. Recent IPCC meetings, including discussions in Bangkok, have highlighted deep divisions over the timing of the next assessment cycle. A group of countries has opposed aligning the report timeline with the second global stocktake under the Paris Agreement, while a majority supports such alignment. If delays extend beyond 2028, the next assessment could miss the opportunity to inform that process. These dynamics risk further politicising the production and use of climate knowledge, potentially weakening the scientific foundation of multilateral climate governance.
Australia has both the standing and the strategic self-interest to respond to this. Canberra is currently serving as President of Negotiations for COP31, a role that gives it unusual leverage to set the agenda across 2026. It is co-convening a pre-COP leaders’ meeting with Pacific Island nations, and its Ambassador for Climate Change is explicitly tasked with engagement across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. That diplomacy depends in part on the quality and legitimacy of shared scientific frameworks. An IPCC producing thinner, slower, or less regionally representative assessments directly undermines the scientific foundation of what Canberra is trying to build.
The solution does not require redesigning the IPCC from scratch. It requires governments to treat it as what it is: critical infrastructure for global decision-making, not a discretionary line item to be managed against domestic budget cycles. The IPCC’s own Ad Hoc Task Group on Financial Stability has long identified the voluntary contribution model as a structural vulnerability and proposed alternatives ranging from assessed contributions to multi-year pledging frameworks. Australia is well placed to make this case at COP31, not as climate charity but as an act of regional self-interest. With its G20 membership, its deepening engagement across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and its presidency of this year’s negotiations, Canberra has both the forum and the motivation to push for more predictable, treaty-like funding arrangements that insulate the IPCC from the volatility of political cycles.
The Bangkok meeting was, on its surface, a routine administrative gathering. Beneath it sat a question with direct consequences for every government in this region: whether the international community is willing to fund the knowledge it claims to govern by. Governments have spent decades citing IPCC findings to justify climate commitments while treating the institution itself as someone else’s financial responsibility. That arrangement is visibly breaking down. For a region as climate-exposed as the Asia-Pacific, the cost of allowing it to continue is not abstract. It is measured in delayed infrastructure decisions, weakened negotiating positions, and a scientific foundation that becomes less adequate exactly when it needs to become more robust.
About the author
Mohd Yunus
Mohd. Yunus is an independent researcher based in Indonesia. He holds a master’s degree in biological sciences from Khon Kaen University, Thailand.
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