NEW DELHI: Despite ending up with egg on his face, IPCC chief R K Pachauri has continued to emphatically rule out stepping down. In an interview to a news channel, he said he won’t step down even if the UN-constituted review committee finds faults in the procedures followed by the climate panel.
Pachauri said IPCC would make efforts to ensure that its fifth assessment report carries no errors. “Certainly not. But we will certainly implement any constructive recommendations that we get. As matter of fact, I would be responsible for implementing the recommendations. How can I walk away from that,” Pachauri said when asked whether he would step down.
Accepting moral responsibility for the error in the fourth assessment report which had claimed that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, Pachauri said he also accepted the responsibility placed on him by world governments by electing him as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Well, I certainly accept moral responsibility. But I also accept the responsibility that all the governments of the world have placed on my shoulders, and that’s by essentially electing me as chairperson by acclamation,” he said.
Asked whether he was ‘determined’ to finish his term ending in 2015, he said he would not withdraw from the task assigned to him. “I have a task, I have a mission to end the fifth assessment report and I am certainly not going to withdraw from that,” he said.
Asked about UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon setting up a committee of top scientists to review IPCC, he said, “That is wrong. Let me correct that. That is something that the IPCC has initiated. We wrote a letter to all the governments on February 16 saying that we would like to set up a review committee.”
