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Rajendra Pachauri trained as an engineer before turning his skills, drive and attention to the climate crisis.
Rajendra Pachauri trained as an engineer before turning his skills, drive and attention to the climate crisis. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images
Rajendra Pachauri trained as an engineer before turning his skills, drive and attention to the climate crisis. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images

Rajendra Pachauri obituary

This article is more than 4 years old
Climate scientist who pioneered the global work of the IPCC as its chair and tackled the ‘climategate’ hacking scandal

To stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis – already being felt in the form of extreme weather, fires and floods – we have only about a decade to cause greenhouse gas emissions to peak and then fall rapidly. That we know this is largely thanks to one global organisation, a loose collection of hundreds of academics around the world that has amassed our knowledge of the climate for more than 30 years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened in 1988 by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, is made up of the world’s leading experts on climate science, who draw on thousands of academic papers to prepare comprehensive assessment reports about every five to seven years. Those reports are the gold standard, representing the summation of our knowledge of how the climate system works, and how we are affecting it.

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, who has died aged 79, served as the chairman of the IPCC from 2002 to 2015, a crucial period during which he oversaw its world-changing warnings and Nobel-winning acclaim, but which also brought humbling disaster for the organisation and for him personally.

Few scientists were explicitly trained or practising in what was then an emerging discipline, and Pachauri was originally an engineer. Born in Nainital in India, he was educated at La Martinière College, Lucknow, and the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical Engineering, before beginning his career with Indian Railways. He took higher engineering degrees in the US, and embarked on a variety of academic, public policy and business-related positions in the US and India, including a visiting fellowship at the World Bank and advisory work for the UN Development Programme.

But it was his election as chairman of the IPCC in 2002 that marked a turning point. Climate science was in difficulty, and the prospect of climate action seemed to have stalled, as the early impetus that gave rise to the IPCC, then the first global treaty on the climate, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and eventually the 1997 Kyoto protocol, had run into powerful vested political and business interests. The US Congress had failed to ratify Kyoto, while the White House, under George W Bush, had taken climate off the agenda. Progress seemed far off.

The task for Pachauri – known as Patchy – was to reinvigorate the IPCC’s work, setting out the path to a comprehensive study that would become the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Its hard-hitting conclusions – that it was 90% certain that humanity was causing climate change, and that carbon emissions must start to fall within about 15 years to prevent catastrophic and irreversible effects – were instrumental in leading the UN to embark on a process that would eventually culminate in the Paris agreement of 2015.

In recognition of this work, the IPCC was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2007, jointly with Al Gore.

Pachauri had the diplomatic skills, organisational experience and profile to bring the IPCC together: a tricky role, because the organisation had to retain its clear scientific and political independence while providing uncomfortable advice to policymakers. But what struck next appeared to blindside him utterly. Shortly before a crunch UN conference in Copenhagen in 2009, hackers released a series of emails among climate scientists that allegedly revealed them conspiring to give a misleading impression of some data. The scientists were embroiled in a damaging row, but worse was to come for the IPCC.

In early 2010, a trickle of findings emerged of mistakes in the landmark Fourth Assessment Report. Most were minor, but the most damaging claim was one that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, later found to be wrong and poorly sourced. The IPCC responded slowly and, many felt, inadequately. At the time, the organisation had little in the way of a permanent administrative infrastructure, and seemed to have no institutional procedure to answer the charges.

Eventually, Pachauri enabled changes in the IPCC’s operations to tighten the review process, rule out some forms of data, and strengthen checks on all the material included. These changes were controversial too – some scientists regard the IPCC as too slow, because full assessment reports take nearly a decade to complete, and far too conservative, leaving out newer research and ignoring the potentially disastrous impacts of “tipping points” in the climate system.

There were rumblings after the “climategate” scandal that a new chairman was needed, someone fresh who could move on from the mistakes, but it was a personal issue that ended Pachauri’s career. In 2015, a woman he worked with at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi accused him of stalking, sexual harassment and intimidation, in text messages, emails and WhatsApp groups. He denied the charges. Soon after, he resigned his IPCC role and from TERI, and largely retired from public life.

Pachauri also helped to lead the emergence of India as a force in global scientific research. Independently of his IPCC role, he served as chairman and director general of TERI, having joined the organisation in 1982. Established in 1974 as a small research centre focusing on energy and natural resources by the industrialist JRD Tata, TERI has grown to more than 1,200 employees across India, with outposts in Africa, Japan, Europe and the US.

He is survived by his wife, Saroj Puri, and by a son and two daughters.

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, engineer and climate scientist, born 20 August 1940; died 13 February 2020

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