Reading the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports provide revealing insights about the science and geopolitics of climate change, their length makes them unlikely to be consumed beyond specific readerships. Reading the IPCC… series attempted to make these documents more public through a participatory public reading.

Over 50 volunteer readers participated in a 3-day attempt to read the entire 800-page Climate Change 2007: Mitigation, the third volume of the Fourth Assessment Report in Manchester during Futuresonic 2009.

Kate Rich provided Feral Trade tea and coffee service as a counterpoint to the unforgiving jargon of the text, using managed hospitality and critical engagement to provide a meeting point where art audiences, climate activists and other citizens could interact and exchange.

Since then there have been four other formal and informal, partial and interstitial public group readings from the report.