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Polar Bears are not the only ones losing sleep as the world warms. In an office in the capital’s India Habitat Centre, one man is now spending sleepless nights as the climate changes and faraway ice-sheets melt. 

As early as 3.30 or 5 am, Rajendra K Pachauri, chairman of the United Nation’s top panel on climate change — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — turns up at his desk at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) where he is director-general.

As the April 6 deadline draws nearer for the next IPCC report on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to release in Brussels, Pachauri is in the hotseat of a global debate on rising temperatures.

How do you get hundreds of authors and representatives of over 100 nations to agree on the fine print of climate change? “We go through the drafts line by line and the meetings for acceptance of the reports go on for days,’’ said Pachauri. “One has to even plan visits to the loo!”

The drafts are sent to governments and reviewers worldwide, and the reviewers send thousands of comments to the authors. “The comments are carefully tagged and looked at,’’ said Pachauri. “The authors decide which comments to act on based on scientific value, but none can be ignored.’’

So these days, the double PhD holder (economics and industrial engineering) is making sense of reams of data sent by 500 authors scripting the latest findings on climate change, awaited by the world's governments, economists and scientists since a draft summary of Climate Change 2007 was released in Paris in February.

“I don’t have weekends, but there is enormous satisfaction in my work,” Pachauri told the Hindustan Times at TERI, where he has spent the last 25 years. “The work will escalate till November when the fourth IPCC synthesis report will be released.” The third assessment report was released in 2001. The November synthesis involves crunching 3,000 pages of work into 30 pages. “But it gets done and we are well on our way,” Pachauri said. “We’ve structured ourselves to cope.”

He was elected to this job in 2002. “I am an economist, but I am passionate about the impact of climate change,’’ Pachauri says.

Email author: reshma.patil@hindustantimes.com