London

Rajendra Pachauri, the new chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has pledged that under his stewardship the global advisory group will place more emphasis on regional assessments of climate change, and on its socio-economic impact.

Pachauri, the director of the Tata Energy Research Institute in New Delhi, says that the prospect of accelerated ice melting on the Himalayas is the type of regional question that the panel needs to address.

“Five hundred million people depend on these glaciers for their water supply,” says the 62-year-old energy economist. “What kind of response do we have? To take an extreme example, we could move highly water-intensive industry out of that region. If you have 20 to 30 years to do that you are not going to cause major disruption.”

Pachauri assumed his new position on 28 April after an unusual, contested election in which he defeated the incumbent chair, atmospheric scientist Robert Watson.

In an interview, Pachauri sought to draw a line under the election, in which many climate-change researchers expressed their support for Watson. In an article written just after the election, Al Gore, the former US presidential candidate, branded Pachauri as the “let's drag our feet candidate”. Pachauri says that he had regarded Gore as a friend. “It's unfortunate that he should have played politics in this manner,” he says.

Pachauri adds that the failure of the Bush administration to renominate Watson — which led to the latter being nominated late, by other nations — could be attributed to Watson's links to the previous administration of Bill Clinton. “When a new president takes over, everyone gets changed — including the janitor,” he says.

The new IPCC chair says that he is now busy setting the agenda for the panel's fourth assessment report, which is due in 2007. He also wants to produce a report to give input to negotiations that begin in 2005 to set greenhouse-gas emission targets for 2013 onwards under the Kyoto Protocol. Such a report, he says, might include an assessment of technology issues, such as the potential of carbon sequestration.

Watson, meanwhile, has immersed himself in a new project. He is launching a $500,000 feasibility study on an advisory mechanism to inform governments and international bodies on the scientific issues facing global agriculture, including the implications of genetically modified crops.