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IPCC's new chair: Rajendra Pachauri. Credit: TERI

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) elected a new chair last week — but the nature of the vote has raised questions over the panel's independence.

Rajendra Pachauri, director of the Tata Energy Research Institute in New Delhi and vice-chair of the IPCC, beat current chair Robert Watson by 76 votes to 49 in the election held in Geneva on 19 April.

Pachauri, an engineer and economist by training, is a respected expert in the economics of development. But the public nature of the contest — which is usually settled by consensus during behind-the-scenes negotiations — has posed some uncomfortable questions for the panel, set up in 1988 to advise the world's governments on climate-change issues.

Watson, an ecologist who is chief scientist at the World Bank, had been expected by many climate researchers to serve a second, six-year term. But he was not renominated for the position by the United States, which backed his initial candidacy in 1996 (see Nature 416, 251; 2002). He eventually received his nomination from Portugal and New Zealand, after the official 15 March nomination deadline had passed.

Watson's former role as associate director for environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Bill Clinton is thought to have deterred the Bush administration from putting him forward. But evidence has also emerged that ExxonMobil, the US oil company, lobbied the administration not to renominate Watson.

The campaign against him continued at the election meeting in Geneva. “Oil-industry representatives were there lobbying for Pachauri,” says Bert Metz, a climate-policy expert at the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, and co-chair of the IPCC working group on mitigating climate change.

Despite the split, IPCC scientists are keen to stress that Pachauri will have their goodwill. Michael Grubb, a climate-change and energy-policy specialist at Imperial College, London, rates Pachauri as extremely capable. “The only worrying thing is the manner in which he was elected,” he says.

Pachauri will now have to guide the IPCC towards its fourth climate-change report, due in 2007. Researchers say that the panel's three working groups, which cover climate science, the impact of climate change and the steps that can be taken to mitigate it, respectively, are all in good shape. “The election won't cause lasting damage,” says John Houghton of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Bracknell, west of London, who stepped down as chair of the climate-science group at the elections. “All the groups are in very good hands.”