How Saudi oil scientists ended up working on the world’s most important climate reports — SkimNews
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- The Guardian investigation identified at least a dozen lead authors in IPCC Working Group III — which assesses emissions-cutting policies and technologies — as employed by or linked to Saudi Aramco, Saudi institutions, or other oil and gas interests.
- Dr Mustafa Babiker, a 20-year Aramco employee, was appointed coordinating lead author for the IPCC's Seventh Assessment Report, and Dr Diego Armando Moya Pinta, another Aramco energy scientist since 2022, is listed by the IPCC only under his Imperial College London affiliation.
- The IPCC's conflict of interest committee reported finding no conflicts of interest among any authors selected for the Seventh Assessment Report in March 2026, a disconnect experts say shows the policy is "not fit for purpose."
- KAPSARC, a Saudi government-funded thinktank chaired by the country's energy minister, has the same number of lead authors in Working Group III as Imperial College London and Vienna's International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
- Working Group III Vice-Chair Dr Malak Al-Nory, a senior adviser to the Saudi energy ministry, continued representing Saudi Arabia at the Bonn Climate Change Conference in June 2026 while serving in her IPCC leadership role.
- 20 cases with strong conflict of interest concerns were identified by the investigation, with more than half involving authors linked to Saudi institutions, marking what one expert called "the first time we have so many Saudi-linked authors in the IPCC."
Why it matters: Working Group III evaluates the very emissions-cutting policies that threaten fossil fuel profits, and its conclusions underpin UN climate negotiations and national climate laws across 195 member countries. With Saudi-linked authors now matching Imperial College London's representation and a vice-chair simultaneously representing Saudi Arabia in negotiations, the credibility of the next major IPCC report — and the policies it informs — rests on a conflict-of-interest framework that experts say is failing to flag the most obvious cases.
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