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Problem Drivers and Indicators

Climate Change

The IPCC was formed jointly in 1988 by the United Nations
Environment Programme and the United Nations World
Meteorological Organization. The IPCC brings together the world’s
top scientists, economists, and other experts, synthesizes peer-
reviewed scientific literature on climate change studies, and pro-
duces authoritative assessments of the current state of knowledge of
climate change.

There is a flood of information available on climate change. It’s in the
news, it’s on talk radio, and among the problem drivers we’ll discuss, it’s
the one that is most likely to be pushing organizations toward “green,”
or at least green messaging. Project managers, for the most part, are a
pragmatic lot. We have to be. Although project management is both an art
and a science, we rely on the “science part”—and our left brains—for the
bigger part of our management of projects. Take earned value manage-
ment as an example. This is founded on mathematical principles and uses
ratios to calculate whether a project is ahead, behind, or right on schedule
and budget. As project managers, we crave these methods, which bring
order to the chaotic world of projects. Despite this, or perhaps because of
it, even the most skeptical left-brain thinker should be able to appreciate
the facts about global warming. There may be quite a bit of debate around
what the true causes are, but one only has to look at the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (2007) first
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to answer the question on whether or not there is a significant change in
the world’s climate, and second to answer the question, “why is the cli-
mate changing?” We use the words climate change because the National

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