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RK Pachauri has stepped down as Chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with immediate effect, following sexual harrassment allegations against him by a junior colleague in TERI. Pachauri sent his resignation to the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) on Tuesday.
The IPCC has decided to designate Ismail El Gizouli, who was the Vice-Chair, as Acting IPCC Chair in the meanwhile, the UN panel said in a statement.
“The actions taken today will ensure that the IPCC’s mission to assess climate change continues without interruption,” said Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The Bureau of the IPCC is expected to elect a new Chair in October, after Pachauri’s second term as the Chair came to an end, IPCC added.
Pachauri has also gone on leave from The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), where he is the Director General. “Adequate internal arrangements have been made to ensure the smooth operations of the organisation,” TERI said.
In his resignation letter to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, Pachauri said he intended to resign from his post in November last year, after the completion of the Fifth assessment report, but had been persuaded against it by “close friends and colleagues.”
“The IPCC needs strong leadership and dedication of time and full attention by the Chair in the immediate future, which under the current circumstances I may be unable to provide, a shown by my inability to travel to Nairobi to chair the plenary session of the Panel this week,” his letter, dated Tuesday, said.
Pachauri had been forced to cancel his trip to Nairobi on Sunday, where he was to chair the plenary session of the IPCC, which started on Monday.
Pachauri, who is also the Director General of TERI, is fighting a legal battle on counts of “outraging the modesty of a woman, sexual harassment, stalking and criminal intimidation.”
Earlier this month a 29-year-old junior filed a police complaint against the 74-year-old head of TERI alleging sexual harassment. On Saturday, a second unnamed victim and a former employee of TERI, also alleged sexual harassment and issued a statement of her own experience, which, she claimed, had been faced by many other female employees of TERI.
Pachauri has denied all these allegations and said his devices, from which allegedly sexually-charged SMSes, instant messages as well as emails had been sent to the victim, had been hacked.
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