In Europe and Australia, by contrast, only about 12 percent of its projections were of low confidence.

“There’s essentially an order-of-magnitude difference in the amount of science available across regions of the world,” says Katharine Mach, a senior climate researcher at Stanford University and one of the authors of the IPCC report. She pointed out that the IPCC spent as much time and energy writing a chapter on Australia and New Zealand as it did for the entirety of Asia.

“If you were to take the 8,000 studies relevant to climate change in Asia, and the 3,000 for [Australia and New Zealand], and if you were to do publications per person [living in those places], obviously the number would look starkly different,” she told me.

The most recent IPCC report, released earlier this month, only focused on how the Earth overall would be affected by 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise and did not produce continent-specific chapters.

Read: How to understand the UN’s dire new climate report

At least 60 years’ worth of data might be needed to draw meaningful observations about temperature or precipitation trends, says Edvin Aldrian, a climate scientist for the Indonesian government who is currently on the IPCC. For parts of his home country, Aldrian says data is scattered at best. In some cases, it might not exist.

Aldrian argues that the IPCC’s methods required a good base of historical data about a country. Without a solid grasp of the baseline science, it becomes difficult to propose effective strategies for communities facing the consequences of climate change, like crop failures due to shifting rain patterns.

It also makes it harder to understand what’s happening now. In much of the global North, researchers are already documenting changes that seem influenced by climate change. Most regions in North America and Europe have experienced a documented increase in hot days and a decrease in cooler days since the 1950s, for example. Based on that data, climate models can predict with high confidence that countries in northern Europe will “very likely” see an increase in hot days in the future, along with more intense precipitation in the winter months, and perhaps won’t experience major changes in drought conditions.

But across broad swaths of Africa, Asia, and South America, that kind of accounting isn’t possible. In East Africa, for instance, there isn’t even enough published scientific literature to say whether temperatures have shifted since the 1950s.

The same goes for precipitation changes. When the IPCC mapped how rainfall amounts had changed from 1951 to 2010, North America and Europe were clearly shaded in a color gradient showing increases or decreases in rainfall. But almost all of central Africa, as well as patches of Asia and South America, had to be left blank due to insufficient data: