A group investigating the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report Monday saying the IPCC needs to make several changes to reduce errors and the chance of bias in its reports, including fundamentally reforming its management structure.

The investigation by the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national academies of science, said the IPCC has been "successful overall" but called for the widely watched organization to enforce its existing procedures more strongly, and to ensure that "genuine controversies" about climate science are reflected in the IPCC reports.

The IPCC also should establish an executive committee that includes people outside the climate-science community, and it should limit the term of its chairman to one term, the report said. The current limit of two six-year terms for the chairman "is too long," the press release about the report said.

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The reforms would aid in seeing that "due consideration was given to properly documented alternative views," according to a press release about the report issued Monday morning.

In addition, the press release said, the IPCC's guidelines for dealing with sources that aren't peer-reviewed are "too vague" and should be made more specific to try to minimize errors from the use of such sources. The report called on the IPCC to better characterize uncertainty in certain aspects of climate science.

The report also called on the IPCC to develop a conflict-of-interest policy for participants.

The investigation was requested by the IPCC in March, following the disclosure of a handful of errors in the IPCC's 2007 climate-science report. Among the errors was a projection that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. The IPCC later said that projection lacked scientific basis.

The 2007 IPCC report called climate change "unequivocal" and "very likely" caused by human activity. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore Jr. for its efforts on promulgating information about climate change.

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