4) How do we better and more equitably represent the distributional impacts of environmental change on countries, species (human and non-human animals), and ecosystems?

Regional equity in high-impact climate research

Number of papers found per region by year (a) and totaled by country across the 10 year period (b). (a) China, India and Brazil totals standalone and are not included in the non-Annex 1 total. Included in these totals are all climate change impact studies spanning Nature, Nature Climate Change, PNAS, Science and Science Advances (N=3921)

Ongoing climate change and extreme events have distributed impacts, disproportionately falling on developing and vulnerable regions. Our understanding of these regions’ climate impacts and options for adaptation is largely informed by peer-reviewed research. Research that makes it to the upper-tier academic journals most often has the highest “impact”, potentially guiding decision-making on climate action, including rising calls to attribute losses and damages. It is therefore crucial that strong research on disproportionately impacted regions appears in these high-impact journals. However, it is unclear (a) to what extent top-tier academic journals publish climate change research on the most vulnerable regions and (b) to what extent these regions’ authors and institutions are represented in these publications. To address these objectives, we employ data science techniques to construct and statistically analyze a dataset of the last decades’ climate research publications, using the provided metadata and complete manuscript texts as data, from top-tier journals. The results of this work will be communicated to increase equity and representation of use-inspired science and academic publishing on regional climate change impacts and adaptation.

Sharma, McDermid, Singh, Bonikowski et al (in prep)