Climate change: Does international research fulfill global demands and necessities?

Abstract

Background: Climate change is safe to be one of the biggest challenges of mankind. Human activities, especially the combustion of fossil fuels, contribute to the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thus to the pace of climate change. The effects of climate change are already being felt, and the resulting damage will most likely be enormous worldwide. Because global impacts vary widely and will lead to very different national vulnerability to climate impacts, each country, depending on its economic background, has different options to ward off negative impacts. Decisions have to be made to mitigate climate consequences according to the preparedness and the vulnerability of countries against the presumed impacts. This requires a profound scientific basis. To provide sound background information, a bibliometric study was conducted to present global research on climate change using established and specific parameters. Bibliometric standard parameters, established socioeconomic values, and climate change specific indices were used for the analyses. This allowed us to provide an overall picture of the global research pattern not only in terms of general aspects, but also in terms of climate change impacts, its effects and regional differences. For this purpose, we choose representative indices, such as the CO₂ emissions for the responsibility of countries, the global climate risk index as a combination value for the different types of damage that countries can expect, the increase in sea level as a specific parameter as a measure of the huge global environmental impacts, and the readiness and vulnerability index for the different circumstances of individual countries under which climate change will take place. We hope to have thus made a comprehensive and representative selection of specific parameters that is sufficient to map the global research landscape. We have supplemented the methodology accordingly.

Results: In terms of absolute publication numbers, the USA was the leading country, followed by the UK, and China in 3rd place. The steep rise in Chinese publication numbers over time came into view, while their citation numbers are relatively low. Scandinavian countries were leading regarding their publication numbers related to CO₂ emission and socioeconomic indices. Only three developing countries stand out in all analyses: Costa Rica, the Fiji Atoll, and Zimbabwe, although it is here that the climate impact will be greatest. A positive correlation between countries' preparedness for the impacts of climate change and their publication numbers could be shown, while the correlation between countries' vulnerability and their publication numbers was negative.

Conclusions: We could show that there exists an inequity between national research efforts according to the publication output and the demands and necessities of countries related to their socioeconomic status. This inequity calls for a rethink, a different approach, and a different policy to improve countries' preparedness and mitigation capacity, which requires the inclusion of the most affected regions of the world in a strengthened international cooperation network.

Keywords: Bibliometrics; Climate inequity; Global warming; Greenhouse effect; Research investment; Socioeconomic indices.

Fig. 1

Procedure for generating the analysis database

Fig. 2

Research foci. a Clusters of author’s keywords with at least 650 occurrences. Red: environmental and ecological issues, green: modeling and simulation issues, blue: social and management issues. b Most assigned subject areas according to Web of Science categories with number of articles and average citation rate (number of citations / number of articles)

Fig. 3

Chronological development of articles on climate change from 1970 to 2018. a Number of articles on climate change and their citations. Dashed line: Cited Half-Life. b Number of all indexed SCI articles (Science Citation Index of Web of Science) and number of articles on climate change per 10,000 SCI articles

Fig. 4

The most publishing countries. a Density equalizing map projection of the number of articles. b Relative share of the most publishing countries in 5-year intervals from 1998 to 2019

Fig. 5

Citation-specific parameters for articles on climate change. a Number of citations per country. b Articles/Citation rate of articles on climate change per country (threshold 30 articles)

Fig. 6

Ratio of socio-economic parameters (threshold 30 articles). a Country-specific ratios of the number of articles on climate change and the countries’ population size in million inhabitants [39]. B) Country-specific ratios of the number of articles on climate change and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1000 billion US-Dollars [38]

Fig. 7

Global Climate Risk Index (1999–2018) [9]. a Average number of fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants. b Number of articles on climate change pro average number of fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants

Fig. 8

Estimated number of people exposed to vulnerable land in 2100 (CoastalDEM scenario: Sea Level Rise Modell K17, RCP 4.5, 95 percentile) [19]. a Number of people living on vulnerable land in mill. b Relative number of people (per 1000 inhabitants) living on vulnerable land. c Relation of the number of articles on climate change and the number of people living on vulnerable land in mill. High values of SIDS (Small Island Developing States) cannot be shown. The highest values have Maldives (87%), Marshall Island (85%), Tokelau (78%), Tuvalu (73%). d Relation of the number of articles on climate change and the relative number of people (per 1000 inhabitants) living on vulnerable land in mill

Fig. 9

Correlation of the number of articles and indices of the ND-GAIN 2017 (Notre Dame Global Adaption Initiative) [27] regarding countries. a Readiness index, positive correlation (p < 0.001). b Vulnerability index, negative correlation (p < 0.001)

Fig. 10

Network of internationally co-authored articles on climate change with numbers in brackets (number of articles/number of cooperation articles). The width of connecting lines represents the quantity of common articles (threshold: 40 collaboration articles between countries)