That darn wealth distribution is affecting who has money for climate research. “The results show that the supply of climate change knowledge is biased toward richer countries.”. Can the begging be any more transparent? Oh, the pain!
Climate change research is globally skewed
The supply of climate change knowledge is biased towards richer countries – those that pollute the most and are least vulnerable to climate change – and skewed away from the poorer, fragile and more vulnerable regions of the world. That creates a global imbalance between the countries in need of knowledge and those that build it. This could have implications for the quality of the political decisions countries and regions make to prevent and adapt to climate change, warn the researchers behind the study from the University of Copenhagen.
Photo: CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture“80 % of all the climate articles we examined were published by researchers from developed countries, although these countries only account for 18 % of the world’s population. That is of concern because the need for climate research is vital in developing countries. It could have political and societal consequences if there are regional shortages of climate scientists and research to support and provide contextually relevant advice for policy makers in developing countries”, says Professor Niels Strange from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen, which is supported by the Danish National Research Foundation.
Click for larger image. Climate change research, shown here by number of publications, primarily concerns countries that are less vulnerable to climate change and have a higher emission of CO2. The countries are also politically stable, less corrupt, and have a higher investment in education and research.Together with PhD student Maya Pasgaard from the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen, Niels Strange analysed over 15,000 scientific papers on climate research from 197 countries. The analysis clearly shows that the research is biased towards countries that are wealthier, better educated, more stable and less corrupt, emit the most carbon, and are less vulnerable to climate change.
As an example, the study shows that almost 30 % of the total number of publications concerns the United States of America, Canada and China, while India is the only highly vulnerable country in the top 10 list. However, Greenland and small island states like the Seychelles and the Maldives that are generally considered vulnerable, also find their way into the top 10 list if it is calculated per capita.
The content of climate studies is also skewed
The study shows that not only the authorship, but also the choice of topic in climate research, is geographically skewed:
Articles from Europe and North America are more often biased towards issues of climate change mitigation, such as emission reductions, compared with articles from the southern hemisphere. In contrast, climate research from Africa and South and Latin America deals more with issues of climate change adaptation and impacts such as droughts and diseases compared to Europe.
– The tendency is a geographical bias where climate knowledge is produced mainly in the northern hemisphere, while the most vulnerable countries are found in the southern hemisphere. The challenge for the scientific community is to improve cooperation and knowledge sharing across geographical and cultural barriers, but also between practitioners and academics. Ultimately, it will require financial support and political will, if we as a society are to address this imbalance in the fight against climate change, says Maya Pasgaard. The study was recently published online in the journal Global Environmental Change.
Link to the scientific article.
A quantitative analysis of the causes of the global climate change research distribution
M. Pasgaard, N. Strange
Highlights
• Distribution of climate change knowledge and its causes is investigated.
• The supply of knowledge is biased toward the richer and less vulnerable countries.
• The production of knowledge is likewise biased away from poorer, vulnerable regions.
• Across regions, different knowledge domains within climate change dominate.
• The imbalanced distribution of knowledge affects adaptation and policymaking.
Abstract
During the last decades of growing scientific, political and public attention to global climate change, it has become increasingly clear that the present and projected impacts from climate change, and the ability adapt to the these changes, are not evenly distributed across the globe. This paper investigates whether the need for knowledge on climate changes in the most vulnerable regions of the world is met by the supply of knowledge measured by scientific research publications from the last decade.
A quantitative analysis of more than 15,000 scientific publications from 197 countries investigates the distribution of climate change research and the potential causes of this distribution. More than 13 explanatory variables representing vulnerability, geographical, demographical, economical and institutional indicators are included in the analysis. The results show that the supply of climate change knowledge is biased toward richer countries, which are more stable and less corrupt, have higher school enrolment and expenditures on research and development, emit more carbon and are less vulnerable to climate change. Similarly, the production of knowledge, analyzed by author affiliations, is skewed away from the poorer, fragile and more vulnerable regions of the world.
A quantitative keywords analysis of all publications shows that different knowledge domains and research themes dominate across regions, reflecting the divergent global concerns in relation to climate change. In general, research on climate change in more developed countries tend to focus on mitigation aspects, while in developing countries issues of adaptation and human or social impacts (droughts and diseases) dominate. Based on these findings, this paper discusses the gap between the supply of and need for climate change knowledge, the potential causes and constraints behind the imbalanced distribution of knowledge, and its implications for adaptation and policymaking.
h/t to Matti H. Virtanen
@Lawrie Ayres says:
January 24, 2014 at 2:33 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/24/oh-noes-richer-countries-get-more-climate-research-than-pooer-more-vulnerable-regions-of-the-world/#comment-1548188
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Excellent!
CRS, DrPH says:
January 24, 2014 at 8:08 pm
Actually, the origin, I believe, of “oh noes” was the magnificent Daily Bayonet which sadly has been in hiatus since early 2012. The Daily Bayonet also bestowed gems such as “oh, the ironing,” “Gaia is not happy” & “hippie-of-the-week.”
In my opinion, it may be that WUWT uses Daily Bayonetisms as a tribute to the Groucho Marx of sceptic blogs.
And I particularly miss the oh so politically incorrect “hottie-of-the-week.”
When I watched Al’s 24 hour show a few years ago. I noted a few of the atolls and islands were asking for help with their gardening and also they were sinking. The problem is they have exhausted their soils and it wouldn’t be hard for us to send in experts to revive the fertility of their soils. The island of Tivula, nr New Zealand and Australia is sinking, mainly because the American company has removed sand and pebbles from the beaches for building. So these problems are not about climate change but ruining their landscapes and it wouldn’t be hard to correct these problems. (Just get a good Jim Morrison gardening book!) Atolls do sink though over time without humans help..
Has Bermuda sunk yet or been eroded? I lived there and it is a coral island, that imports most of its food and in a drought water from the hotels there and ships. On the fringe of the hurricane belt. It’s highest points are only 150 feet absl. I lived on blue hole hill that was also high, but we had a bad storm, and waves were breaking over the cars, and it was hard to stand up visiting a Wiggley Piggerly store. But other than some plants in the garden that suffered salt spray damage, we survived. Water was luke warm or tepid.