Thirty years of climate change research: A fine-grained analysis of geographical specialization

Abstract

Bibliometric overviews of climate change research typically focus on the main topical trends and few countries with the largest share of the scientific production. These are important limitations: most of the world’s population live in countries that are heavily affected by climate change but have a relatively small scientific production, so that their topics of interest might be neglected. This contribution aims to address both limitations by investigating variations across countries in climate change research specialization. We employ a combination of state-of-the-art language modelling techniques to gain a fine-grained representation of the research topics on climate change, considering abstracts of 193,471 publications from 1990 to 2020. The analysis reveals the existence of five major country blocks, with distinct research specializations. Countries’ research specialization is driven by the specific challenges posed by climate change, such as extreme precipitation and floods and food, as well as the level of resources at disposal, so that research into the phenomenon of climate change and its global solutions is more important in affluent western countries. Less affluent countries – which host several billion people – develop distinct research focuses on local problems’ causes and mitigation strategies, but typically have limited resources to address these challenges. Hence, leading scientific countries should possibly contribute even more to addressing such issues.