Editorial: Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action

Editorial:  Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action

In: Climate and Development. May 10, 2021.

By: E. Lisa F. Schipper, Jonathan Ensor, Aditi Mukherji, Alisher Mirzabaev, Arabella Fraser, Blane Harvey, Edmond Totin, Matthias Garschagen, Minal Pathak, Philip Antwi-Agyei, Thomas Tanner & Zoha Shawoo (2021) Equity in climate scholarship: a manifesto for action, Climate and Development, DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2021.1923308

An editorial commenting on the Reuters Hot List (published April 20, 2021), which ranks 1,000 climate academics according to their influenceability.

"The Reuters ‘Hot List’ reflects several academic biases that interfere with our ability to undertake equitable and impactful research on climate and development challenges. To begin, social sciences and humanities scholars are underrepresented on the list. There are some real reasons for this. Publishing traditions and rates tend to favour natural sciences in such metrics, where there is a tendency to publish more in indexed scientific journals, while some disciplines in the social sciences and humanities favour single-author research articles or books over multiple co-authored papers, naturally reducing the publication rate. In addition, natural sciences receive 770% more research funding on climate change than social sciences (Overland & Sovacool, 2020), which generates large differences in the sort of publications being produced. Related to this, gender biases in funding are significantly more explicit in the physical sciences than in social sciences (Boyle et al., 2015) and there are more men in STEM subjects than women. Despite there being more women in academia than 60 years ago, gender differences have increased in terms of both productivity and impact (Huang et al., 2020)."

Directlink to full editorial:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17565529.2021.1923308?src