Gap in research funding leaves global south more vulnerable to climate impacts, studies suggest
CBC
Developing countries suffer from a significant gap in terms of scientific research related to climate change, a new study shows, even though they contain the communities and people most vulnerable to extreme weather, rising sea levels and other serious impacts of climate change.
"There is a kind of gap in knowledge, specifically in peer-reviewed papers in the large literature databases about those areas," said Max Callaghan, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin.
"We know that there are kind of inequalities in this global scientific system in terms of resources."
The stark divide in availability of scientific research has been on the radar of climate experts, with major barriers facing global south scientists, such as access to prestigious (and expensive) scientific journals, the lack of time and funding to work on research, and even onerous visa requirements that make it difficult for scientists to attend conferences and meetings in the global north.
Experts warn that the gap might leave developing countries without the means to identify where climate mitigation and adaptation efforts should be directed to prepare for future weather disasters. Good climate science is also needed so that aid money from rich countries to help poor countries address climate change is targeted and spent on the right projects.
The new study, published this week in Nature Climate Change, used machine learning to examine over 100,000 scientific papers worldwide. The study was conceived as a way to see if machine learning could help the work of the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by making it easier to examine and analyze the thousands of paper scientists currently examine by hand.
The study authors divided the world into smaller grid cells, and calculated the number of climate studies that studied climate impacts in those areas.
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