Lack of diversity in climate science
In 2021, I conducted analysis on the lack of diversity in highly-cited climate science research. I also interviewed dozens of experts about the barriers faced by women and experts from the global south.
This analysis was way more popular than I expected! I have since conducted similar analysis for the authors of IPCC reports, and added this analysis to Carbon Brief’s annual “Altmetric” analysis of popular climate science papers.
Highly-cited research
In 2021, Carbon Brief ran a feature week on the topic of “climate justice”. As Carbon Brief’s science writer, I decided to investigate inequality in academic publishing – a topic that seems dry at first glance, but which actually resulted in one of my most popular articles to date!
There was plenty of back and forth on how this analysis would work. Ultimately, I decided to track the gender and country of origin of the authors of 100 most highly-cited studies of climate-related research published over 2016-20.
(I was blissfully unaware of how tedious the task would be when I first opened up my excel spreadsheet. Overall, it took days to go through every one of the 1,300 authors in this analysis!)
Unsurprisingly, I found that the men from the global north made up vast majority of these authors. Around 90% of the authors in my analysis were from institutions in the global north. Meanwhile, fewer than 1% of authors came from African countries and no papers had lead authors from Africa or South America.
There was also a gender bias. Fewer than one quarter of the authors were female, while only 12 out of the 100 papers analysed had female lead authors.
Map and graph from Analysis: The lack of diversity in climate-science research, Carbon Brief
There was also a gender bias. Fewer than one quarter of the authors were female, while only 12 out of the 100 papers analysed had female lead authors.
The analysis recieved plenty of media attention! Over the next few weeks, I talked about it for BBC News, the BBC’s global news podcast (at 17:40), the Lancet podcast, Ticker News (at 16:40), and Forbes.
Obviously, the most attention-grabbing parts of this analysis were the punchy stats. But my favourite part of writing this piece was talking to scientists about the barriers that they faced in conducting and publishing research.
I spoke to about a dozen experts, who told me about a wide range of barriers they had faced. These included lack of funding and infrastructure, language barriers and institutional biases, among other things. These conversations – which often stretched well past their allocated hour – were the first in-depth interviews that I conducted as a journalist!
Often used as a metric, a target, or simply a buzzword, the phrase “diversity” is thrown around a lot. For years, I had accepted that diversity is important, without stopping to question why. This analysis was the first time that I thought about why a wide range of opinions and life experiences are needed – especially in a field such as climate science, which seems objective and unbiased.
Dr Lisa Schipper summarised it brilliantly for me:
“It’s a fallacy to say that science is neutral and that we’re not influenced by other things in our lives. We [scientists] get our training and so on, but world views, the perspectives that we have and our social cultural baggage all influence the way that we understand what we’re looking at.”
The analysis was a big departure from the normal style of Carbon Brief pieces, and it was really exciting to see how well it was received! (I have since started adding a little diversity analysis section into the annual Carbon Brief roundup of the climate papers most heavily featured in the news and media.)
I also spoke to six early career researchers from the global south, and guided them to each write a short segment about their experiences of barriers to conducting and publishing research for a guest post.
IPCC analysis
A couple of years later, I decided to revisit my analysis on diversity – this time by looking at the authors of reports published by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC’s first assessment report, published in 1990, had around 100 authors. In contrast, the latest assessment cycle boasts more than 700 authors in total.
I found that female and global south representation are both on the rise from their abysmally low 1990-starting points. But men and authors from the global north are still over-represented.
Map and graph from Analysis: How the diversity of IPCC authors has changed over three decades, Carbon Brief
None of my results were super surprising. Again, the interesting bit for me was talking to IPCC scientists about their expertiences. I learned a lot about the “black box” of IPCC selection, and about the obvious barriers in a system that relies on academics volunteering hundreds of hours of work in their free time.
There were some surprising tid bits of information here, which I was able to back up with the data – for example, that global south nationals sometimes find it easier to apply to the IPCC focal points of countries in the global north, if given a choice. I found some experts who had citizenship in global south countries, but who were registered with institutions in the global north.
I’m sure that we will keep adding to these analysis as the authorship lists for AR7 get released. Especially as the authorship data for all reports from AR5 onwards are pretty well documented and easy to analyse.
And I have also started adding diversity analysis to Carbon Brief’s annual Altmetric analysis of the most “popular” papers published each year.