In my first year at Carbon Brief, I conducted analysis showing that researchers from the global south are severely under-represented in the authorship of highly-cited climate science research. (Read more about that analysis here.)

I could not do much to combat this problem. But I decided to make more of an effort to quote climate scientists from the global south in my articles going forward.

There are plenty of brilliant climate experts from the global south. However, I soon found that they often have a lower online presence than their counterparts from the global north – in part because they usually haven't published in as many high-impact journals, I guess. But also because their university’s pages were sometimes old or out of date. I could easily spend hours trying to find up-to-date email addresses relevant experts from the global south, and still come up short.

It would have been really easy to fall back on a rotation of (excellent) British and American scientists for quotes in my pieces, instead of finding new and diverse sources. But I wanted to avoid this if possible.

To try to prevent this from happening, I started to jot down the names of climate experts from the global south who had given me quotes. After a few weeks of this, I created a google form that any interested global south experts could fill in to share their contact details with me directly. As my list grew, my colleagues began asking for suggestions for their own pieces, and I realised that my list could be a useful public resource.

I am super lucky that around this time, a colleague introduced me to Diego Arguedas Ortiz - a journalist and associate director from the Reuters Oxford Climate Journalism Network, who was also aware of this problem.

Over the next few months, Diego and I worked together to create the Global South Climate Database – a publicly available, searchable database of scientists and experts in the fields of climate science, policy and energy. Experts who wanted to be included on the database could submit their details using a google form, and the GSCD team verified every entry before it to the database.

With plenty of help from the Carbon Brief and OCJN teams, we held a twitter spaces “soft launch” of the project in August 2022 to make the google form public, and encourage experts from the global south to fill it in. And in October 2022, we had the “hard launch” to release the database itself!

For the hard launch, we also arranged a tonne of social media promo, podcasts, articles, ews stories, shoutouts in newsletters, and even a webinar! Diego and I co-wrote a blog post explaining our motivation for launching the database – a true test of my creative writing ability, or lack thereof. (“Your headline is killing me, it sounds like an academic paper,” Diego laughed at one point, as we workshopped a title.)

At first launch, the database included more than 400 verified climate experts from the global south, ranging from scientists to lawyers to policy analysts. By our one-year anniversary, it had grown to include more than 1,000!

Experts on the database collectively speak more than 75 languages, ranging from Spanish to Swahili, as well as all speaking English. And more than 100 countries were represented.

We hope the database will amplify the voices of experts from the global south and helping journalists from the global north to enrich their reporting.