The Nature Index has a guide
Climate Science in China: How much do we care about the environment, how much can we do to fight climate change, and how to make the most of it?
Governments worldwide have begun to pay attention. China, in particular, has made “rapid progress” with its climate and conservation-related policies in the past five to ten years, says Choi. China began implementing a strategy to preserve areas that are delicate or have important ecological functions as part of an effort to improve management and restrict development from taking place. The strategy could potentially triple the number of key coastal waterbird sites under protection. The policy change has resulted in fewer natural wetlands being converted into aquaculture ponds for fish farming, farmlands and other developments. “It’s really encouraging to see such a change,” says Choi.
Although the speed at which these actions are being carried out is impressive, it does make it challenging for researchers to keep up, says Choi, especially when they’re not brought in on the planning stages.
“Sometimes, things change a little too rapidly,” he says. “Because these policies have been implemented on such a big scale and at such rapid rates, there is often very little time for us researchers to really evaluate the impacts.”
It is also important for researchers to make their own personal efforts in reducing carbon emissions if they want to see wider change, says Millan. He is participating in a group of scientists that are working on a plan to reduce their emissions by 50% by 2030 through a number of things, including using trains instead of planes, renting electric bikes, and improving the energy efficiency of their buildings. He says that if climate scientists want society to do their part in fighting climate change, then we have to be the first to change our behavior. Andy Tay.
There are three main areas in which Choi works: examining how aspects of climate change, such as shifts in wind patterns, affect migration journeys, identifying ways to conserve migratory bird populations, and understanding factors that drive different waterbird populations.
Growing up in the landlocked state of Querétaro in central Mexico, a nine-hour drive from the coast, Marina Banuet-Martínez was intrigued by the ocean from an early age. She remembers that her teacher asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. “I drew a picture of the ocean, because I wanted to be a marine biologist,” she says.
Years later, as an undergraduate student at the Autonomous University of Querétaro in Santiago de Querétaro, Banuet-Martínez stood on the shore along Mexico’s north Pacific Coast and had a full-circle moment. “The first time I got there, I was like: ‘Oh man, I drew this.’”
Source: Three scientists on the front line of climate and conservation research
Climate Anomalies and the Health of People in the Southern Hemisphere: The Impact on Sea Lions, Fishing, and Migratory Waterbird Survival
She would go on to study the impact of climate anomalies on the health of California sea lions (Zalophus californianus)3 and other marine species for the next seven years, before switching her focus to people. “The impact on the sea lions’ physiology was huge, and I wondered if it was the same for the people who share the same space and resources with them,” she says.
Although fishers worry about how a decline in marine species could affect their income, they don’t necessarily consider the consequences that this might have on their physical and mental health, says Banuet-Martínez. She will use the remainder of her PhD to translate the information she collected from the project into models that can be used to estimate the health effects.
The International Doctoral Research Award from the International Development Research Centre in Canada supported research to improve the lives of people in the global south. She says that being able to conduct fieldwork in her home country has been invaluable: “I think it’s a great opportunity for me, as a Mexican, to bring resources and knowledge and my scholarship there.”
When Romain Millan arrived at the University of California, Irvine, to get his PhD, he had no idea that he’d be relying on existing data. “When my supervisor told me that I was going on two expeditions to Greenland in the same summer, I couldn’t believe it,” he recalls.
The world’s glaciers hold a key part in the research. Because the flow of a glacier is influenced by its mass, Millan and his colleagues were able to update water-volume estimates for several glaciers, including those in the Upper Indus and Chenab basin of the Himalayas, and the tropical Andes of South America. “We found that there is 34% more ice in the Himalayas and 27% less ice in the tropical Andes than previously estimated,” says Millan, who is among the most prolific early-career authors in the Nature Index on climate and conservation topics. The affected people may need to revise their water distribution policy because of the impact of this.
Increasing global temperatures have affected migratory waterbird survival. He points to the red knot (Calidris canutus), a species of Arctic-breeding sandpiper. Chicks are reportedly getting smaller because their hatch dates are out of sync with peak periods of insect activity, which now occurs earlier in the year because of premature snowmelt1.
The Nature Index: An Indicator of High-Quality Research Output, Collaboration, and Alignment of Research Articles Related to Sustainable Development Goals
A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.
It’s an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration if the Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level. The most recent year made available under a Creative Commons license is the most recent data in the Nature Index. The database is created by Nature Portfolio.
The total number of articles varies each year, but is accounted for by the adjusted share. It is arrived at by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the base year levels.
The bilateral collaboration score (CS) between two institutions A+B is the sum of each of their Shares on the papers to which both have contributed. The Nature Index shows the number of articles written by any two institutions or countries that are a bilateral collaboration.
Each query will return a profile page that lists the country or institution’s recent outputs, from which it is possible to drill down for more information. Articles can be displayed by journal, and then by article. The outputs are organized into areas. The institution or country’s top collaborators are listed on the pages. Users can create their own indexes and export their data from an institution.
To track research outputs that are relevant to the topic of climate and conservation, Nature Index articles related to the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in responsible consumption and production (SDG 12), climate action (SDG 13), life below water (SDG 14) and life on land (SDG 15) were searched via the Dimensions database from Digital Science. The data set was put together for the supplement.
Data on research articles and their SDG alignment come from Digital Sciences’ Dimensions platform, which uses machine learning to automatically tag research papers if they align to certain SDGs. Some articles are tagged to more than one SDG, so percentages may not add up to 100.
The countries with a relatively low volume of research output forSDG 12–15 are: Argentina, Brazil, and Italy, while Australia has higher output than the global average.
Brazil is an outlier in the group of countries that skew towards Life Below Water and Life On Land, because of its research focus on the Amazon rainforest.
The volume of bubbles shows the proportion of a location’s total climate output in the Nature Index that relates to theSDG, with the size of the ones showing the volume (measured by the Nature Index).
The United States and China, the two biggest publishers of climate research, are closer to the global average but fall on either side. Japan, meanwhile, is an example of a country with relatively high volume, but well below the average as a proportion of its total Nature Index output.
Almost one-fifth of Nature Index research published by Norway, for instance, is related to these SDGs, and 14.5% of New Zealand’s output in the database align with the four goals. Finland and Denmark also have a high proportion of their research related to these topics.
