Climate change has attracted the general concern of the international community. Global actions on climate change are based not only in the science, but also involve domestic and international economics and politics. Here we review the interactions between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports and the development of climate policy under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). There are inextricable links between the scientific research and political processes. The systematic IPCC assessment reports provide important scientific evidence and conclusions on which the Parties to the UNFCCC have based their negotiations. An important example is policies considering adaptation to long term climate change. Conversely, the UNFCCC negotiations direct research direction and foci for scientific communities and the IPCC. China has participated in global climate change science and policy activities for years, but although its scientific and political contribution has increased, its research activity still lags behind that of Europe and the United States. The percentage of mainland Chinese publications cited in the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report (AR5; 2013), Working Group I (Physical Science Basis), was 2.8%, a doubling from the percentage cited in the Working Group I report from the 4th Assessment Report (2007). For the AR5 second and third working group reports (Impacts, Mitigation), the lead authors were 1.3% and 1.6% respectively. Some core fields, such as the global sequence of surface air temperature data and the accumulated emission space of 2°C, lack expert and Chinese input. With the rapid development of its economy, China will assume more responsibility in global climate change policy. However current domestic scientific research cannot fully support China's transition to a more important global role. More responsibility needs to be matched with more high level capacity. In the future, China should learn from the historical interactions between the international scientific research community (including the IPCC) and global climate change governance (both international and domestic policy making). First, the national long term climate policy should systematically consider the relationships between science and politics, since climate change issues are different from others. Without the confident support from scientific research, it is hard to make any decisions. Second, it should take advantage of expertise in think tanks. Think tanks have played very important role in the West. Given the unprecedented complexity of climate diplomatic decisions, there is an urgent need for high level think tanks to provide forward-looking, agile, accurate, credible, high-quality and efficient support for decision-making. Third, China should continue to maintain and increase investment in climate related scientific research and integrative activities, publication of academic achievements and international recognition. Climate change is a global and systematic issue. It is essential to accelerate the integration of information across different disciplines (natural sciences, social sciences, engineering and technology) and to pay attention to the transformation from basic disciplinary research results into policy recommendations at the state, department, locality and industrial levels. Since the working language assessed by IPCC is English, this requires that the research results of China should be published in English with international recognition. Fourth, China should make full use of the IPCC working procedures to improve scientific decision making for domestic work. The IPCC scientific evaluation norms system ensures broad participation, improve transparency in decision-making, prevent subjective decision-making and ensure a balance of interests. In the domestic decision-making process, it is useful to absorb the opinions of government departments, social organizations and the public, give full play to the role of different stakeholders in decision-making, and establish a decision-making system dominated by government departments, consulting institutions and think tanks, while involving the general public extensively. All sectors of society need to improved awareness of climate change to respond to this crisis, and broader participation will help achieve faster and better decision-making goals.

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time, yet little is known about how early-career researchers contribute to this field through doctoral research. This study provides the first comprehensive mapping of climate change-related doctoral dissertations in Italy across all disciplines, spanning a 14-year period (2008–2021). Doctoral dissertations offer a unique lens into the formative stages of scientific inquiry, where new ideas, methods, and agendas take shape. Using a machine learning approach on a novel dataset of over 74,394 dissertations, we conduct the first large-scale classification of climate change dissertations in Italy. We identify climate-related dissertations and analyze their thematic, disciplinary, and geographical distribution, highlighting emerging research trends in areas such as energy transition, biodiversity conservation, and extreme weather events. While technical disciplines dominate among English-language dissertations, those written in Italian reveal a more balanced disciplinary landscape, with a stronger presence of the social sciences and humanities—though these remain underrepresented overall. Although climate-related research spans a variety of topics, regional variation also emerges: water in the North, energy in the Centre and South, and governance in the Islands. This study marks an important step toward recognizing doctoral research as a strategic asset in building resilient climate knowledge systems and guiding long-term policy planning.

Determining how climate change affects aquatic organisms, such as fish is vital, since this could directly or indirectly impact food and protein sources that are important for human nutrition. Thus, identifying suitable organisms for studying the impacts of climate change on aquatic species is essential. It is most effective to select model organisms for climate change study and determine how each organism might adapt within the diversity of organisms present. This study aimed to review the current development and frontiers of climate change’s model organism based on the literature. We conducted a scientometric analysis by differentiating between publications on different model species, the number and origin of authors and affiliations involved, the citation analysis, and the most common keywords used. Increased publication numbers for Zebrafish and Medaka were detected during the analysis of the networks. Our results showed that both species are among the most important aquatic model organisms for climate change related research. Furthermore, we found that these model organisms, especially the Zebrafish are becoming increasingly important towards climate change related studies, because of their simple anatomy and established biological studies. Our analysis could be on the forefront for disseminating and communicating scientific knowledge and impactful discoveries to researchers, academics, policymakers, and to the public worldwide for future contribution to the community resources preservation.

Abstract Industrialization and the overuse of natural resources have led to severe environmental degradation. Social and economic inequalities have widened, especially during the global pandemic, which intensified existing disparities. These conditions have prompted global leaders to seek solutions, as climate change and environmental damage directly affect both human and planetary health. They also limit the ability of vulnerable populations to exercise their right to food sovereignty. This article aims to identify perspectives on food sovereignty in the context of climate change through a bibliometric analysis. The findings show that research in this field is growing, with the United States playing a key role. The study concludes that developed countries are focused on tackling the effects of climate change on food sovereignty. It also finds a correlation between regional CO₂ emissions and malnutrition, suggesting a link between environmental harm and food insecurity.

Understanding effects of climate change on ecosystems will require a diverse range of approaches. We proposed using downscaled climate models to generate realistic weather scenarios as experimental treatments. Kreyling etal. propose a gradient approach to determine the shape of response functions. These approaches are different, but highly complementary.

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in human ecodynamics—the relationship among climate, environment, and culture. Most published research concentrates on the potential causal role of climate and environment in culture change. We approach the issue from the other side: The archaeological record often incorporates important, sometimes unique, proxy records of climate, of environment, and of change in both. We detail four case studies, from South America, Southwest Asia, North America, and the Shetland Islands. In each case, the paleoclimatic and/or paleoenvironmental data resulted from multidisciplinary archaeological projects whose major objective was to understand past human behavior. Nevertheless, in each case, the projects generated important information about the natural world in the past. Often, these data play a role in modeling future climatic and environmental change of potential significance to humans. We note a growing use of archaeological proxy data by climate scientists and predict an increase in this trend on the basis of recent history.

This think piece introduces the views of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others on the capabilities approach to climate change ethics research. Furthermore, it suggests that the capabilities approach can help climate change research in identifying if, and if so which, intrinsic values of people’s wellbeing are vulnerable to climate change. The think piece introduces a climate-capabilities reading of documents associated with the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2007). Furthermore, it suggests that climate change education research may include descriptive and comparative, normative, critical and meta forms of research to investigate the various meanings of climate change wellbeing in spaces of capabilities. Furthermore, climate change education research may contribute to climate change research in identifying how education may help students identify individual, social and environmental conversion factors. That is, factors needed to convert, for example, adaptation resources into actual beings and doings – into climate capabilities.

At each Conference of Parties (COP), scientists hand over the climate change problem to diplomats and policymakers. A COP also offers scientists a chance to take stock of their research, confront emerging policy questions, identify research gaps, and update their research agendas. We, as an interdisciplinary group of academic experts who have been providing independent insights to the COP21 French presidency and negotiation team (1), have seen not only the importance of science in policymaking but also its limitations and sometimes its lack of alignment with the complex environmental and societal issues addressed in the negotiations. Here we analyze research gaps and identify new directions of research in relation to a number of facets of the Paris Agreement, including the new 1.5 °C objective, the articulation between near-term and long-term mitigation pathways, negative emissions, verification, climate finance, non-Parties stakeholders, and adaptation.