This article is based on a presentation Haseeb Irfanullah delivered at the Editage webinar titled Climate Change and Its Impact on Academia on February 13, 2025.

Climate change is not something coming to us in ‘the future’, it is very much with us ‘now’. With this time dimension very much settled, the impacts of climate crisis also depend on where we are, in geographical terms, and who we are (e.g., our place within a social structure). That’s why the climate change reality of Nordic fishermen is quite different from that of women shrimp-fry collectors of Bangladesh’s coast. But, if academia is essentially (and potentially) a highly connected global community, does it have a unique, uniform relationship with climate change? In other words, does climate change affect academia irrespective of one’s discipline, geographical location, age, professional experience, and academic culture?

While our understanding of climate change is shaped by academia, the climate crisis also shapes academia’s research and teaching in numerous ways. In this article, I will first explore the current climate change-academia relationship, then I will touch upon some envisaged changes — by using five reality checks.

Reality Check 1: Is it because of academia that we know for sure that climate change is human-made?

Yes, it is! In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) started compiling evidence on climate change. The latest sixth edition (AR6) of this periodic compilation was released in 2022-2023, and it continued showing undoubtedly that human activities since the 1850s are solely responsible for current climate change. These Assessment Reports (ARs) are essentially based on published scientific research, almost all of which is published in peer-reviewed journals. Together with scholarly publishers, academia therefore has been shaping the world in terms of understanding and acting against climate change — a strong collaboration we often (probably unintentionally) overlook. On the other hand, climate change also affects academia by restructuring the existing disciplines’ research agenda, founding new disciplines building on this planetary crisis, and creating spaces for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and funding opportunities. As of May 3, 2025, there were 43 journals listed in Scopus with the word “climate” in their titles. And a search of “climate change” (from my city Dhaka, Bangladesh) returned 3.62 million results on Google Scholar (32% of those were since 2020).

Reality Check 2: Is climate change research an inclusive venture, globally?

No, it isn’t! The Working Group II’s (WGII) volume of the IPCC’s AR5 was published in 2014. In that volume, Professor Saleemul Huq and Clare Stott found 150 references on extremely climate-vulnerable Bangladesh written by 70 different first authors. But only a minority of those authors were from Bangladeshi institutions. Another study showed that, during 2000-2014, climate change research was dominated by the Global North. This equity concern was raised at different forums with an expectation that it would change in the coming years. But in the AR6, 65% of the 796 authors remained from the Global North. An article published on January 22, 2025 in the journal Climate Change revealed that low investment in science by the home countries, scientists’ publications not meeting the IPCC standards, and those scientists’ weak professional networks were the top three barriers to the Global South participating in the IPCC workforce. These numbers are in line with the inequity in climate change research funding. One estimate suggests that 521 organizations disbursed US$ 1.51 trillion climate change research grants between 1990 and 2020. While only 3.8 percent of this funding was spent on African topics, 78 percent of that amount was received by European and North American institutions, and African institutions received only 14.5 percent. Thus, climate change continues to be a ‘Global North Discipline’.

Reality Check 3: Does progress in climate change research vary in different arenas?

Yes, it does! In addition to the variations in geographical representation of climate change authors, not all disciplines benefit from global studies. For example, we can say with ‘very high confidence’ from global assessments that climate change is negatively affecting malnutrition, mental health, and human displacement. But such broader studies are missing for biodiversity and ecosystems. Similarly, while it is ‘virtually certain’ that extreme heat events around the world are happening due to human-induced climate change, the literature shows ‘medium confidence’ in linking increasing droughts and climate change.

If we consider what is cited in the IPCC reports as an indicator of progress in research, we should remember that the types of documents used in writing these reports vary with the topics in question. As I showed in a previous Scholarly Kitchen article, while hardcore science-based chapters of the AR6 (WGII, released on April 4, 2022) are based on about 95 percent peer-reviewed journal articles, less technical chapters are based on around 25 percent non-peer reviewed literature.

Again, the regional chapters of the AR6 present an interesting dimension of balancing peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed (or “grey”) literature. While the Global North, such as Australasia (>30 percent) and North America (about 25 percent) use grey literature a lot, it is mostly high-level, expert-reviewed government documents. The Globally Southern regions, on the other hand, use grey literature (about 15 to 28 percent) for two main reasons: 1) to fill in the gap in the existing peer-reviewed research, and 2) when journal articles are outdated, diverse and recent sources of grey literature can cover this shortcoming.

Reality Check 4: Is climate change research only about climate scientists?

Not at all, because the relationship between people and nature under changing climate is both complex and complicated. In addition to hydrological and climatological aspects of climate change, we need multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and even transdisciplinary research to understand, and to prepare and take action against climate change. Let me explain that with an example: When we talk about community-based ‘solar-irrigation systems’, it is not only about using renewable energy technology to grow more food while reducing dependency on fossil fuel. It also includes numerous issues demanding investigation, for example:

• ‘Technology justice’ aspects (i.e., challenges around availability, accessibility, and affordability of modern technology);
• Acceptance and ownership of technology by farmers;
• Minimizing social tension (e.g., conflict between the new users of these irrigation systems in areas with existing fuel-based irrigation providers, as the latter will lose revenue for this innovation);
• Potential additional values (e.g., vegetable cultivation under the solar panels, and supplying surplus electricity and water to the neighborhood);
• How this technology may shift the public-private spaces for women of these farming households;
• Post-installation adaptive management along with sustainable financial models to ensure maintenance of the equipment;
• Scaling up and mainstreaming of the piloted solar-irrigation system; and
• How agriculture, food, and energy policies are responding to these changed scenarios.

Therefore, climate change research can open up collaboration among disciplines which are not usual suspects in climate change research.

Reality Check 5: How would governments’ hostility against climate action affect climate change research?

The climate change-academia relationship is expected to change rapidly over the coming years given the evolving views and values around us. In September 2024, the British Labour Government appointed an Oxford University professor as its new climate envoy. In March 2025, the UK’s NIHR and UKRI pledged to invest UK£ 42 million into seven climate change research hubs involving 47 organizations — almost all are universities and research centers. In January 2025, on the contrary, the 47th president of the United States withdrew the country from the Paris Agreement on climate change, for the second time in eight years.

Let me dig into the US case a bit deeper. The current US administration doesn’t want to understand climate change. It has already cut almost all development assistance, which was US$ 64.7 billion in 2023, including funds allocated to fight climate change. What this means in terms of research on climate change is yet to be fully realized. However, in other sectors like health, reducing NIH funding has already had irreplaceable impacts on biomedical research affecting its annual portfolio of US$ 47 billion supporting 60,000 grant projects engaging 30,000 scientists. While the total amount of annual climate change research funding is difficult to track, and thus it is challenging to estimate US’s contribution to it, some sector-specific numbers are available. During 1985-2022, 9 million publicly-funded research projects on climate change and health were supported with more than US$ 3 trillion. Here, NIH support was only 0.26 percent. Again, while NIH’s overall funding for climate change grants increased from US$ 10 million (2019) to US$ 74 million (2023), it is only a tiny fraction (0.16 percent) of NIH’s total budget. In recent weeks, however, the US House and Senate Committees have been strongly considering a significant cut in the budgets of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) (by 30.8 percent) and the NASA (by 24.3 percent). Such slashing of billions of dollars means that these agencies’ research wings responsible for climate change research and global surveillance programs will become ineffective, if not abolished.

The consequences of these changes in terms of scholarly publishing are not easy to predict at a global scale. Let me share two recent studies on climate change research. During 1997–2023, climate change research made up 15 percent of all research publications produced by global foreign direct investment (FDI)-funded research. While the institutions and funders from China, the US, and the UK supported the highest number of FDI publications, it was China, Pakistan, and Turkey who produced about 60 percent of FDI-climate change publications. Further, during 2000-2023, the US (28.3 percent) led climate change research publications in English, followed by China (15.3 percent). But, in 2022-2023, about 30 percent of global climate change literature was from China, surpassing the US’s outputs.

From the above figures, we understand that current climate change research funding and outputs were not dominated by the US, even in recent years. The current tense relationship between the US administration and research and academia has been, and will continue, affecting young researchers and international students working on climate change to some extent. But it won’t be massive. This is because, although the current US administration does not use the term “climate change,” it is still not against some of the concept and approaches involved, such as resilience, disaster and humanitarian response, community engagement, knowledge mobilization, change monitoring, resource flow, or technological innovation issues which underly aspects of climate action. US academia will need to rephrase its research design as it continues seeking federal funds and collaborating with global researchers.

Also, despite high interest of the international students in post-graduate and PhD degrees from US universities, they won’t wait until the first week of November 2028 to decide where to go to study. The US has already seen a 11 percent drop in international student enrollment in March 2025 compared with March 2024. We will therefore see new avenues of research collaboration and outputs in climate change research in the coming years involving institutions outside of the US — the way global high education system responded to the US’s post-9/11 policies.

Academics working on climate change therefore have dual challenges to face. They not only need to create new knowledge on climate change and mobilize it, but also need to make the research system to be more responsive, adaptive, and transformative to unstable politics.