Climate change research within Regional Environmental Change

Abstract

The goal of the journal Regional Environmental Change (REEC) is to publish scientific research and opinion papers that improve our understanding of the extent of environmental changes, their causes, their impacts on people, and the options for society to respond. Reflecting growth of the environmental change field, the journal has expanded rapidly in recent years, with the annual number of published articles reaching 169 in 2014, a more than fivefold increase since 2010, and more than a quarter of all 735 articles published since the journals founding in 1999. To account for this increase, the number of regular published journal issues was increased from 4 to 6 in 2013 and to 8 in 2015. I (James Ford) also joined the journal recently as joint Editor-in-Chief to work with the long-serving Wolfgang Cramer, in part to manage and cope with the everincreasing volume of submissions, but also to help further develop the interdisciplinary profile of the journal, specifically climate change content. This editorial identifies the kinds of climate change content we are looking to profile in REEC in the coming years, while also emphasizing that we continue to welcome and promote the submission of a wide variety of environmental change-focused articles. Naturally, climate change has been a key concern of REEC in recent decades, and since the journals founding approximately half of our published articles have had a climate change focus (n = 374) (Fig. 1). Proportionally, climate change articles have also increased in importance over time and are the focus of a quarter of articles from 1999 to 2009 and 60 % from 2010 to 2015 (Fig. 1). Already in the first 3 months of 2015, more climate change papers were published in the journal than from 1999 to 2008 combined. The impact (and breadth) of climate change articles published in REEC has increased over time and is particularly notable in the Fifth Assessment Report of Working Group II (WGII) to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with REEC articles cited across 26/30 chapters (Fig. 2). The main focus of climate change articles in the journal to date has been on impacts (n = 202, 54 %), where studies identify and evaluate the detrimental and beneficial consequences of climate change on natural and human systems. This focus is intentional: Indeed, we routinely advise authors of papers dealing with climate change processes to submit to expert climatological journals instead. Modeling future impacts in particular has been an important focus in this work, with studies reporting from a diversity of sectors and geographic regions. Vulnerability is the focus of 22 % (n = 82) of climate change-focused articles, with emphasis on the biophysical and human factors which affect sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and resilience to change. These articles began to appear in the journal in the last years of the 2000s, with peaks in 2010 and 2011. A limited number of adaptation studies were published in the first decade of the journal’s existence, but have emerged as an important focus since 2010, forming 24 % of all climate change content (n = 90); this mirror trends in the adaptation literature in general (Berrang-Ford et al. 2011). As the climate change field continues to grow, we expect climate change-focused submissions to further rise, although—like other journals—we will of course always favor quality before quantity. Our interest will be to publish a diversity of studies in the field, emphasizing the interdisciplinary focus of cutting-edge research. We focus & James D. Ford James.ford@mcgill.ca