Examining the relationship between climate change-related research output and CO2 emissions

Abstract

Climate change has been a pressing global issue in current times, which has seen many initiative programs set out to try and limit the rise in CO2 emissions globally. The main purposes of this study are to first determine if the importance of climate change research output has increased by undergoing a bibliometric analysis using the Clarivate Analytics core collection (between 1956 and 2019). Findings showed that the overall number of climate change-related research output has gone up exponentially from 1956 up to 2019 and that the proportion of climate change-related papers to total papers has gone up substantially during that period. Next will be to examine the causal dynamics between CO2 emissions, Research Output and expenditure on R&D (GERD), considering the role GDP plays with those variables for the top 50 climate change-related research output producing countries. This study also looks at this relationship by isolating developed vs developing countries and doing an income-based classification between the countries. Panel data techniques were employed as proposed by Emirmahmutoglu and Kose (Economic Modelling, 28: 870–876, 2011) for the period 1996–2019. From the Granger causality analysis, findings showed that causality runs from Research Output to CO2, CO2 to GERD and GDP to GERD for the entire sample. To account for any limitations in the test results, the individual WALD test statistics and p values for every country using the LA-VAR Granger causality method is also reported.