COP26: inequality in climate research

Why are the countries which currently suffer the most direct health impacts from climate change some of the least likely to publish climate research? In the lead-up to COP26, Prof. Penny Murage of LSHTM discusses the field and her community work in sub-Saharan Africa, and Ayesha Tandon of CarbonBrief talks about her recent piece on inequality in climate research.

Lancet Countdown: https://www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate
CarbonBrief article: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-the-lack-of-diversity-in-climate-science-research

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Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated using speech recognition technology and may differ from the original audio. In citing or otherwise referring to the contents of this podcast, please ensure that you are quoting the recorded audio rather than this transcript.

Gavin: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Lancet voice in the run up to COP 26, it's October. 2021. I'm Gavin Cleaver, and I'm here with my co host, Jessamy Bagnall. So Jessamy, we're talking about inequality in climate change, obviously in the run up to COP26. But it's interesting, isn't it, to analyze the difference between these high level, important talks at COP26.

versus the kind of actual reality of what goes on the ground in countries that would be more easily affected by climate change. And look at the kind of research looking at these kind of lower income Global South countries and the kind of vast difference between between talk and action when it comes to helping those countries.

Jessamy: It's very difficult, isn't it? And I think it's one of the starkest examples that we have because obviously this is, it's similar in lots of different fields where you have these policy frameworks, which are very much removed from, what it's like on the ground. But I suppose for climate change, it feels even more poignant because of the impact because this is our planet.

This is the only one that we have and people's lives are impacted in every single thing that they do. It's not just, Oh there's a, vertical high level approach to vaccination. Obviously that's bad and it doesn't play out on the ground, but for something like climate change is you can't disentangle it from every other part of people's lives.

And so to have such a big disconnect feels wrong. And wrong is not even the word. It just feels. It's hopeless almost. 

Gavin: It is a huge disconnect, isn't it? And people might ask, why is a medical journal looking so intensely into climate change? But I feel like the effects on health are very clear to see, these, this is people in environments that are no longer suitable for them.

that affects their health, people may often have to flee their environments that affects their health. They are. 

Jessamy: But it's interesting, isn't it? Because obviously, historically, this is a, this is something that the Lancet has completely led the way in, in its climate countdown and the work that, that commission and its authors and leaders have done, because, it might seem intuitive now, but over the last 10 years, The interrelationship between climate and health has not always been very well acknowledged at all.

In fact, many, there's been a couple of analysis of sort of UN talks where, health is not even mentioned in climate change only until sort of 2015, 2016, and onwards. So I think. There is a huge knowledge gap there in terms of what the impacts are. We've just published this year our global burden of disease part on, on what the impact of heat and cold is on mortality and morbidity, which shows some very staggering numbers, but that is.

The first time that we've tried to estimate it on a global scale, and it is estimates, but the fact that we don't have anything like that sort of wide, each country, each region, what are the impacts going to be on health? And we don't have that for many other fields. Those knowledge gaps mean that there is an action taken.

and you know that it feeds into this cycle of inertia on climate change. 

Gavin: I should say as well, you mentioned Lancet Climate Countdown there. We did publish the most recent Lancet Climate Countdown last week, and I'll put the link to it in the show notes to this podcast. It's quite a sobering read, isn't it?

Jessamy: It is. There's a great couple of launch events and talks around it that you can click onto. And I really encourage you to do that. But yeah, there, there are not that many positive take homes in terms of progress that we've made over the last year. And I think some of the things that we've circled around with our interview is that.

There was some great hope that COVID 19 might be a tipping point or just really ignite how important this issue is and how important action is now. And I think although there is a definite groundswell and things have changed hugely since, 2018 even in terms of people awareness and people's interest in this topic, we must have the high level policy regulatory framework to make sure.

that people can act in ways and that businesses are incentivized to act in ways that move us towards carbon neutrality because individual level is great, but it can't happen through individual level. It has to happen through this high level process in my view. 

Gavin: So we're about to hear from Professor Penny Mirage, who was up until recently the Co Deputy Director of the LSHTM Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health and is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Epidemiology.

Yeah, let's let's hear from Penny.

Jessamy: It's been a very sort of anxious time in the run up to COP26. There's a lot of pressure on it. There's been lots of leaks. There's lots of speculations over who's going to turn up who's thwarting efforts. How are you feeling about it? 

Penny: I always want to maintain or, some level of hope and optimism.

And I think that's what keeps us going. That's what keeps me going, particularly in this job. But in general, I think, the international agreements have their place. I think they're really important. And I think the discussions are really vital, but I'm much more of a downstream sort of person. So I'm a big advocate for the things that are happening locally and at community level.

And how they interact, with the international discussions. And I'll give you some examples of that work that I'm doing with the local communities later. And my thinking really is because of sort of two main reasons. The first one is that we need to demonstrate impact. We need to demonstrate impact of what COP is achieving, has achieved in the past.

And I think it's really difficult to do that. But when you have actions and interventions and activities happening at community level and at the downstream level, it's much more easier to demonstrate impact. And the other thing is that I feel there's a lot of marginalized, vulnerable communities who are not able to attend this, the summit and this international meetings.

And there, there are maybe a little bit, there's a bit of representations, but a lot of them will not be able to attend. They won't have a voice. And the people attending those meetings will probably go back home to their air conditioned, comfortable homes. And so that sits quite uncomfortably with me. So I don't really get involved with co op.

I see it has a role, it has a vital role, but my focus really is. on with the local communities and the people who will be most affected by climate change. So could you tell us about some of that work Penny? Yeah. So I do two things. So historically I used to do climate change modelling where I modelled the impact of climate change on health.

So looking at heat and cold. And really that was trying to quantify the impact in terms of morbidity and mortality. But more and more, I'm more interested in looking at the solutions. And so a lot of my work now is on looking at nature based solutions. So this is the, it's a very intentional thing where you enhance the natural environment and at the same time deliver multiple benefits to societies.

So it's a bit of a win situation for the environment and also for social economics perspective, but also for health. And some of this work, I'll give you a really good example of what I'm doing in Northern Tanzania. It's a region called Dodoma, quite keen in evaluating the impact of land restoration solutions.

And in Africa, there's a lot of that's happening. A lot of it is led by local communities. So in fact, the work that I'm doing in Tanzania is led by a small NGO called Lead Foundation. And they're using very low cost and sustainable techniques. So they don't plant any trees, they don't water any trees.

What they do is they work with what's on the ground. So tree stumps from trees that were felled years ago, and they regenerate the landscape using that by just managing and pruning of those landscape, those trees. And in that region, specifically in Tanzania, they've managed to restore 6. 8 million trees, which is amazing.

Working with farmers and doing that. And the idea is that they integrate those trees in the agricultural landscapes. Yeah. So trees are integrated in crop lands and grazing lands, and there's benefits. It's beneficial in terms of improved crop yields. better water retention, reduced soil erosion.

What we're finding is that a lot of the health benefits are not quantified, and that's why I come in. So I'm basically just building on what's already happening and trying to quantify the health benefits. 

Jessamy: And when you say you try and stay out a bit of COP26 and this sort of very stark difference between, high level kind of high powered people coming talking about climate change in a very sort of distant manner, not really understanding what's going on in the ground or any of these types of local solutions.

It's crucial that we overcome that. that there is some more connection between those two things. Do you feel hopeful that there will be more of a connection? What do you think can be done to try and build up some of that realization of what's actually happening on the ground and what can be done?

Penny: I'm always hopeful and I always live, like I said, I live a bit of optimism. But I think we need to start listening a little bit more. And I think policymakers and people who are making those decisions really need to go and visit those communities and see exactly what's happening. A lot of them have good positive news.

So they are working with the land to try and adapt better to a changing environment. A lot of the time, they're not very well funded. They just don't have the capacity or the resources. They have the willpower and sometimes, and this is true for the community in Tanzania, they don't really know what.

And then, that's where you get maybe international organizations coming and telling them, this is how you need to manage that landscape. So training, teaching, giving them resources and that sort of thing. But I think we just need to improve the communication lines between the people at the ground level and the people at the very high up.

Jessamy: Do you think that. That plays into it, that actually there needs to be much more of a focus into adaptation and to how communities can change and try and protect some of the environment that we have, despite this very rapid change that we're going through in terms of climate. 

Penny: Yeah, I think there's an element of that.

I think there's an element, particularly because I live in England with all some of my work is in Africa. I think there's an element of particularly in a cold place like England. Oh, it's not hot enough. It doesn't really get hot enough. And so you think, Oh, maybe it will get hot here in the next, I don't know, three, four decades.

But for some of those vulnerable communities who live in the tropics and in, in very hot. Climates. It is a reality. And actually I was watching a BBC recordings that they're doing all this mini clips of how different people are affected. And one that was really heartfelt was a clip of, I think there were goat farmers in Mauritania, in North Africa.

Where, the climate has changed significantly. It was always dry, but it's drier now. And because they don't have anything to feed their livestock and their goats, they were giving them card, cardboard papers to eat. And, that, that sort of thing really hit me. So when you sit in maybe more temperate regions of the world, you don't see, or you don't experience the heating as much as, if you live in, in, in a global south.

And similarly, for people living in the Pacific islands, some of the smaller islands where there's a huge risk of being flooded and being submerged, within decades, really. So it is a reality for a lot of people. And I think maybe we need to do more to spread that message.

And I do think that people are getting it more and more, but I think it will be combined effort and, getting the media involved as well. And I, I'm really glad to see the BBC doing that and the Guardian doing that and other media channels. And 

Gavin: so you mentioned earlier, of course, about people for who climate change is a reality now, it's having an effect on them right now.

But so often in climate research, we see that the people, who are being affected right now, aren't the ones putting out the research, it's still so dominated by the kind of global north researchers. Why is that? And also, what kind of effect do you think that has, if the global north dominates climate research so much?

Does it lead to this kind of sense of 

Penny: Yeah. Yeah. Because, if you're only publishing and producing papers from what you know in the global north and neglecting the global south, that's a huge mismatch. I think I always advocate for fundamental changes in the funding structure and I came across some statistics in, in some recent papers.

So there's a paper that came out I think it was a couple of months ago that said only 3. 8 percent of global funding for climate change is. spent on African topics and just to make it a little bit more worse out of this 3. 8%, a lot of that funding goes to institutions based in Europe and North America.

So about 78 percent of that, so meaning African institutions only receive about 14. 5 percent out of that pot. Which is a huge mismatch really, because if you think about, and not just Africa, I'm just using Africa because that's where a lot of my work is based, but it's true for all the developing countries in Latin America, in Asia and in the Middle East.

And the mismatch really comes, plays in the fact that the vulnerability will be in those developing countries. So they're the ones who are most affected. So they need to be owning their research and they need to be owning. the solutions as well. And just to give you a paper about a few more statistics.

So this was from the wild resource Institute, and they had some statistics from the green climate funds. So the GCF, which is a huge initiative that was created to support an effort. Particularly in just develop developing countries. Yeah. And so some of the recent data from the GCF showed that out of the 1.2 billion pounds funding for about 15 climate change projects, only 2% of that went directly to developing countries institutions.

And so this is a fund that was purposely created for, to fund. Projects in developing countries and yet a lot of that money is not feeding into those into those countries. So I think there is there's a problem and it needs to change, really. And I think developing countries need to own, they need direct access to some of those fundings.

And like I said, there's a lot of good action that's happening there, but it just needs to be well resourced and well supported. 

Gavin: Do you think this kind of inequality in climate change research has a direct effect on the kind of direction of travel of climate change research? 

Penny: I think he probably does have an effect.

I think if policymakers are using research or research output to make decisions and that research is missing from some of those developing countries, I think it will have an effect in terms of what we find in the solutions that we have, because if there's no evidence, then people tend to do nothing.

So we need to be generating more evidence. 

Gavin: What are some of the kind of fundamental reforms that you're interested in? 

Penny: I think I, the first one is how do we address the knowledge gap? How do we improve the capacity for the developing nations to do their own research and to own that research and to build more evidence?

Because I think, clearly they understand the situations and the problems better. So how do we build capacity for that? The other thing is that I talk about a lot is how do we demonstrate impact? Cause I don't think we are demonstrating impact on some of the intervention and solutions. And a lot of money goes into some of those interventions and solutions.

And we still don't know what is the how do they work? How are they being implemented? Are they effective? Are they not? How can we scale them up in other parts of the world, for instance? Yeah, so I'd say more evidence and more demonstration of impact will be my two key points. Probably the other thing I want to talk about is there's a lot of focus on climate change.

It's a big issue. But it's only one of the problems. There are very many other that we should be talking about. Global loss of biodiversity is a huge one. Changes in soils and soil cycles and water cycles, loss of freshwater. It's all happening. So let's try and look at some of those other issues as well and not just climate 

Jessamy: change.

So having the broadest definition of climate change as in trying to encompass all of those other aspects, biodiversity, clean water and everything else. We often just focus on like at the moment, I think we've been fairly focused on heat and, that how that impacts mortality, morbidity, because we've done some, big GPD papers and things like that.

And you tend to go through those cycles of focusing on one particular aspect, but actually it is, it's our environment, it's our world. And therefore it includes every single aspect of it. And it impacts. every single one of us in, in, in a myriad of different ways. 

Penny: And I think COVID 19 pandemic was a really good reminder of all that.

We still don't know where COVID came from, it's suspected that it had a zoonotic origin. And I was reading somewhere that up to 75 percent of all emerging diseases have a zoonotic origin. I 

Jessamy: think it has been. a wake up call in some ways, although I feel that now we're backtracking on that and very much wanting to forget about it and go back to the way things were whereas it was, it feels like such an opportunity, but I'm not sure that anybody's going to take it.

Penny: Yeah. And I actually, I was thinking about it. So the opportunity is that it has brought at least from where I'm sitting, it has unified different perspectives. So not just looking at. Health, but health and the environment and also the economic aspect. So now I think people are there's a little bit more cross disciplinary thinking.

Jessamy: I think people are more alive to that intersectional approach, aren't they? Definitely. But I still don't feel that there's a political will to act on it to say, certainly in this country, we don't get, see any examples that there is. 

Penny: Yeah. And actually relating that to the funding thing again, one of the things that we really grapple with is obtaining funding to fund projects that don't sit on just one discipline.

So funding projects that look at the environment and health together, it's really difficult to obtain that because a lot of the funders just want to. They want to tick box. Yeah. Yeah. And also they want to be very focused either on health or the environment, but not both. That's a great 

Jessamy: shame, isn't it?

Because as we've just said there's no way Disentangling one from the other or economics, we must try and embrace that complexity in some form, but. 

Penny: And there are ways of breaking it down, we can apply ecosystem frameworks to understanding health, for instance, and it's something that, we should be doing more, but I don't think we are it's really difficult to do it, but you can't break the complexity if you really.

Jessamy: Gavin, we've been involved in and have heard lots about the Lancet's work on trying to promote equity in authorship. And it's something that we face across lots of different specialties and lots of different fields. But this carbon report that we read was shocking and mentioned the Lancet nature science by name.

And I think we felt that we really needed to cover it and to explore it in more detail and what its impact is on The direction of climate change action, and it was great to speak to Aisha and she, I think, has a fresh perspective and a great one for this. 

Gavin: Yeah, it's really important to talk about, isn't it?

And like you said, so much of. What you'll hear in the upcoming interview is, a kind of standards of how research is conducted and we talk about these extremely broad terms I'm not obviously, but we'll talk about those in the interview as well, the interests of them But the global north versus the global south, the kind of high income countries research and low income countries research so much of the problems that we've talked about with these kind of with high income countries doing research involving low income countries, but not giving them any of the credits and then really not actually getting anything out of it, so to speak.

We did a podcast earlier this year that was hosted by the excellent Mandeep, who's on our Lancet Voice team, talking about what's wrong with global health. And doing this interview with Ayesha, it just struck me how many of those problems are repeated. within climate change. How awful that is, because as we heard from Penny just then, climate change is affecting these communities now.

The health problems are obvious to us now, and this kind of research gap really exacerbates those inequalities. 

Jessamy: Yeah, the term is parachute and helicopter research, isn't it? Where high income countries go in and do some research and then actually publish it in a very Eurocentric or global North American journal.

It's looked at and read from the majority of people from high income countries and give very little back to that country and nothing actually happens as a result of that research. And it goes hand in hand with this decolonizing global health agenda where we've realized and recognized and are yet to fully act on the sort of imperial culture backdrop that all of our research that we do is based on.

And we don't yet fully, I don't think, I don't think we fully appreciated it. We don't have the mechanisms in place to fully negate it. There was recently a consensus statement on measures to promote equitable authorship in the publication of research from international partnerships by a group who.

very much called for a list of recommendations. And you can look them up that tries to mitigate some of these issues and their things around the lines of, the fact that each piece of research would have to have a statement from the authors saying how this has. Impacted that community, what the sort of activities to support research capacity, both personnel and infrastructure are going to be in addition to the normal details that we would require from an authorship manuscription.

That's not something I don't think that The Lancet has taken up yet, but it might be something that we move towards in the future, because we definitely need to have more structured ways of dealing with this issue, and we're doing lots of Lancet for it, but there's much, much more to be done.

Gavin: It's very much kind of the opening barrage, isn't it? It's like the very beginning of understanding what this problem is and how much it affects the impact of research. 

Jessamy: Yeah, I still feel we're very much in the realization. Just starting to try and lift the veil and see the problem for the first time in its realness and sit with how uncomfortable that is.

Gavin: Without further ado, let's hear from Ayesha Tandon, who is a science journalist at Carbon Brief.

Jessamy: Ayesha, thanks so much for joining us. I read with great interest this analysis of the lack of diversity in climate science research, and you particularly mentioned the Lancet, as well as nature and science. I just wondered what the background is behind it, why you felt it was important to do. Great, 

Ayesha: thanks.

It's great to be here. As you said, I'm a journalist. And a lot of my job is to write up scientific papers. What I found in the past year of being a journalist at Carbon Brief is that these papers seem to exclusively have authors from the Global North. So that's Europe, that's North America, that's Australia as well.

Can't forget that Australia is also in the Global North. I found that it was very rare that one of these papers was published by someone in the global south. It was also fairly rare that they were published by women. And so I started wondering how big this inequality actually is. Was it some kind of sampling bias of the papers that I was interested in?

Or was this a more systemic issue that was affecting a lot of the world of science and climate science in particular? And so that's what really birthed this project, which I then spent about four months working on. I think it was really quite an undertaking. 

Gavin: So you mentioned in your article, the Reuters hot list, which, is the thousand most influential climate scientists and the diversity, the lack of diversity in that list is pretty shocking.

It's only got five African scientists, only 122 of the authors in that list are female. Do you think that's representative of the kind of diversity problem that climate research has? Do you think it has maybe even a slightly bigger diversity problem? And where do you think it sits versus other kind of research fields as far as 

Ayesha: you know what, Kevin, I'm really glad you brought up that Reuters hot list because that list generated a lot of discussion when it was first published and actually was quite controversial. So I think maybe I should just give a little bit of background about that list. It was published in April of 2021, and it aimed to rank the 1, 000 most influential climate scientists.

And it did this using three factors. It looked at how many research papers the scientists had published, how often the papers were cited, and then the social presence of the scientists. So how often they were mentioned in the press, how big their social media presence was, for example. And there was a big long piece that went with this list, which praised a lot of the individuals that featured a couple of them and so obviously institutions were very proud when they had their scientists on this list and publicized it a lot and it generated quite a lot of hype.

But then there was also this big backlash against the list as well because In scientific circles especially, but even on social media and the wider press, people were realizing how much this list was lacking in diversity. As you said, there were only five Africans. I think fewer than one in seven people on the list were women.

And so the list was a really interesting piece of work. I should emphasize this. It was an interesting piece of analysis. It was eye opening. But unfortunately, I think it missed an opportunity because it really praised the scientists on the list. Rightly, they're fantastic scientists, but it didn't know the lack of diversity anywhere in the list except for on one page, which was a feature of Corinne Lequeur, who is a female climate scientist who, by the way, did some fantastic work on the drop in CO2 emissions caused by COVID.

So in the feature on her, it mentioned that she was one of the few women on the list, but otherwise throughout the entire project, it didn't mention the lack of diversity anywhere. It didn't mention that this could be a problem. It didn't mention that. There are systemic biases or how this way of determining the influence of a scientist could be skewed towards the global north.

And in my mind, and clearly that of many other scientists, celebrating individuals who all came from not only the same countries, but often the same institutions, the same research groups without mentioning any of these other issues was a bit of a tone deaf way to approach the problem. And so I think that list.

Highlights very clearly the biases that are present in climate science. I think it maybe went about doing it in the wrong way. So when I went to conduct my study, I also looked at the lack of diversity in climate science. And so I looked at the 100 most highly cited. Climate science papers over the past five years.

I looked at specifically reputable or prestigious journals such as nature or science, etc. And I can go through my results in a minute. But as well as doing this analysis, I looked at the systemic biases. I interviewed scientists. I talked to people about why we were getting these results. So I think that's really the important thing.

Gavin: Yeah, so why don't you tell us a little bit about what you found in your research, and maybe illustrate some of these kind of structural problems and systemic biases. 

Ayesha: In these 100 papers that I looked at, there were roughly 1300 authors, maybe a bit more. So I found that 90%, 9 out of every 10 authors came from the global north.

So that's Europe, that's North America, that's Oceania And that only 10 people were affiliated with institutes in Africa and that half of those were affiliated with South Africa, which is quite a wealthy African nation. Then if you look at the gender imbalance, I found that only about 122. About 122, exactly 122 out of these 1300 authors were women.

But then the thing that I found interesting was that the inequalities basically get even worse when you look at just the lead authors. So the lead author on a paper is the first listed author, and they're generally considered to be the most important. Although in different fields, I think that convention changes slightly.

But if you look at the lead author, these inequalities worsen even further. So only 12 of the lead authors were women, so 12 out of 100. And there were none from Africa or from South America at all. So this is showing that not only were there, there biases, but that These biases even within individual papers can be amplified if you just look at the order the authors are listed, which is something that I wasn't really expecting.

I think that's the thing that actually surprised me the most. 

Gavin: Yeah. Would you say you were shocked when you found these? I guess do you think it's one of those situations where maybe you were suspecting it, but you were still a bit surprised by the scale of it? 

Ayesha: I think that's exactly how I would characterize it.

I was expecting these exact patterns, but I was just surprised by how widespread they were. I think the thing that I found sad, if anything, is that none of the other academics I spoke to were surprised. And I mainly spoke to women and people from the Global South. None of them were surprised at all. I asked them all, did anything shock you?

And pretty much universally, I got no. A couple of people were shocked by the lead author findings, that there was no one from Africa or South America leading a paper. But none of them were as surprised as me, because they'd all been part of this system for so long. Which For me it was really sad. 

Jessamy: And we should say here that, this extends well beyond climate research.

We see this in all categories of STEM kind of fields, that there is a real lack of inclusion and diversity when it comes to authors. And that's something that The Lancet, as we've spoken before, is really trying to address. What are the knock on impacts of having this lack of diversity? How is it relevant for COP26?

Ayesha: That's a really good question. So I'd like to just start by saying I think there's a very cruel irony that some of the countries that have contributed the least to global emissions and are now being hit the hardest by climate change are now really struggling to make their voices heard. So I'm talking specifically about sort of countries in Africa and South America.

And so I think it's really important to emphasize here that a lot of people think of science as this perfectly unbiased, smooth, perfect process, that it's neutral, that it doesn't matter who conducts science, the results will be the same anyway. And that's just not true. Science has always reflected the society that it's conducted in, the cultural views at the time, people's upbringing, people's scientific training.

So who conducts the science is going to make a difference to what kind of outputs they get. That's inevitable. One of the scientists that I spoke to in my research called this an individual's social and cultural baggage which I thought was quite a nice way of explaining it. So basically what I'm saying is scientists are people, right?

They made decisions What questions to investigate, how to carry out research, how to analyze findings based on their experiences. And so if we have predominantly men from the global North carrying out research, then they're going to generally speaking, have similar problems. They're going to be aware of similar issues.

They'll have similar opinions and they're not going to be searching for knowledge in new ways. For example, one of the studies that I found in this research shows that climate science is really biased towards cooler climates. And it found that's because the people conducting this research are from the global north where the climate is cooler.

And so we're basically creating this massive gap around the needs of women and scientists from the global south, people from the global south, who, as we've already said, are some of the most vulnerable. So if we don't include these voices, we really miss out on the knowledge and the perspectives that these people could bring to the table.

One of the other scientists highlighted to me that climate change is a global problem, and a lot of the issues really can only be experienced on the ground by the people who live them on the day to day. And if you don't bring those people into the conversation, you're just not going to understand what those issues are and how to solve them.

Jessamy: Yeah, and I suppose I always feel slightly uncomfortable when we use Global North and Global South so much, and we didn't talk about that before the start of this interview, but on the one hand, it's a very blunt tool for dividing up the world. On the other hand, it is a shorthand for talking about.

Countries that are either low middle income countries and higher income countries or countries who don't necessarily have the clout to be able to work on a sort of global multilateral level. And aren't, included on the World Bank boards or, all of these other places.

So I just want to quickly say that because we're using it a lot and I don't know how you feel about it as a term. 

Ayesha: No, absolutely. It is an interesting one. And actually when writing the piece, there was a a thought process to. How do we present these results? And so we did plump for Global North and Global South in the end because it is a very easy way of dividing the world into these two categories.

But obviously, even within continents, even within much smaller regions of the world, even within individual countries, there are going to be biases in different ways, right? For example, as I mentioned, South Africa has half of all the authors from Africa because of how it's developed as a country.

Or if you look at Asia, there are many countries that aren't referenced at all. And then China is responsible for roughly half of the climate research output of Asia. So as you said, it's not a perfect way of dividing the world up. But yeah, one that we use a lot, 

Jessamy: isn't it? So it's just how it is.

And at the Lancet, we do, we are doing, we are trying to do a lot about this and particularly research that is about a local area. We won't. Really consider it unless they have local authors that is a, that's a policy that we have across all of our journals. 

Ayesha: I think that's really brilliant. There was one paper that I found, Oh, I'm going to get the number wrong now, but it was looking at the grant money that goes to countries in Africa to research projects.

in Africa. And I found that only 15 percent of all the grant research money that goes to African studies about countries in Africa, actually go to local people. I think about 80 percent went to Europe and North America, although that number might not be completely correct. And 

Jessamy: I wanted to ask you about that sort of in particular when we think about how science progresses and although climate change science is pretty old now, it's impact and it's relevance for now has become more and more important.

The sort of the focus on it is much greater now than it was, say, 10 or 15 years ago. And I just wondered what you thought about when we have these fairly. Novel, newer areas. Is that the bias that funding bodies and grant bodies, they don't want to take a risk on unknowns. So it makes it even harder for these types of areas to have some kind of equality in authors because funders, grant bodies, they're more likely to go to the established people who are, at a very prestigious university in, the UK or in North America, because they think that's going to guarantee them results rather than going for unknown people who, might not have that, those sort of credentials 

Ayesha: and how we might try and overcome that.

I think that's definitely an issue. As I mentioned, I spoke to many scientists from the Global South and female scientists and got a huge number of opinions on the different biases that they face, but it definitely is one that bodies giving out grants, A, do not publicize themselves as much to countries in Africa, for example, because they don't think that they even have the capacity there.

B, the countries in Africa also are not trained on how to apply for these research grants as well. So they might have a fantastic idea, but they don't know how to write the grant often in the way that it needs to be written because they haven't received that formal training early on in their career.

And then C, there is that bias, as you said, against institutions which aren't considered prestigious. So that's actually a bias that even feeds through into paper publishing. There have been studies that show that there's a sort of gatekeeping process in the peer reviewers of papers. So the peer reviewer is the person who gets sent the paper after it's sent to the journal to assess the quality of the science.

And there's a gatekeeping effect there too, where if peer reviewers don't know which institution a paper comes from, they're much more likely to accept papers from the Global South. So it really is inequalities just stacked on top of each other. 

Jessamy: Another way that we try and address it is by making sure that we're having, we've got a really strong push for inclusion and diversity of our peer reviewers, because that feeds into this cycle.

Because if they're not people who have this sort of local expertise and knowledge of how this, these biases and systems work, then that influences their review for us. And we as editors have to be able to be aware of that and interpret that and therefore aim to invite reviewers that are going to be representative of a much broader conversation.

Ayesha: I think another thing that was suggested is blind and double blind peer reviewing, grant funding processes, that kind of thing. That's one of the measures that a lot of the scientists I spoke to were quite in favor of. 

Gavin: It's interesting, isn't it? All this kind of lack of objectivity and kind of bias towards high income researchers, high income grant bodies that are used to dealing with, grants from high income bodies.

It's all gatekeeping, isn't it? What we're talking about. But none of these structures are purposeful, but keeping them in place and just allowing them to function as they have been is itself a kind of purposeful act. Upholding these structures contributes to the problems we've been talking about.

Ayesha: Exactly. So I think one of the things that's really important to remember is that these systems didn't spring up overnight. They're based on hundreds of years of colonialism. And the way that Western science has been produced for many hundreds of years is. in part, based on exploiting poorer nations.

That's just the way that science has happened. So there's one phenomenon called parachute science. It is also known as colonial science, which is when researchers from the global north fly over to a developing country. Say Columbia, where they have really good biodiversity research and forests and a lot of data that can be gathered there.

Researchers will fly over, they'll gather the data and then they'll leave without contributing to. Anything in that local country without contributing to their science capacity or their training. Or maybe if you take it a step down and it's not quite parachute science, still when the researchers from the global north fly over, they will see their local collaborators more as assistants rather than as equals.

And all of this is based on these long ingrained power structures and inequalities. In the way that scientists from different countries see each other. This is obviously something that I haven't personally experienced, but it's based on the experiences of many of the scientists I talk to. And I think that is one of the things with collaborations that can be very tricky.

Often countries, often scientists from developing countries choose to collaborate because they don't have the equipment in their country or the computing power or the funding. And so they choose to collaborate with Countries from the global north to get those resources. And then when they do, they find that they're working with this power imbalance and they can't get what they need out of the research anyway, that may be not considered as knowledgeable.

They're not listed high up on papers that may be treated more as field staff or as assistants than as equals. They also maybe don't get as much of a say in how to conduct the project because the scientists from the global north will get the funding, which means they get to design the project and decide on the questions.

Again, it really is many factors 

Jessamy: that all play into this. So what do you think, what's next for you and the afterlife of what you fell into? 

Ayesha: I am really excited to go to COP26, the Conference of the Parties next week. I don't know when this podcast is going live, but for me it's next week.

It's going out this week, so we 

Gavin: should still be fine with that reference. 

Ayesha: There you go. Fantastic. And so I think that's going to be great because that's going to be an opportunity to meet lots of diverse scientists and to talk to them about their thoughts on climate change and to learn about new papers that they have coming out.

So I really hope I'll use that opportunity to meet lots of people from different countries and hopefully then in the future use some of those people in my pieces rather than relying on my typical experts that I've come to know quite well from local institutions. COP has already been delayed a year due to COVID and so it's actually unsure how many delegates from the Global South can make it due to vaccines and quarantining costs.

There is still a question around how inclusive COP's going to be, like how many experts there actually will be there from different countries. I guess that's something to see when I get there though. 

Jessamy: Yeah, it's funny, isn't it, to have such an important and global conference and for us to still be very uncertain about who is going to be attending.

It feels strange, it feels a bit haphazard, and I find it quite anxiety producing, I 

Ayesha: think. It is, I'm definitely nervous about it. It's going to be my first COP, so nervous anyway. But yeah, no, seriously, I've been talking to quite a few scientists from the Global South and saying, Oh, will you be at COP?

Can we meet up? And a lot of them have been saying no, I decided not to go because of COVID, because of costs, x, y, z. And actually this COP, governments were really angling for this COP to be quite an inclusive event and some activists were protesting in recent months that it actually might be one of the most exclusionary COPs that we've had to date.

I think it is going to be a really interesting event. Obviously a lot of it is based on climate justice as well. There's this whole hundreds billion dollar pledge that rich countries haven't met yet for poorer countries. And I think a lot of COP will be based on whether that happens. So a lot of stuff is really up in the air at the moment.

I guess we'll see when it happens.

Gavin: so much for listening to this episode of the Lancet voice. If you're interested in finding out more, you can of course go and read our Lancet Countdown that's on thelancet. com and I'll post a link, as I said, into these show notes. As well as that, The Lancet will be offering a lot of coverage during COP26 and you can again visit thelancet.

com to see more about that. But thanks so much for listening and we look forward to seeing you again after COP26 when we'll be discussing what happened at COP26 and where we go from here. Thanks again.