Reports & Papers
Section | Material |
---|---|
Title | The misallocation of climate research funding |
Author | Indra Overland,Benjamin K. Sovacool |
Date | Dec 18, 2019 |
ABSTRACT
The window of opportunity for mitigating climate change is narrow. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require rapid and deep alteration of attitudes,norms,incentives,and politics. Some of the key climate-change and energy transition puzzles are therefore in the realm of the social sciences. However,these are precisely the fields that receive least funding for climate-related research. This article analyzes a new dataset of research grants from 333 donors around the world spanning 4.3 million awards with a cumulative value of USD 1.3trillion from 1950 to 2021. Between 1990 and 2018, the natural and technical sciences received 770% more funding than the social sciences for research on issues related to climate change. Only 0.12% of all research funding was spent on the social science of climate mitigation |