Learning about climate change solutions in the IPCC and beyond

There has been much debate about the assessment process of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet two of the most fundamental challenges that directly threaten the ability of the IPCC to fulfill its mandate have been largely neglected so far. Firstly, the magnitude and rapid expansion of the climate change literature makes it increasingly impossible for the IPCC to conduct comprehensive and transparent assessments without major innovations in assessment practices and tools. Secondly, the structure, organization and scientific practices across the social sciences and humanities prohibit systematic learning on climate change solutions and increasingly limit the policy-relevance of IPCC assessments. We highlight the need for responses along three avenues to prepare the IPCC for continued success in the future: 1) IPCC assessments must make better use of big-data methods and available computational power to assess the growing body of literature and ensure comprehensiveness; 2) systematic review practices need to be enshrined into IPCC procedures to ensure adequate focus and transparency in its assessments; 3) a synthetic research culture needs to be established in the social sciences and humanities in order to foster knowledge accumulation and learning on climate solutions in the future. As policymakers become more interested in understanding solutions, the future prospects of global environmental assessment enterprises will depend heavily on a successful transformation within the social sciences and humanities towards systematic knowledge generation. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented Global Environmental Assessments.     

Structural anatomy and temporal trends of road accident research: Full-scope analyses of the field

Introduction: Scholarly research on road accidents over the past 50 years has generated substantial literature. We propose a robust search strategy to retrieve and analyze this literature. Method: Analyses was focused on estimating the size of this literature and examining its intellectual anatomy and temporal trends using bibliometric indicators of its articles. Results: The size of the literature is estimated to have exceeded N = 25,000 items as of 2020. At the highest level of aggregation, patterns of term co-occurrence in road accident articles point to the presence of six major divisions: (i) law, legislation & road trauma statistics; (ii) vehicular safety technology; (iii) statistical modelling; (iv) driving simulator experiments of driving behavior; (v) driver style and personality (social psychology); and (vi) vehicle crashworthiness and occupant protection division. Analyses identify the emergence of various research clusters and their progress over time along with their respective influential entities. For example, driver injury severity ” and crash frequency show distinct characteristics of trending topics, with research activities in those areas notably intensified since 2015 Also, two developing clusters labelled autonomous vehicle and automated vehicle show distinct signs of becoming emerging streams of road accident literature. Conclusions: By objectively documenting temporal patterns in the development of the field, these analyses could offer new levels of insight into the intellectual composition of this field, its future directions, and knowledge gaps. Practical Applications: The proposed search strategy can be modified to generate specific subsets of this literature and assist future conventional reviews. The findings of temporal analyses could also be instrumental in informing and enriching literature review sections of original research articles. Analyses of authorships can facilitate collaborations, particularly across various divisions of accident research field.     

Trevor Kletz's scholarly legacy: A co-citation analysis

Dr. Kletz is one the pioneers in the process safety area, known widely for his work on inherent safety design and loss prevention. He worked 38 years in Imperial Chemical Industries, and became a fulltime researcher only after his retirement. He published more than 200 papers and 15 books during his retirement. The intellectual basis analysis presented in this article shows that he frequently cited his books in his articles, indicating that his industrial experience was very influential to his scholarly contributions. Lawley, H.G. was one of the researchers whose work had most influence on Kletz's research. Among Dr. Kletz's publications, the article ‘What You Don't Have, Can't Leak’ has the highest impact, while his most influential book is ‘Process plants: A handbook for inherently safer design’. The references co-citation network is divided in two clearly connected components: his earlier work related to infra-red spectra, and his later work addressing process safety related topics, including inherent safety and hazard and accident analysis. Both his work and that of his followers is rooted in a similar intellectual basis within process safety research, in which particularly Dr. Kletz's earlier work forms an influential original body of knowledge rooted in his industrial experience. His career is a prime example of how process safety research has been strongly influenced by knowledge from industrial practice, illustrating that a continued strong connection between industry and academia can lead to very fruitful outcomes. It is hoped that the presented analysis can inspire especially young graduates with academic interests to first embark on an industrial career to gain industrial experience before aiming to contribute to academic process safety knowledge.     

Plant–pollinator interactions in urban ecosystems worldwide: A comprehensive review including research funding and policy actions

Urbanization has rapidly increased in recent decades and the negative effects on biodiversity have been widely reported. Urban green areas can contribute to improving human well-being, maintaining biodiversity, and ecosystem services (e.g. pollination). Here we examine the evolution of studies on plant–pollinator interactions in urban ecosystems worldwide, reviewing also research funding and policy actions. We documented a significant increase in the scientific production on the theme in recent years, especially in the temperate region; tropical urban ecosystems are still neglected. Plant–pollinator interactions are threatened by urbanization in complex ways, depending on the studied group (plant or pollinator [generalist or specialist]) and landscape characteristics. Several research opportunities emerge from our review. Research funding and policy actions to pollination/pollinator in urban ecosystems are still scarce and concentrated in developed countries/temperate regions. To make urban green spaces contribute to the maintenance of biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services, transdisciplinary approaches (ecological–social–economic–cultural) are needed.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-020-01410-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Sam Mannan and his scientific publications: A life in process safety research

Dr. M. Sam Mannan is one of the true pioneers in the process safety area, spending almost his entire lifetime in process safety and risk research. He was dedicated to ‘make safety second nature’ and published an impressive body of work. An overview of his research helps understanding the process safety area and provides insight in the legacy of this process safety pioneer. In this paper, 327 publications authored by Dr. Mannan from 1999 to 2019 in Web of Science core collection were downloaded and visually analyzed from four perspectives: his publication outputs, collaboration networks, topic areas, and highly cited papers and cited references. The results show a rapidly increasing trend in his research activity, mostly through journal publications. He published in 53 different outlets, with Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries being most frequently selected. Dr. Mannan had a very active and diverse worldwide network, and collaborated with 18 different countries/regions, nearly 90 different institutions and 387 authors. His publications addressed process safety-related topics widely, including safety related to liquefied natural gas, explosions, runaway reactions, inherent safety, flammability and aerosol, and more recently resilience. Dr. Mannan's most cited paper focused on ‘fuzzy risk matrix’, whereas the most frequently cited reference in his work is ‘thermal hazard evaluation by an accelerating rate calorimeter’ by Townsend DI in 1980. Based on his most recent research activity, promising future directions for process safety research include resilience linked to risk assessment and management, for instance through the ‘safety triad’ concept he promoted shortly before passing away.