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

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 CO 2 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 CO 2 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 CO 2 , CO 2 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.