Addressing inequality in climate research

Towards building open and transparent international comparative research

Kyoto University

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Kyoto, Japan -- Global climate action based on the Paris Agreement is progressing, but concerns have been raised that the future projections and scenarios forming the scientific basis for these actions are biased toward a limited number of regions and research institutions.

Climate research teams have created long-term climate mitigation scenarios known as integrated assessment models, which map the technological feasibility of climate change countermeasures, their associated costs, and their long-term effects. Many of these are model comparison projects, a method in which research teams from multiple countries and institutions conduct model simulations based on similar experimental settings and compare the results.

However, only a limited number of research teams can participate in these projects, and the inevitable result is that they do not adequately reflect diverse global perspectives, in particular those of developing countries.

To address this need, an international research team led by Shinichiro Fujimori of Kyoto University has proposed a more open and transparent international platform for comparative research.

"Our goal is to allow researchers from a wide range of regions to participate, enabling less biased future projections and more reliable analysis," says team leader Fujimori.

The proposed system follows a clear process divided into four major stages. First, researchers propose topics that are reviewed and can be approved by the research community. Then, a protocol will be published describing which model experiments will be conducted along with a research outline. Scholars from around the world can then freely participate based on that protocol, and the scenarios and data created are shared in a common database. Finally, after analyses and quality checks, the results are published and made available for widespread use by governments, businesses, civil society, and educational institutions.

Including a wider range of researchers from more countries may lead to changes in future scenarios. Fujimori's team expects an increase in climate mitigation scenarios that take developing countries into greater consideration, providing a more balanced scientific basis for global climate policy. However, securing the essential training, technical support, and funding may be challenging. Developing countries in particular need diverse funding and long-term support to build the foundations of research systems.

The aim of this proposal is to gradually transition the entire research community to an open system while accumulating these experiences. The research team does not expect to change everything immediately, but they aim to lay the foundation for more equitable and effective climate policy by connecting researchers from around the world and pooling diverse knowledge.

"Climate change is a global issue, and research itself is easily influenced by politics," says Fujimori. "Research should be more inclusive, and while this may mean sacrificing efficiency to a certain extent, I sincerely hope that the scientific community will move in a better direction."

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The paper "Towards an open model intercomparison platform for Integrated Assessment Models scenarios" appeared on 16 October 2025 in Nature Climate Change, with doi: 10.1038/s41558-025-02462-3

About Kyoto University

Kyoto University is one of Japan and Asia's premier research institutions, founded in 1897 and responsible for producing numerous Nobel laureates and winners of other prestigious international prizes. A broad curriculum across the arts and sciences at undergraduate and graduate levels complements several research centers, facilities, and offices around Japan and the world. For more information, please see: http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en

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Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-025-02462-3 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Towards an open model intercomparison platform for Integrated Assessment Models scenarios

Article Publication Date

16-Oct-2025

Democratizing global climate modeling

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

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New proposal procedure

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Credit: Fujimori et al. (2025)

A new international study co-led by IIASA researchers and Japanese partners aims to democratize the way global climate scenarios are developed. The authors propose a transparent, inclusive research platform that invites participation from scientists worldwide – especially from emerging and developing regions – to ensure that the foundations of climate policy analysis are globally representative and equitable.

As the world strives to keep the ambition of the Paris Agreement alive, a new international initiative aims to transform the way climate change research is conducted. The study, just published in Nature Climate Change, responds to growing concerns that the scientific foundations of climate action, such as the scenarios assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are largely produced by a limited number of institutions in Europe and North America. This imbalance risks overlooking the perspectives and priorities of developing and emerging countries.

To address this, the authors propose an open and transparent international research platform that democratizes the process of generating and comparing Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) scenarios – the simulations that explore possible pathways to a low-carbon future.

“Climate change is a global challenge, but the science behind climate scenarios has not always reflected a truly global diversity of views,” explains lead author Shinichiro Fujimori, Guest Senior Research Scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program and professor at Kyoto University, Japan. “Our proposal aims to open up this process so that researchers everywhere can participate, contribute their expertise, and shape the future of climate policy together.”

Under the new system, every stage of model comparison research, from topic selection to data publication, would follow a clearly defined and open process:

• Proposal and approval of model comparison research content: Researchers will submit ideas for model comparison studies covering topics like climate impacts, renewable energy, or land use to a central body. Proposals will be reviewed and approved based on their scientific merit and global relevance.
• Protocol publication: A detailed experimental protocol will be published outlining the study’s design, methods, required data, and analysis procedures. This will also include the requirements for the model and a list of variables that should be submitted as data. This protocol will be widely shared as an international research project, opening the door to participation for researchers around the world.
• Participation and data submission: Approved projects will be open to all, including smaller institutions and researchers from developing countries. Participants will run simulations according to shared rules and upload their results to a common, standardized database. Data will be subject to quality checks to ensure consistency and reliability.
• Review and publication: After verification and corrections, results will be published in academic journals and also made freely accessible to the public. The open data can then be used by policymakers, businesses, educators, and citizens to support climate action and decision-making.

This approach would allow research teams from across the world, including smaller institutions and early-career scientists, to join major integrated assessment modeling efforts. It also emphasizes reproducibility, data transparency, and broad access to model results.

“Opening up the model intercomparison process is about changing the way science itself is done,” notes coauthor Volker Krey, who leads the Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group at IIASA. “By connecting researchers globally and pooling diverse knowledge, we can make our projections more inclusive, more credible, and more useful for real-world climate decisions.”

The paper highlights the importance of building capacity in developing regions, providing technical infrastructure for data sharing, and ensuring sustainable, balanced funding to enable global participation. The authors emphasize that this is a transition plan, not an overnight overhaul, designed to evolve gradually as international collaboration strengthens.

“We envision a climate research community where participation is not limited by geography or resources,” adds IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program Director, Keywan Riahi, who was also a study coauthor. “By creating open systems and shared standards, we can deliver more inclusive, actionable science.”

The proposal also complements ongoing efforts by IIASA and partners through the Scenario Compass Initiative, which aims to enhance openness and transparency in climate scenario development and data sharing. The authors hope that this framework will serve as the foundation for a new era of global, more equitable climate change research, informing future IPCC assessments and helping shape the climate policies that determine the planet’s trajectory in the face of climate change.

“As climate change is a global issue, the research that informs the policies to address this should be more inclusive. While this may mean sacrificing efficiency to a certain extent, I sincerely hope that the scientific community will move in this direction. I personally intend to work hard to achieve this,” Fujimori concludes.

About the Study
This research was conducted under the JST ASPIRE project (JPMJAP2331), with support from the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan (JPMEERF20241001), the Sumitomo Electric Group Social Contribution Fund, and the Bezos Earth Fund through the Scenario Compass Initiative (Grant G-2023-201305841).

Reference
Fujimori, S., Krey, V., Riahi, K., Sugiyama, M., Hasegawa, T., Edmonds, J., Guivarch, C., Paltsev, S., et al. (2025). Towards an open model intercomparison platform for Integrated Assessment Models scenarios. Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02462-3 

About IIASA:
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Our findings provide valuable options to policymakers to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. www.iiasa.ac.at

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Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-025-02462-3 

Article Title

Towards an open model intercomparison platform for integrated assessment models scenarios

Article Publication Date

16-Oct-2025

 

Extreme, multi-year droughts drive cumulative collapse in terrestrial productivity

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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Although many ecosystems can weather several years of moderate drought, consecutive years of extreme dryness push them past a tipping point, resulting in dramatic declines in plant growth, researchers report. The findings – borne from a global experiment spanning six continents – reveal threats to Earth’s grasslands and shrublands as climate extremes intensify. Although most droughts are brief and moderate, the most ecologically and economically damaging events are both prolonged and extreme. Evidence suggests such extreme events are becoming more frequent with ongoing climate change. However, the effects of multi-year droughts on ecosystems remain poorly understood. While some studies show cumulative declines in ecosystem functioning over time, others suggest that ecosystems can acclimate, stabilizing their productivity despite prolonged stress.

 

Here, Timothy Ohlert and colleagues present findings from the International Drought Experiment (IDE), a coordinated multi-year rainfall-exclusion experiment assessing the effects of drought duration and severity on ecosystem productivity in 74 grassland and shrubland ecosystems across six continents. Ohlert et al. found that many ecosystems generally maintained productivity under moderate or less severe, multi-year droughts; although productivity dropped sharply in the first year of drought, they did not continue to decline in subsequent years, indicating ecosystem acclimation rather than cumulative loss. However, extreme droughts (e.g., 1-in-100 year events) resulted in steep and progressively larger declines in productivity as duration increased. The severity of the current year’s drought was the strongest predictor of productivity decline, yet by years three and four, extreme droughts intensified this negative effect. Sites subjected to consecutive extreme drought years experienced the most dramatic impacts, with productivity falling roughly 2.5 times – from 29% in year one to 77% by year four. According to the authors, these cumulative declines are likely due to species mortality, failed establishment, and changes in community composition. “The discovery that the resistance to drought duration of grasslands and shrublands rapidly eroded with prolonged drought of extreme intensity portends an uncertain future for these ecosystems,” Ohlert et al. write, “threatening their long-term stability and the ecosystem goods and services they provide.”

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.ads8144 

Article Title

Drought intensity and duration interact to magnify losses in primary productivity

Article Publication Date

16-Oct-2025

 

Coral skeletons left by a medieval tsunami whisper warning for Caribbean region

University of Washington

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An earthquake between 1381 and 1391 triggered a tsunami in the northeastern Caribbean sea that stranded large coral boulders hundreds of meters inland on Anegada, the northernmost of the British Virgin Islands. A new University of Washington-led study dates the event based on analyses of the coral. Zamara Fuentes, a postdoctoral student at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, is pictured.

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Credit: Brian Atwater/United States Geological Survey

Sometime between 1381 and 1391, an earthquake exceeding magnitude 8.0 rocked the northeastern Caribbean and sent a tsunami barreling toward the island of Anegada.

Flooding scattered debris across the island, depositing coral boulders hundreds of meters inland. The corals died but their skeletons remain. More than six centuries later, scientists are learning that these skeletons hold clues about tsunami history. Computer models showed the flooding likely resulted from a tsunami generated during a large earthquake in the nearby Puerto Rico Trench.

Now, in an open-access paper recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers narrow the tsunami time frame to the last decades of the 14th century. The researchers expect this finding to support ongoing efforts to prepare for future Caribbean tsunamis.

“If you’re designing a school or a hospital near the coast, you want to know whether there’s a chance that a very big earthquake could occur, and you want to design that building to withstand it,” said corresponding author Brian Atwater, a University of Washington affiliate professor of Earth and space sciences and research geologist with the United States Geological Survey.

Anegada is the northernmost of the British Virgin Islands, sitting just south of the Puerto Rico Trench, where the Caribbean and North American plates converge. Most of the islands are protected by a broad, shallow continental shelf. Waves lose energy as they roll across the expanse, decreasing the chances of a tsunami hitting Caribbean shores. Anegada is different — the seafloor slopes steeply toward the deep trench, making the island more hazard prone.

Written records from the northeastern Caribbean go back five centuries, but none provide evidence for a tsunami from the Puerto Rico Trench. Geology allowed the researchers to evaluate tsunami history on a longer timescale.

Researchers began surveying the region after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Indian Ocean in 2004, killing more than a quarter of a million people.

The disaster surprised everyone, including researchers, prompting officials in the U.S. to take a closer look at coastal hazards on the Atlantic seaboard. Uri ten Brink, one of the project leads and a research geophysicist at Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center, asked Atwater to check for signs of similar activity on Anegada. Atwater spent years in Indonesia after the tsunami.

The evidence uncovered on Anegada drew various research teams to the island and produced a series of discoveries.

In the most recent study, led by Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the researchers present a time frame for the medieval tsunami based on how old the coral was when it died.

They calculated age by measuring two radioactive elements — uranium and thorium — that decay at known rates. These measurements were made on samples from the inside of the coral skeletons, due to weathering and potential contamination. The researchers then added the number of annual growth bands between the dated sample and the exterior of the coral to estimate when the tsunami occurred.

“Corals have annual density bands, much like tree rings,” Kilbourne said. “We were able to count how many years passed between the top density bands and the sections we used for dating.”

Kilbourne can also gather valuable environmental data from the coral skeletons, which store information about temperature and salinity, and plans to continue studying the samples to better understand climate change over longer timescales.

For more information, contact Atwater at atwater@uw.edu or Kilbourne at kilbourn@umces.edu.

Additional co-authors include Jennifer Weil-Accardo and Nathalie Feuillet at Paris Institute of Earth Physics; Pierre Deschamps at Aix-Marseille University; Yuan-yuan Xu at the University of Delaware; Chuan-Chou Shen at National Taiwan University and Robert B. Halley at Colorado Mesa University and the United States Geological Survey. 

This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the University of Paris-IPGP, the French National Research Agency, Academica Sinica, the Higher Education Sprout Project of the Taiwan Ministry of Education, the National Taiwan University Core Consortiums Project, the Taiwan National Science and Technology Council.

The tiny figures in this drone photo are standing near one of the stranded coral boulders on Anegada, showing how far inland the tsunami, dated in this study between 1381 and 1391, carried it.

Credit

Michaela Spiske

An earthquake between 1381 and 1391 triggered a tsunami in the northeastern Caribbean sea that stranded large coral boulders hundreds of meters inland on Anegada, the northernmost of the British Virgin Islands. A new University of Washington-led study dates the event based on analyses of the coral. Co-author Robert Halley is pictured beside a specimen.

Credit

Brian Atwater/United States Geological Survey

Journal

Geophysical Research Letters

DOI

10.1029/2024GL114448 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Article Title

Dating a Medieval Tsunami With Uranium-Series Techniques on Caribbean Corals

Article Publication Date

18-Oct-2025

 

Teaching students how to better manage natural resources

UTA faculty revamp a course through an NSF grant to build decision-making skills around water, food and energy

University of Texas at Arlington

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Headshot of Cory Forbes and Silvia Jessica Mostacedo Marasovic

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Credit: The University of Texas at Arlington

Water is one of Earth’s most vital resources, essential for life and critical across industries like agriculture, manufacturing and energy. Understanding its importance and managing it wisely can lead to better outcomes for this precious resource.

To help undergraduate students at The University of Texas at Arlington develop a firmer understanding of natural resources and their importance to society, faculty from the College of Education and the College of Science are revamping a course in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. The effort is supported by a National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grant.

Silvia Jessica Mostacedo Marasovic, postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Higher Education, Adult Learning, and Organizational Studies, said the course—ENVR 2316: Conservation of Natural Resources—will introduce students to the conservation of natural resources such as food, air and water, and give them tools to make informed decisions about their use and management.

“When teaching about decision-making frameworks we will be evaluating real-world scenarios, from which pet should students should adopt or which vacation spot is best—a trip to the beach or a trip to the mountains—to cases about managing resources that require collaboration between various users,” Dr. Marasovic said. “Through the different processes we’ll be introducing, they’ll be able to not only make conscious decisions in their daily life but take it and apply it to real-world natural resource management decisions.”

Cory Forbes, Fenton Wayne Robnett endowed professor and principal investigator, said he and Mostacedo have been researching how to better teach and develop students’ decision-making skills.

To strengthen these skills, the course will incorporate game theory–based teaching methods. This approach helps students understand not only how to make their own informed decisions, but also how different stakeholders and interest groups weigh options and reach conclusions.

“We want our students to be really purposeful in how they think about the complexities of different issues and consider all the factors, evidence and potential impacts before coming to their final decision,” Dr. Forbes said. “It’s a relevant skill in the context of natural resources because there are so many different groups involved, but this decision-making process can be more widely applicable and that’s what makes it unique.”

“This new course is of importance for strengthening the course offering for the environmental science degree program,” said Arne Winguth, chair of the department of earth and environmental sciences. “The course will train the next-generation scientist on sustainable practices in areas like water resources, ecosystem management and land use.”

By the end of the course, students will be able to apply these decision-making skills in their careers and daily lives, contributing to better practices that benefit their communities.

The new course will be offered beginning in fall 2026.

About The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) 

Celebrating its 130th anniversary in 2025, The University of Texas at Arlington is a growing public research university in the heart of the thriving Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. With a student body of over 42,700, UTA is the second-largest institution in the University of Texas System, offering more than 180 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Recognized as a Carnegie R-1 university, UTA stands among the nation’s top 5% of institutions for research activity. UTA and its 280,000 alumni generate an annual economic impact of $28.8 billion for the state. The University has received the Innovation and Economic Prosperity designation from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and has earned recognition for its focus on student access and success, considered key drivers to economic growth and social progress for North Texas and beyond.