Women are under-represented in adaptation policy research and are more likely to emphasise justice topics

This paper is the first to analyse the role of women authors in fostering justice-relevant topics in climate adaptation research.
As representation, citation and payment patterns remain gender-biased across scientific disciplines, we explore the case of climate science, particularly adaptation, as its most human-oriented facet. In climate research and policy, there has been a recent surge of interest in climate justice topics. Between the latest assessment cycles of the IPCC (AR5 and AR6), mentions
of justice in the reports of the Working Group on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability have increased almost 10-fold. We conduct a systematic examination of the topic space in the adaptation policy scholarship. As it is a vast and rapidly growing field, we use topic modelling, an unsupervised machine learning method, to identify the literature on climate justice and related fields and examine the relationship between topic prevalence and the gender of the authors. We find climate change adaptation policy research to be male dominated, with women holding 38.8% of first and 28.8% of last authorships. However, we observe topic-specific variability, whereby the shares of female authors are higher among publications on justice-relevant
topics. Female authorship is highly linked to topics such as Community, Local Knowledge, and Governance, but less to Food Security and Climate Finance. Our findings corroborate the evidence that female authors play a significant role in advancing the research and dialogue on the relationship between climate change and areas that have meaningful impact on lives of women and other marginalised groups.