No climate change justice in lieu of global authorship equity

Abstract

The 2022 Countdown on health and climate change 1 highlighted the impacts of climate change due to human-made disasters on the overall physical and socioeconomic fabric of human life. This Countdown aims to highlight the global experiences but fails to translate the global point of view in terms of the report's authorship. There is lucidity on this subject from authors from low-income and middle-income countries; but of over 50 authors for this report, only two authors are from such countries. Climate change is a global issue that has no geographical limits to which countries can be severely affected. For example, countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Malawi, Mozambique, Haiti, and Nigeria are on the verge of economic crises due to severe flooding. 2 Environmental degradation has led to a scarcity of water, food insecurity, malnutrition, 3 and pandemics, resulting in overwhelmed economies and thus a rise in mental ill-health. 4 Ghani and colleagues reported in their meta-analysis that only 26·2% of all published articles had an authorship based exclusively or jointly in low-income and middle-income countries. 5 To bridge this gap, we recommend an international approach for coauthoring articles due to the global reach that climate change has, to effectively bridge the climate justice gap.