Open Access Resources for Climate Change

Climate change refers to “any significant change in measures of climate (such as temperature, precipitation, or wind) lasting for an extended period (decades or longer).” (US Environmental Protection Agency) Current change in climate and atmospheric composition (commonly referred to as global warming, the greenhouse effect, etc.) is widely recognized as potentially dangerous for the biosphere and the well-being of humankind. 

Climate change may result from various factors such as natural factors (e.g. planet tectonics, solar variation, orbital variations, volcanism), natural processes within the climate system (e.g. glaciation, changes in ocean circulation), and increasingly, human activities that change the atmosphere’s composition (e.g. through burning fossil fuels) and the land surface (e.g. deforestation, reforestation, urbanization, desertification, etc.)

Therefore, monitoring, understanding and predicting climate change is a challenge to the scientific community that encompasses many scholarly disciplines such as meteorology, climatology, environmental sciences, earth sciences, ecology, geology, and oceanography. This demands interdisciplinary research. This demands recognizing wide-ranging contributions to the development of methods, tools and evaluation strategies relevant to the study of climate change.

This subject guide includes information on open access resources, mainly journals and online subject-based repositories, for researchers, scientists, and scholars involved in the study of climate change. This guide is also for anyone who is interested in the topic and would like to know what action steps individuals can take to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, save energy, and so on. At the moment, open access literature in this subject field is relatively scarce and many journals are still at the start-up stage. It is the aim of this subject guide to promote open access to research on climate change, and to encourage free, global knowledge sharing in this field.

Select categories from the drop-down menu on the left-hand column for resources of common characteristics.

==================================================================

This subject guide was created in partial fulfillment of the academic requirements for Heather Morrison’s Open Access Course, offered through the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies
(SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia. For more subject guides in other disciplinary areas or other projects relating to open access initiatives, visit the Open Access Course Blog.