Carbon dioxide emissions: Who is responsible and who is actually doing research?

Abstract

During the past century, humans have increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by at least a third, which is considered as the most important long-lived “forcing” of climate change. Scientists all over the world are responsible to do their best on offering practical solutions to reduce the effects of CO2 on environment. This paper uses data envelopment analysis to measure the effects of researches accomplished by scientists from 30 countries which are representative of producing over 80% of CO2 in the world. The study uses 10034 articles published in Scopus database from 1959 to March, 2019. The study uses the amount of CO2 produced by each country as the input and total publications, h-index and I-10 as the output of the DEA model. The results indicate that despite the fact that China was responsible for producing nearly 30% of the CO2, the scientists of this country contributed the least on carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, United Kingdom was responsible for about one percent of CO2 emissions but the researchers of UK performed the best in terms of offering good quality studies.