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: mentions of justice have increased almost tenfold in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group 2 reports between the latest assessment cycles (AR5 and AR6). 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, as well as to 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 share of female authors is 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.

A large-scale transformation of the energy system, which climate mitigation entails, is a global and highly politicized problem. This thematic issue brings together scholars who work with Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)—which are used for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and other key analyses of future climate trajectories—and social scientists working on climate and energy issues to highlight how the two strands of research could benefit from combining insights across different disciplines and methods. One of the key messages across almost all contributions is that the more technical perspectives could benefit from adjusting their assumptions to reflect the patterns observed in quantitative and qualitative social science. Combining different disciplines is methodologically challenging but promising to ensure that the mitigation strategies developed are considered technically and politically feasible, as well as just.

Sustainable irrigation expansion over water limited croplands is an important measure to enhance agricultural yields and increase the resilience of crop production to global warming. While existing global assessments of irrigation expansion mainly illustrate the biophysical potential for irrigation, socioeconomic factors such as weak governance or low income, that demonstrably impede the successful implementation of sustainable irrigation, remain largely underexplored. Here we provide five scenarios of sustainable irrigation deployment in the 21st century integrated into the framework of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which account for biophysical irrigation limits and socioeconomic constraints. We find that the potential for sustainable irrigation expansion implied by biophysical limits alone is considerably reduced when socioeconomic factors are considered. Even under an optimistic scenario of socio-economic development, we find that additional calories produced via sustainable irrigation by 2100 might reach only half of the maximum biophysical potential. Regions with currently modest socioeconomic development such as Sub-Saharan Africa are found to have the highest potential for improvements. In a scenario of sustainable development, Sub-Saharan Africa would be able to almost double irrigated food production and feed an additional 70 million people compared to 2020, whereas in a scenario where regional rivalry prevails, this potential would be halved. Increasing sustainable irrigation will be key for countries to meet the projected food demands, tackle malnutrition and rural poverty in the context of increasing impacts of anthropogenic climate change on food systems. Our results suggest that improving governance levels for example through enhancing the effectiveness of institutions will constitute an important leverage to increase adaptive capacity in the agricultural sector.