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UKCIP Climate Digest
Why is UKCIP undertaking this activity?
Activity 1.1 of the business plan requires UKCIP to establish a procedure for monitoring and sharing developments in climate change impacts and adaptation within the team, to stakeholders, and Defra.
Activity 4.1 of the business plan requires UKCIP to produce a monthly Climate Digest for the Customer, identifying and summarising new research on impacts and adaptation appearing in key academic/scientific publications.
How do we do it?
A monthly literature search is conducted to identify relevant research for each of 3 key areas of UKCIP’s work:
- Climate change science
- Climate change impacts
- Climate change adaptation and decision making
The information is collated and summarised into a short (2-3 page) document providing the headline messages from key papers. Full references for each article included below the summary. Reference details for papers of peripheral interest may also be provided in the table, but these papers are not necessarily discussed in the summary.
Key journals (eg. Science, Nature, New Scientist, Climatic Change, Climate Research, Global Environmental Change Part A) are searched electronically on a weekly or monthly basis (depending on publication frequency) either directly with the journal, or using TDNet, an electronic journals management system to which the University subscribes.
A host of other journals are searched monthly through electronic search and e-alerting services provided by publishers. Keywords have been registered with a number of publishers (SpringerLink, ScienceDirect, Blackwells Synergy, Earthscan). A monthly email is sent out listing newly published articles containing the specified keywords. These services enable UKCIP to monitor dozens of journals for relevant literature without having to search each one in turn.
Sector-specific journals which only occasionally contain climate change related articles, and whose publishers do not offer electronic alerting services, will be searched individually on a quarterly basis.
In order to limit the scale of the activity, the search is limited to new literature published during the relevant month. We have taken April 2005 as the starting point for including papers: anything published prior to that will not be included unless it is particularly important or topical.
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