Scientific coherence in climate change research: a meta-research perspective to accelerate scientific progress and climate justice

Climate change research has expanded at an unprecedented speed, yet its growth has not necessarily translated into proportional advances in global resilience, equity, and climate justice. This Perspective introduces the conceptual framework of scientific coherence, defined as the alignment between the volume, geographic origin, thematic focus, and translational capacity of climate research and the real distribution of climate vulnerability and risk. Using a scoping scientometrics snapshot of Scopus-indexed, final-stage journal publications on climate change (n = 483,333; 1946–2024), we describe structural imbalances favoring high-income regions while low- and lower-middle-income countries, despite being the most affected, remain significantly underrepresented. Under a conservative, title-based filter, only 0.001% of these Scopus-indexed climate-change journal documents were identified as integrating a meta-research perspective, indicating a very small lower-bound share. We argue that climate science requires a systematic evaluation of its evidence-generation system to better assess whether research agendas, funding priorities, and implementation strategies reflect global needs rather than geographic scientific privilege. We propose a four-pillar framework of scientific coherence, geographic, thematic, temporal, and translational, as a pathway to strengthen climate research utility, accelerate policy impact, and embed climate justice into scientific production. This perspective positions meta-research as a useful roadmap for future implementation in high-value, globally relevant climate science, aligning directly with the cross-disciplinary and impact-driven mission of the global scientific progress.