Geography and environment

In this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and ‘ Geo Themes’ being developed: ‘Decolonising Climate Geography’; ‘Climate Change, AI and Sustainability’; ‘Geographies of Energy Futures’. The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topics and put out a new call for Special Section proposals on subjects around the environment, climate and sustainability. In our first Editorial as the new team of Editors at Geo (Bickerstaff et al., 2023, p. 1), we set out our hopes for the journal as a repository for ‘innovative, experimental and impactful scholarship—addressing some of the biggest environmental challenges facing society today through a distinctly geographical lens’. We also talked about Geo 's commitment to collaborative research, celebrating the opportunities of Open Access to support novel formats, expand our readership and build a diverse Geo community.


Abstract
In this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and 'Geo Themes' being developed: 'Decolonising Climate Geography'; 'Climate Change, AI and Sustainability'; 'Geographies of Energy Futures'.The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topics and put out a new call for Special Section proposals on subjects around the environment, climate and sustainability.
In our first Editorial as the new team of Editors at Geo (Bickerstaff et al., 2023, p. 1), we set out our hopes for the journal as a repository for 'innovative, experimental and impactful scholarship-addressing some of the biggest environmental challenges facing society today through a distinctly geographical lens'.We also talked about Geo's commitment to collaborative research, celebrating the opportunities of Open Access to support novel formats, expand our readership and build a diverse Geo community.
Over the past 12 months, we have seen an exciting response to this vision.Since the start of last year, Geo is increasingly becoming a key journal for those seeking to access the cutting edge of environmental geography scholarship.Last year saw a 44% increase in the number of paper views, a 67% increase in the number of papers published and a 75% increase in submissions to the journal.Our intention in this editorial is to review and showcase Geo contributors over the past year, highlighting some of the critical issues and agendas that are defining Geo as a home for new conversations and communities, and to set out how we see this progressing over the next year.We also want to take this opportunity to welcome six new colleagues this year, who join representatives from the 'Geo Themes' on our Editorial Board: Dr Biadgilgn Demissie (Mekelle University, Ethiopia), Dr Kauê Lopes dos Santos (State University of Campinas, Brazil), Dr Collins Adjei Mensah (University of Cape Coast, Ghana), Dr Meg Parsons (University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand), Prof. Nahid Rezwana (University of Dhaka, Bangladesh) and Dr Thomas Thaler (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria).
Geo has established itself as a global platform for environmental geography research and thinking.Reflecting our mission to reach a global geographic audience, 56% of our submissions in 2023 came from outside of the UK, Europe or the United States: a significant proportion within the discipline.Furthermore, our largest continental cohort of authors came from Africa, with lead authored submissions from African institutions accounting for 21% of all submissions, followed by European (19%) then Asian institutions (16%).Published articles have focused on important environmental topics from around the world.Geo authors (Akaateba et al., 2023;Odame et al., 2023) have, for instance, led recent discussions around disability, exclusion and public transport provision in Ghana.Both Odame et al. and Akaateba et al. address questions of marginalisation and the social and material structures that create barriers to public transport use, and raise practical implications for policy actors in the region.
Our top accessed papers cover a significant geographical and thematic range, from an analysis of sustainable urbanisation in Ethiopia (Mekonen et al., 2023), where uncollected trash frequently covers open areas in cities, creating miniutopias for rodents and mosquito-borne disease carriers, to the livelihood benefits arising from cashew farming (Yeboah et al., 2023) and urban greening in Ghana (Duku et al., 2023).A highly read and topical multi-country study of e-waste in the UK, Brazil and Ghana (Lopes dos Santos & Jacobi, 2022) bridged these areas of geographical expertise, highlighting This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).© 2024 The Author(s).Geo: Geography and Environment published by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
the global geography of the sustainability challenges generated in our shared but unequal economy.Geo is providing a space for such global conversations, in a way that not only fosters innovative scholarship but also makes it visible and available to those who need it.
Our aim at Geo, though, is more than simply providing a place for the world to publish on environmental issues.Above all, we aim to be a journal that responds to the needs of our diverse community, facilitating the flexibility necessary to respond to pressing environmental issues in the way that best suits their communication.To this end, we have been working to reduce decision times in order to ensure that papers reach their audience as quickly and as rigorously as possible.The year 2023 saw the average time from submission to first decision fall to 86 days.Flexibility and a capacity to respond to current issues and debates have long been central to the aims of Geo and are very much reflected in the range of formats we offer and our commitment to publish research that is open, accessible and intelligible to all.As we outlined in last year's editorial, we are keen to create opportunities that afford authors the flexibility necessary to communicate novel environmental scholarship in the way that best suits the message.This means tailoring article lengths to authors' needs and incorporating novel forms of data where appropriate, from embedding video and audio media to incorporating large primary datasets.We encourage prospective authors to experiment with a range of innovative formats in their submissions to the journal.
Since January 2023, we have worked with authors to produce pieces ranging from 2,000 to more than 12,000 words, either as standalone pieces or as part of linked conversations.We are also developing a programme of conversations between authors, in order to establish a dialogue on new and emerging environmental agendas and to bring different perspectives (of geographic context, interdisciplinarity, academic and professional and variety of career stages) to bear on an issue or debate.For instance, James Dyke and George Monbiot ( 2024) have recently co-authored a forthcoming dialogue on the role of universities at a time of climate and ecological crisis.This is a hugely important topic, and the authors raise many challenging questions for our community.We would certainly welcome responses to this and our other dialogue pieces.
In a similar vein, we also see Geo as a key space for collaborative conversations and publications in environmental geography.We know that there are many aspects of doing environmental geography (opportunities, challenges and concerns) that are discussed in our communities, but do not make it to publication and/or are not deemed sufficiently 'academic' or 'on topic'.At Geo, we are keen to widen the scope of what is publishable to include issues around PhD processes; career progression; Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; fieldwork practices and so on.A recent piece by a group of PhD students at Exeter University (Lait et al., 2024) offers a great example of the sorts of issues we are keen address.The authors reflect on the experience of undertaking environment-facing collaborations as part of doctoral programmes and some of the systemic challenges presented by this studentship pathway.Crucially, the authors present suggestions for reforms to doctoral programmes based on their collective experiences.It is a topic that warrants much fuller discussion.We are also reaching out to our wider community of scholars and practitioners to shape the agenda and priorities of Geo.Whilst we absolutely see Geo as a home for all environmental geography scholarship, we have also started to build some thematic topics that have been developed by key figures engaged in these debates within the discipline and beyond.
Decolonising Climate Geography, led by Miriam Gay-Antaki, Farhana Sultana and Kathryn Yusoff, has attracted a strong body of novel thinking, including Fahana Sultana's (2023)  Climate Change, AI and Sustainability, led by Mark Maslin, James Dyke, Eric Nost, Ruth Machen, Jenny Goldstein and Luis Alvarez León, provides a fresh and vital new lens on one of the world's most pressing questions: the rise of artificial intelligence.This theme, which aims to become a repository for new geographical thinking on the climate-AI nexus, has already produced two insightful themes: on governing AI (Nost, 2024) and on the political economy of data (Alvarez León, 2024).We view this as a springboard to a greater understanding of this issue and the beginning of a conversation that will span across and beyond the discipline.
Geographies of Energy Futures, led by Catherine Butler, Peter Forman and Ankit Kumar, addresses the ways in which geographical concepts and methods can inform our understanding of energy transitions and their uneven impacts.The Geographies of Energy Futures theme will develop thinking at these intersections, seeking to bring different voices into the debate and actively encouraging contributions that showcase novel methods, datasets and formats.Helena own commentary 'Whose growth in whose planetary boundaries?', which lays bare the geopolitics of planetary environmental injustice and the imperative for systems change to address the intertwined crises of climate breakdown and unsustainable economic growth.Towards the same critical end, Ishfaq Hussain Malik's (2024) conversation with Paul Robbins turns the lens back on scholars themselves, whilst Jenny Pickerill's (2024) paper 'Lived environmentalisms: Everyday encounters and difference in Australia's north' and Ana de Luca Zuria's (2024) commentary critique of overpopulation discourse highlight the inconsistencies in discourse and policy on climate change, whilst suggesting new pathways of thinking, action and organisation.