Analysing national climate change-related documents: Spatial and temporal dimensions worldwide

The effects of climate change are wide- ranging and exacerbate existing environmental and social challenges. The Climate Change Strategies of the World's Countries geodatabase, developed for the present study, comprises national-level data on the climate change-related documents of 199 countries worldwide, which were grouped into types according to their fields of application. Furthermore, four categories were created based on these types. Spatial and temporal analyses of the distribution of documents were conducted to examine their specifics. A total of 300 documents were identified, comprising complex- (50%), adaptation- (32%), and mitigation-type (18%) documents. Although first mitigation- and adaptation-type documents appeared as early as the 1990s, a significant increase in their number occurred only in the early 2000s; first complex-type documents were created around the same time. Complex-type documents were found to occur more frequently; however, the spatial distribution of categories across continents reflected varying perspectives.