Canada’s environmental and natural resource sciences falling behind: report

Canada is losing its status as one of the world leaders in environmental and natural resource sciences, according to a new report released today.

The overall report states that Canadian science & technology is healthy and growing, in the amount of research performed and the impact that research has on a global scale. For having less than a half of a percent of the world's population, Canada puts out more than four percent of the world's scientific papers and has almost five percent of the world's top-cited papers. Between the 2006 and 2012 assessments, Canada was also the only G7 country that had an increase in the number of papers produced.

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However, this year's report shows although Canada was ranked in 2006 as one of the world-leaders in areas of natural resource sciences and strong in the environmental sciences, these areas have since remained static or declined. The two reports used different classification systems, but their analysis concluded that "the overall decline in these fields is real."

These assessments are all relative to the rest of the world and the panel did note that both fields were still considerably strong. Canada ranks second in the world for research in agriculture, fisheries and forestry, and fourth in the world for earth and environmental sciences. It was just that these fields were not increasing as quickly as the world average.

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The State of Science and Technology in Canada, 2012 is a followup to a similar report from 2006 by the Council of Canadian Academies. According to the Council's website, it assesses the state of science and technology in the country, based on "a survey of over 5,000 top-cited international researchers, a survey of Canadian S&T experts, and an analysis of highly qualified and skilled personnel."