• Celebrating five years of highly cited articles

    Celebrating five years of highly cited articles

    Posted by UCL Open Environment Editorial Office on 2025-01-27


As we welcome the start of 2025 we want to take a moment to celebrate some of our highly cited publications – in part as a testament to the rigorous efforts of our Editors’, reviewers’, and authors’ contribution to their fields. Reflecting on just how far UCL Open Environment has come since opening for submissions in 2019, this post explores some of the papers published in the journal that shows the breadth of research already explored.

All articles are published open access and are free to read to anyone. Readers will also find all previous preprint versions during the peer review process, along with the peer review reports, alongside the final version of record published after peer review. You can also read more about how the journal works, the aims and scope, and how to contribute to the journal on our website.


We start by looking at papers related to public health grounded in environmental factors. As the current most cited article in the journal, The impact and effectiveness of the general public wearing masks to reduce the spread of pandemics in the UK: a multidisciplinary comparison of single-use masks versus reusable face masks, Mark Miodownik and colleagues at the UCL Plastic Waste Innovation Hub compared the effectiveness and impact of single-use versus reusable face masks in the UK during the pandemic. The authors conclude that while single-use masks are more effective against pathogens, reusable masks significantly reduce waste, have a lower environmental impact, and are more cost-effective.

In Synergies and trade-offs between sanitation and the sustainable development goals by Priti Parikh and colleagues, the team explores how sanitation impacts all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), highlighting both synergies and trade-offs and provides recommendations for integrated sanitation solutions.

Published in 2023, A short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiations, by Mark Maslin, John Lang and Fiona Harvey, delves into the last 35 years history of the UNFCCC/COP and how these international negotiations have sought to address climate change, leading to notable successes, including the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C and pursue efforts to stay below 1.5°C, but highlight the disappointment at the slow rate of progress made.

In Rethinking entrenched narratives about protected areas and human wellbeing in the Global South, Emily Woodhouse and colleagues, critically examines five key narratives about conservation and human wellbeing, revealing that while some narratives are supported, others are problematic and highlight the need for more equitable and inclusive conservation practices.

In the article Climate change awareness and risk perceptions in the coastal marine ecosystem of Palawan, Philippines, the authors investigated climate change awareness and risk perceptions among coastal communities. Key findings in the paper indicate that local temperature rise and excessive rainfall significantly influence awareness, while perceptions of sea level rise and its impacts on mangroves and coral reefs vary based on factors such as income, education, and direct experiences with extreme weather events.

Looking now to papers focusing on the environment in which people live, the paper Decarbonising existing homes in Wales: a participatory behavioural systems mapping approach, by Johanna Hale, Christopher Jofeh and Paul Chadwick, maps relationships between actors, behaviours, and influences within the home retrofit system, as well as the developing policy recommendations for energy-saving interventions in the UK. The study uses participatory workshops and the Behaviour Change Wheel framework to create two behavioural systems maps for privately rented and owner-occupied housing.

Another paper linking public health, environment health and also disaster management is What are cascading disasters? where the authors, David Alexander and Gianluca Pescaroli, lay the ground for future studies in this area. They explain how the interdependencies of modern infrastructure and socio-economic systems can amplify the impacts of disasters, creating secondary effects that may be more severe than the initial event and how complexity can be categorised and analysed in order to find those weak points in society that enable cascading impacts to develop.

Papers on earth history and systems are also covered by the journal’s multidisciplinary scope and the article Global evolution and paleogeographic distribution of mid-Cretaceous orbitolinids by Marcelle BouDagher-Fadel and Geoffrey David Price, investigates the global evolution and paleogeographic distribution of mid-Cretaceous orbitolinids. The paper highlights a bi-directional migration from the Tethys to the Americas and the Western Pacific, influenced by marine regressions and tectonic events, ultimately leading to their extinction in various regions due to global anoxic events and rising sea levels.

Planetary health is another area of interest for the journal and the authors of Research priorities for maintaining biodiversity’s contributions to people in Latin America outline in this paper a set of research priorities for studying the contributions of biodiversity, as identified at a workshop held in Palenque, Mexico, in August 2018. Five main groups of research issues emerged: (1) Enhancing the quantity, quality, and availability of biodiversity data; 2. Integrating different knowledge systems; (3) Improved methods for integrating diverse data; (4) Fundamental questions in ecology and evolution; and (5) Multi-level governance across boundaries.

Lastly, in this review of Light pollution: a landscape-scale issue requiring cross-realm consideration, the authors highlight the interconnectedness of terrestrial, marine, and freshwater ecosystems in relation to artificial light at night (ALAN), which poses significant threats across multiple realms. The paper discusses the impacts of ALAN on species with life cycles spanning different realms, species interactions across boundaries, and ecosystems like mangroves and estuaries. The authors go on to propose a framework for cross-realm management of light pollution and emphasize the need for collaborative networks among professionals to address these challenges effectively.


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