7. Environmental Geography

Environmental geography is an emerging science using geography’s perspective and knowledge to study environmental issues. This chapter analyses the keywords of publications on 66 SCI/SSCI indexed mainstream journals and 3 CSCD core journals in environmental geography from 1986 to 2015. Environmental geography has focused on the source apportionment, surface processes, health effect and risk assessment of pollution, and established distinguishing characteristics in large scale distribution, long-term transportation and multiphase transformation of pollutants in the past 30 years. China’s environmental geography research has been following closely with international hot topics while complying with China’s real situation and has gained substantial achievements in many fields, such as soil pollution and remediation; the accumulation and biological effects of pollutants in water body; the mechanism, effects and simulation of air pollution, and the environmental behaviors and multi-phase transportation of organic pollutants. Since 2008 NSFC has set up environmental geography as a branch of geography, including environmental pollution, regional environmental quality and regional sustainable development in an effort to balance the development of environmental geography in both microscopic and macroscopic scales. Chinese researchers have contributed 18 % of the SCI/SSCI-indexed articles globally in the recent 5 years. In the past 10 years, 65 % of the SCI/SSCI-indexed articles and CSCD-indexed articles by Chinese authors have been sponsored by NSFC. Moreover, 56 and 68 % of the top 100 Chinese authors with the most publications in the SCI/SSCI and CSCD journals are supported by NSFC in the past 30 years, respectively.