Nature says Abbott has ‘unnerved’ the nation’s scientists

The Abbott government’s “apparent disdain” for environmental conservation threatens to undermine Australia’s strong performance in the environmental sciences, according to a report by Nature Publishing.

The global science publisher says its annual research publishing index shows Australia usually out-performs “heavy hitters” such as China and Japan, producing around one-third of all scientific papers in this category for the Asia Pacific region.

But the 2013 Nature Publishing Index for the Asia-Pacific region says that Australia has already lost its top spot, slipping to second place behind China. The NPI tracks and analyses annual changes in science publishing as indicated by the number of research papers published in Nature and its associated journals.