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The article explores how habitability loss is as an important dimension of climate risk assessment with complex linkages to migration, and approaches that apply quantitative models using uniform methodologies of regional scales. Topics include privileging physical sciences over social science understandings of local vulnerability and adaptive capacity; and migration with adaptation responses with climate determinism minimizes potential for human agency to find creative social contexts.

The article focuses on the May⁄June 2006 issue of the journal “ScienceWatch,” that ranked research institutes of colleges and universities in Great Britain basing on 21 fields within the life, physical, and social sciences. In examining the institute's scientific heft, the survey identifies the universities' research citation impact and the total number of citations published between 2001 and 2005. The survey found out that Oxford University and the Cambridge University dominate and proved themselves as significant research institute in the region.

This article reports that the chiefs of France's CNRS, the largest basic research agency in Europe, have adopted a plan to shake the place to its foundations. Although many agreed that reform was overdue, it has taken more than a year of tough negotiations between the government and research unions to bring it off. Some observers were worried that the government might gut CNRS. The new plan calls for CNRS to reduce its thematic science departments from eight to four: chemistry, social sciences, life sciences, and a giant grouping of math, computer science, physics, and science of the planets and the universe.