Nature Reviews Earth and Environment

About Nature Reviews Earth and Environment

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment — Journal Profile

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment is a monthly, online-only reviews journal published by Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature), launched in January 2020 to synthesise research across the whole of Earth and environmental science. It publishes no conventional primary-research articles; instead, its professional editors commission and develop authoritative Reviews, Perspectives, Technical Reviews and Comments that summarise what a field knows, where the disagreements lie and what should happen next. Its sole ISSN is the electronic ISSN 2662-138X, stated on the journal's own information page at nature.com and confirmed by OpenAlex source S4210178125, resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for 2662-138X (checked October 2026). Within six years of launch it had become, by citation impact, the top-ranked journal in geoscience: Nature's metrics page gives it a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 74.1.

The journal arrived at a deliberate moment. Earth-system science had outgrown its disciplinary containers — climate, oceans, cryosphere, solid Earth and human systems were producing a combined literature no researcher could read — and the Nature Reviews family, which had long served the life and physical sciences, had no Earth-science title. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment was built to be that title: a single, accessible venue where a glaciologist can read the state of carbon-cycle science and a policymaker can read both, in prose edited for readers outside the subfield.

Identity and Bibliographic Record

A note on stored directory data: some records describe the publisher's country as Switzerland, reflecting a Springer Nature registration address. OpenAlex records the host organisation as Nature Portfolio with country code GB, and the journal is edited within Nature Portfolio's London-centred operation; readers should treat Nature Portfolio / Springer Nature as the governing publisher identity. The journal's title is also sometimes rendered with "and" in place of the ampersand; the registered title uses the ampersand, while the ISSN record and this site's slug use the spelled-out form.

History and Positioning

Springer Nature announced the journal in February 2019, alongside Nature Food and Nature Cancer, as part of a deliberate extension of the Nature Research portfolio toward humanity's largest-scale challenges. The first issue appeared in January 2020 under founding Chief Editor Graham Simpkins, whose launch editorial framed the journal's mission as encouraging Earth scientists to work with broader communities to understand the interactions between the natural environment and society (Springer Nature, launch account, 2020). That framing distinguished the title from the start: alongside the solid-Earth and atmospheric core, the journal would treat migration, risk, resources and policy as first-order subjects. Early articles set the template — a widely read Review on mobility and migration responses to sea-level rise, and a synthesis of carbon storage through mineralisation, both discussed in the publisher's own six-month retrospective.

The journal's rise was unusually fast even by Nature Reviews standards. Its first Journal Impact Factor, for 2021, was 37.214, ranking it near the very top of both Environmental Sciences and Geosciences categories; by the 2025 Journal Citation Reports cycle the figure stood at 74.1 (Nature journal metrics page), placing the title among the ten highest-impact journals in all of science in recent rankings. Nature Portfolio announcements name Clare Davis as the journal's Chief Editor at the time of checking (nature.com, AGU25 announcement), succeeding the founding editor. The editorial office has also developed distinctive formats, including a Fellowship Q&A series in which recently funded researchers advise on developing project proposals — a small but telling sign of a reviews journal consciously building a community, not merely a catalogue.

The Nature Reviews Model, Applied to the Earth Sciences

Understanding this journal requires understanding the family it belongs to. Nature Reviews titles do not wait for a field to summarise itself; their editors actively construct the summary literature. An editor responsible for, say, the cryosphere tracks preprints, conference programmes and funding calls, judges which topic has reached the point where a synthesis would change how the community works, and recruits the authors best placed to write it — often a team assembled across institutions and career stages for the purpose. The resulting article is then engineered as a teaching document as much as a research one: summary points distill the argument, figures are redrawn for consistency, glossaries define terms for outsiders, and the reference list is curated rather than exhaustive. This is why the journal's articles are so heavily used in graduate teaching, and why their citation counts compound: a Review that becomes the standard entry point to a topic is cited by everyone who enters the topic after it.

Applied to Earth and environmental science, the model carries a particular advantage and a particular risk. The advantage is integration: a single journal whose editors see climate, oceans, land surface, solid Earth and society together can commission the cross-cutting syntheses — on compound hazards, on carbon-cycle feedbacks, on adaptation limits — that disciplinary journals structurally miss. The publisher's own early retrospective took pride in exactly such articles, where environmental change and human response had to be treated in one frame. The risk is gatekeeping: when one journal's commissioning judgement shapes which syntheses exist, fields outside the editors' attention can wait longer for their synthesis moment. The journal mitigates this partly by considering external proposals, and its topic spread — from deep-Earth geochemistry to migration studies — suggests the mitigation is real. Researchers assessing the title should nonetheless read its catalogue as an editorial map of the field, influential precisely because it is a map drawn by someone.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's stated scope covers the latest advances in, and timely syntheses of, research spanning all aspects of Earth and environmental science, organised around three core themes — weather and climate; surface processes; and solid Earth — with the reciprocal relationship between the environment and society featured throughout (journal information page, nature.com). In practice, its Reviews and Perspectives range across:

• Climate dynamics, variability and modelling, including extremes and attribution.
• The cryosphere, oceans and the global water cycle.
• Surface processes: erosion, rivers, coasts, landscapes and the hazards they produce.
• Solid Earth: tectonics, volcanism, seismology, geochemistry and the deep carbon cycle.
• Biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem responses to environmental change.
• Human dimensions: migration, adaptation, resource governance, risk and the science-policy interface.
• Methods and monitoring: remote sensing, field instrumentation and data approaches, treated in Technical Reviews.

OpenAlex's topic profile for the source (S4210178125) corroborates this breadth, listing climate variability and models, geology and palaeoclimatology, geological and geochemical analysis, cryospheric studies, and marine and coastal ecosystems among its leading topics. The journal also reports that over 50% of the articles it published in 2025 related to one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (journal information page) — a measure of how deliberately its commissioning tracks societal relevance.

Article Types

The journal publishes Reviews (comprehensive, balanced syntheses of a research area), Perspectives (forward-looking, opinionated accounts of where a field should go), Technical Reviews (syntheses of methods and technologies), Comments (short agenda-setting pieces), Research Highlights (brief notices of important primary research published elsewhere) and Q&A features. Review-type articles are the core: they are typically commissioned by the editors, developed with the authors over an extended period, and edited so that figures, summary points and glossaries make the article self-contained for non-specialists. Springer Nature notes that its Reviews journals occasionally use internal artificial-intelligence tools to support accessory content such as summary points, always edited and fact-checked to journal standards (journal information page) — a disclosure this profile records because readers increasingly ask how such content is produced.

Editorial Model

Like all Nature titles, the journal has no external academic editors: every editorial decision is made by a dedicated team of full-time professional editors with research backgrounds in the Earth sciences (journal information page). The Chief Editor at launch was Graham Simpkins; Nature Portfolio's current announcements name Clare Davis in that role. The professional-editor model shapes the author experience. Most content originates in editorial commissioning — editors map a field, identify the team whose synthesis the community needs, and invite it — rather than in unsolicited submission, although the journal does consider proposals. Peer review is by external referees, and editors remain involved through revision, with substantial developmental and presentational editing before publication. Manuscripts move quickly once in the system: Nature's metrics page reports a median of 5 days from submission to first editorial decision and 67 days from submission to acceptance.

Metrics and Standing

Read these numbers with the reviews model in mind. A catalogue of 844 commissioned syntheses accumulating 83,340 citations — roughly a hundred citations per article — reflects both the citation magnetism of review articles and six years of careful commissioning in high-attention fields. The 2024 Journal Citation Reports placed the journal first in both Environmental Sciences and Geosciences, Multidisciplinary (rank 1 of 358 and 1 of 253 respectively, Q1 in both, as reported in ranking summaries), a position it has held effectively since its first full ranking cycle.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and in Scopus (indexing record as summarised in reference sources, checked October 2026), the bases of its Journal Impact Factor and SJR figures above; its CODEN is NREECQ. A DOAJ listing could not be verified — a DOAJ search-API query for ISSN 2662-138X returned no record at checking time — and as a subscription-based reviews journal with an optional open-access route it sits outside DOAJ's fully-open-access catalogue in any case; this profile therefore makes no DOAJ claim.

One further structural note matters for librarians and bibliometricians: because the journal is online only, citation and cataloguing records should carry the single electronic ISSN and the monthly issue structure should not be mistaken for a print run. Articles are published online as soon as they are ready and then gathered into the monthly issue, so the version of record is the online article, dated by its first online publication (journal information page).

Access and Charges

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment is primarily a subscription journal: most articles sit behind institutional or personal access, with individual articles purchasable, while an open-access option exists for commissioned content whose authors or funders require it. The exact open-access charge could not be verified from the journal pages fetched for this profile (an older directory figure of USD 12,690 appears in the stored record but is not confirmed on the journal's current public pages), so authors should obtain the current figure from the editorial office or the journal's open-access page before committing — and should note that a large share of Nature Reviews content is published under subscription terms with no author charge at all. What is certain is the readership side of the equation: content here is read through the Nature platform by essentially every research institution on earth, and the 2025 usage figures above show the scale.

How to Publish Here

Because most content is commissioned, the practical route in is a proposal, not a manuscript. A research team that believes its area is ready for synthesis should: (1) read the journal's recent Reviews in neighbouring topics to calibrate length, structure and figure style; (2) contact the editorial office (nree@nature.com, per the journal information page) with a concise proposal — the question the Review would answer, why the field needs it now, the proposed author team's standing, and an outline; (3) expect an editorial decision on the proposal before any drafting, and, if commissioned, a structured development process with deadlines, referee review and intensive editing; and (4) plan for accessibility — the journal's readers include scientists from every neighbouring discipline and informed readers beyond academia, and drafts are edited toward that audience. Early-career researchers rarely lead a commissioned Review, but frequently contribute as co-authors within senior teams, and the journal's Comments and Q&A formats offer additional, shorter routes onto its pages.

Who Reads It, and How It Is Used

The readership implied by the journal's design, and confirmed by its usage figures — 889,619 downloads in 2025, per Nature's metrics page — spans research scientists keeping up outside their subfield, graduate students entering a topic, lecturers building courses, and professionals in agencies, consultancies and finance who need defensible summaries of Earth-system risks. Altmetric mentions of 6,995 in the same year indicate a further audience in media and policy discussion. For authors, this audience profile has a practical consequence: a Review here is written to be the version of the field that non-specialists cite. Teams accustomed to writing for forty specialists should expect editors to push for broader framing, clearer figures and explicit statements of uncertainty — and should regard that push as the source of the article's eventual reach rather than as friction.

Similar and Related Journals

• Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences — the long-established annual synthesis journal; the closest traditional counterpart, differing in rhythm and commissioning style.
• Reviews of Geophysics — the AGU reviews title, publishing long, technical syntheses.
• Earth-Science Reviews — Elsevier's broad reviews journal, author-initiated more often than commissioned.
• Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change — Nature Portfolio sister titles publishing primary research and shorter commentary in parts of the same territory.
• One Earth — Cell Press's sustainability-science journal, overlapping on the environment-and-society strand.
• Global and Planetary Change and Earth System Science Data — for synthesis-adjacent and data-publication work that does not fit the Nature Reviews format.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment?

2662-138X. It is an electronic ISSN; the journal is online only and has no print ISSN.

Who publishes the journal, and when did it start?

Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature). It launched in January 2020, announced in February 2019, with Graham Simpkins as founding Chief Editor; Nature Portfolio announcements name Clare Davis as Chief Editor at the time of checking.

Does the journal publish original research?

No conventional primary research. It publishes Reviews, Perspectives, Technical Reviews, Comments, Research Highlights and Q&A features — synthesis and commentary formats.

What is its impact factor?

74.1 for 2025 (5-year: 87.2), per Nature's journal metrics page; it stood at 71.5 for 2024 and 37.214 in its first cycle, 2021. OpenAlex gives an h-index of 142 and a 2-year mean citedness of 24.93.

Can I submit a Review unsolicited?

Most Reviews are commissioned, but proposals are considered. Contact the editorial office with a structured proposal before drafting; do not send a finished manuscript uninvited.

Is the journal open access?

It is primarily subscription-based with an open-access option for some content. The current open-access charge could not be verified from the journal's public pages at checking time; confirm with the editorial office.

How does the journal relate to the other Nature Reviews titles?

It is the Earth-science member of the Nature Reviews family, sitting alongside titles in the life sciences, physical sciences and clinical medicine. Articles occasionally cross-reference sister journals — a climate-and-health topic, for example, may be treated from different angles in this journal and in a clinical Reviews title — and the family shares production standards, article formats and the professional-editor model described above.

What is the journal's CODEN and abbreviation?

Its CODEN is NREECQ, and the correct abbreviation for abstracting and indexing is Nat. Rev. Earth Environ., as stated on the journal's information page.