The TCA Corpus: A Comprehensive Literature Resource from the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment

Abstract

Background The Transformative Change Assessment Corpus (TCA Corpus) is a collection of literature compiled by the authors in support of the Thematic Assessment Report of the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity (TCA) of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Methods The corpus is based on the OpenAlex database, which contained about 253 million documents at the time of compilation (April 2024). It was built by searching for documents combining terms defining nature and transformative change in the context of the TCA assessment, combined with the boolean operator AND, yielding 4.7 million documents. Its inclusiveness was checked against 134 key papers considered foundational by the IPBES TCA author team. Conclusions The TCA Corpus played a key role in the TCA by serving as a documentary basis to support quantitative statements, and provides a foundation for further research on transformative change toward a just and sustainable world, usable by the scientific community, policy makers and stakeholders. The TCA Corpus has already supported several peer-reviewed follow-up publications.