A Systematic Review and Global Trends on Blue Carbon and Sustainable Development: A Bibliometric Study from 2012 to 2023

Abstract

Halfway through Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, only 15 percent of the goals have been reached. As a carbon storage and climate change mitigation mechanism, blue carbon is closely related to sustainable development goals and plays an important role in the global carbon cycle. In spite of its great potential, blue carbon still faces several challenges in terms of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Herein, this review aims to retrieve all known impacts of blue carbon on sustainable development through research published on the Web of Science from 2012 to 2023 using a sequence of bibliometric analyses. Keywords such as “blue carbon” and “sustain*” (including “sustainability”, “sustainable”, etc.) were used for article extraction. CiteSpace, a science mapping tool, was used to capture and visually present the bibliometric information in the research about blue carbon and sustainable development. Upon reviewing the existing literature, no study has concentrated on bibliometrically analyzing and visualizing studies about blue carbon and sustainable development. This study sets out to fill this gap by examining the key areas of concentration in published works on blue carbon and sustainable development from 2012 to date. Moreover, the integration of blue carbon and sustainable development may help to develop supportive policies for marine carbon sinks. Despite the valuable contribution of this study to the blue carbon and sustainable development body of knowledge, generalizations of the results must be made cautiously due to the use of a single database, which in this case is the Web of Science.