The Challenges of Climate Change and Energy Transition for Environmental Research—A Bibliometric Overview

Within the global debate of climate changes, the energy transition stands out as a primary concern for countries struggling to embark on sustainable development. Portrayed as one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century, the energy transition has been addressed by a large body of research. However, the literature devoted to this topic has not been systematically explored to capture the contribution of research to knowledge production and guidance of best practices to cope with global environmental changes. Thus, this paper is aiming to provide an overview of the scholarly focus on climate change and energy transition through a bibliometric analysis of the literature published in Springer environmental journals. We search to contribute to more in-depth knowledge of the scholarship devoted to climate change and energy transition by identifying the conceptual and relational framework of analysis and persistent themes underpinning the environmental research. Filtered by keywords (climate change and/or energy transition, and related terms) a number of 728 articles published between 2000 and June 2022 were identified and content analysis of abstracts using VOSviewer was performed. Six major clusters were identified: environment and development, China, energy market, green economy, globalization, and environmental integration. These clusters contain networked terms related to various energy sources, industries, economic contexts, institutional frameworks, and governance models. We notice the increasing number of articles dealing with our pre-defined topics and the widening of the geographical coverage, mainly in the developing world. The paper offers a comprehensive and integrative literature review of the main concepts, methods of analysis, and spatial occurrence put forward by Springer environmental journals. We argue that this kind of analysis might be timely and helpful to understanding how research empowers societies and governments to tackle the ‘climate urgency’ of present times and support worldwide environmental integration.