Bibliometric Analysis of Carbon Finance and Carbon Markets: Trends, Hot Topics, and Future Research Agenda

Carbon finance and carbon markets have attracted significant attention as effective means to mitigate climate change on a global scale. This paper adopts bibliometric analysis as the research method and employs Citespace and Vosviewer software to visually analyze the literature on carbon finance and carbon markets in the Web of Science and Scopus databases since 1992. By interpreting knowledge maps, such as publication volume and keywords, we aim to analyze the hot topics and evolution path of research on carbon finance and carbon markets. Our findings reveal that the number of publications related to carbon finance and carbon markets is rapidly increasing, with China leading in terms of publication volume, followed by the United States and the United Kingdom. We identify the main research directions to include carbon market policy and carbon trading mechanism research, carbon finance and carbon market risk research, research on carbon market spillover effects, as well as carbon finance tool design, pricing, and price forecasting. The development of carbon finance and carbon markets is analyzed to consist of three stages: policy formulation and content determination, establishment of the carbon market system, and improvement of carbon market mechanisms. Lastly, we summarize the future research agenda for carbon finance and carbon markets.