Research Trends in Carbon Finance and Carbon Markets: A Bibliometric Analysis from 1992 to 2022

Figure 2. Number of publications on carbon finance and carbon markets from 1992 to 2022.

2.2 Analysis of Major Journals

As shown in Figure 2, Vosviewer was used to analyze the bibliographic coupling of the literature. This network visualization demonstrates the relative publication quantity of journals in the field of carbon finance and carbon markets. If the distance between journals is close, it indicates that they have some similarities in their published content. The red cluster represents journals that are more focused on climate change and related policies, the blue cluster consists of journals predominantly concentrated in the field of environmental science, the green cluster primarily focuses on environmental science and green sustainable development technologies, and the yellow cluster represents sources of articles on environmental economics.

From 1992 to 2022, a total of 1,440 journals published articles related to carbon finance. Table 1 shows the top 10 journals that published 1,534 out of 5,689 articles (26.96%). Overall, these journals mainly cover publications in the fields of energy, environmental science, and economics, indicating that carbon finance and carbon markets are interdisciplinary fields at the intersection of economics, energy, and environmental science in the context of climate change. The three journals with the highest number of publications, JCPR (267), Energy Policy (255), and Sustainability (204), are all classified as JCR Q1 and Q2, with impact factors of 11.1, 9, and 3.9, respectively, further confirming the importance and value of carbon finance and carbon markets.

Table 1. Top 10 journals in terms of publication quantity on carbon finance and carbon markets.

Figure 3. Network visualization of journals in the field of carbon finance and carbon markets.

2.3 Distribution by Country

To gain more knowledge about the research field, geographical location is included as part of our analysis. Analyzing research geographical divisions by country provides a better understanding (Parsley and Wei 2001). As shown in the graph, China is the leading country with 2,222 publications, followed by the United States with 978 publications, and then the United Kingdom with 517 publications. An integrated analysis of these clusters confirms that European countries are mostly leading in this field, with the United Kingdom (517), Germany (288), France (217), and the Netherlands (143) ahead of other continental countries. In the Asia-Pacific region, China is the leader, followed by Australia (371), Canada (245), Japan (146), and South Korea (115). India has 154 publications in the field of carbon finance and carbon markets. From Figure 4, it can be observed that many developing countries in Africa have relatively less focus on carbon finance and carbon markets.

Figure 4. World map visualization of carbon finance and carbon markets based on the number of publications by country.

3. Research Hot Topics in Carbon Finance and Carbon Markets

3.1 Keyword Co-occurrence Analysis

Keyword co-occurrence analysis provides a highly refined and summarized representation of the main content of articles, reflecting the research value and direction of the articles. By analyzing the high-frequency keywords, current hot topics and trends in the research field can be determined (Chen and Sharp 2004). In this study, Citespace and Vosviewer were used to create a keyword co-occurrence map of the literature related to carbon finance and carbon markets to analyze its research hot topics (as shown in Figure 5). Each node in Figure 5 represents a keyword, with larger nodes indicating higher frequency of occurrence. Each link represents the co-occurrence frequency between keywords, with thicker links indicating higher co-occurrence frequency.

From Figure 5 and Table 2, it can be observed that the keywords 'carbon emission', 'emission control', 'emission trading', 'environmental economics', 'climate change', 'cost', 'China', 'pollution tax', 'carbon tax', and 'environmental policy' have larger and more frequent nodes. Against the backdrop of increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions leading to deteriorating global climate conditions, various countries have enacted environmental policies and taken corresponding measures. Carbon taxes and emission trading are the two main means of controlling carbon emissions (Elkins and Baker 2001). Cap and trade systems are effective mechanisms in carbon emission trading systems (Chen et al. 2020). With global efforts to reduce carbon emissions, issues related to carbon reduction decisions by companies under carbon taxes and cap and trade systems have received significant attention from scholars. In addition, among these keywords, China, the United States, and the European Union appear with higher frequency, indicating that these countries play important roles in both the generation of greenhouse gases and addressing climate change.

Figure 5. Keyword co-occurrence map of research on carbon finance and carbon markets.

Table 2. Top 30 keywords in research on carbon finance and carbon markets.