Tourism Carbon Emissions: A Systematic Review of Research Based on Bibliometric Methods

ABSTRACTTourism is one of the industries that contributes to climate change. Tourism accounts for about 10% of total global GDP, while contributing about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, far more than many industries. The study of tourism carbon emissions is indispensable for global sustainable development. However, current research summaries on the field of tourism carbon emissions rarely describe the research dilemmas and future trends that the field desperately needs to address. This has led to fewer studies on tourism carbon emissions in recent years, with researchers turning to study environmentally responsible behavior for which data are more readily available. This is dangerous for the perception of sustainable tourism development and climate change. This paper first identifies the commonly concerned research issues in the tourism carbon emissions field through keyword analysis. By analyzing the existing research contents and topics, this paper proceeds to comb the inner logic among those researches in three dimensions which are time, space and topics, thus proposing a research framework. Finally, this paper puts forward four research areas needed to be improved and four directions we can go further, namely 4I and 4P. Other current review literature in this field focuses only on analyzing authors, journals, institutions, etc. without analyzing the logical relevance of the research content. In this paper, we believe that a research review based on the content of the literature itself is what will show scholars the current state of research and research issues in the field. And the constructed research framework can further clarify the research content and topics in the field and present a clear picture of the research content for relevant scholars. Therefore this study is convinced that a clear research framework will bring a powerful direction for the tourism carbon emissions research field. The research results will certainly make some contribution to the tourism carbon emissions field, by providing new viewpoints and research trends on tourism carbon emissions.KEYWORDS: Tourism carbon emissionCitespacecritical reviewresearch frameworkco-occurrence word analysis AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Professor Hanqin Qiu and Professor Kam Hung for their valuable suggestions on the revision of the article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Author contributionsDandan Liu: Visualization, methodology, data collection, writing – original draft, review and editing. Jing Ji: Writing – review and editing. Meng Wu: Writing – review and editing.Data availability statementThe author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.Additional informationFundingThe author(s) received the financial support of the “Zhejiang Province Science and Technology Plan Project of Soft Science Research Program (2023C35020)” and “Scientific Research Foundation of Hangzhou City University (No.J-202312)”.