Knowledge Mapping of Low-Carbon Tourism Research: Hotspot Evolution and Frontiers

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🔬研究者:Provides a comprehensive overview of low-carbon tourism research, including key themes and evolution, useful for scholars in sustainable tourism and carbon accounting.

🏢実務担当者:Tourism operators and policymakers can use the identified research hotspots to inform their low-carbon strategies and governance approaches.

🏛政策担当者:Governments can leverage the review to understand current challenges and prioritize standard-setting and collaborative governance in tourism.

In the context of global climate change and the green transformation of the tourism industry, low-carbon tourism has emerged as an important topic within the field of sustainable development research. Consequently, there is a pressing need to systematically review and synthesize its knowledge domain. This study utilizes bibliometric analysis, employing CiteSpace, to review 468 articles published in the Web of Science Core Collection from 2010 to 2026, thereby elucidating publication trends, keyword clustering, and research hotspots within the field of low-carbon tourism. Additionally, it employs content analysis to provide an in-depth discussion of the knowledge system in this research area. Key findings are as follows: (1) The number of published papers on low-carbon tourism exhibits a phased growth pattern, with contributions predominantly centered around scholars such as Gössling and institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Moreover, keyword co-occurrence and clustering analyses uncover a development from essential concepts such as low-carbon tourism and climate change to a more extensive range of themes, including carbon emission accounting, tourist behavior, and systemic governance, and research topics have undergone a phased evolution, moving from macro-level cognition to quantitative analysis, and then to systemic governance. (2) The research hotspots encompass five key areas: basic cognition and related concepts, carbon emission accounting methods and applications, factors influencing emissions and assessment frameworks, tourists’ low-carbon behaviors and decision-making mechanisms, and pathways for multi-party collaborative governance. (3) Current research is still facing four challenges, i.e., the absence of a standardized framework for assessing carbon emissions, outdated assessment methods, a disconnect between behaviors and governance, and fragmented governance entities. This indicates that research on low-carbon tourism has progressed beyond the initial macro-level discussions and has entered a critical phase closely linked to substantive governance. Future research needs to focus on deeply exploring the standardization of accounting methods, the development of dynamic assessment models, the design of behavioral intervention mechanisms, and the establishment of multi-level collaborative governance mechanisms. These efforts are essential to provide scientific evidence and practical guidelines for the global tourism industry to achieve neutrality goals.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/land15050809first seen 2026-05-27 04:44:41