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Knowledge domain and emerging trends of climate-smart agriculture: a bibliometric study

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Abstract

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is a new agricultural development pattern to address future food crises. Since CSA was proposed in 2010, it has attracted the attention of scholars from all over the world. It is of great significance to scientifically summarize the overview and emerging trends of CSA research, providing ideas for scholars concerned about CSA to engage in research in this field. Based on bibliometrics and CSA-related literature data in the WOS database, this paper used CiteSpace software to draw knowledge maps to scientifically analyze publications in the field of CSA. Our study found that (1) CSA research is showing a rapid upward trend, focusing on the environmental sciences and agricultural economic management; (2) international organizations such as the FAO, World Bank, and the international agricultural research institute have made significant contributions to CSA research; (3) among the nine clusters in the CSA literature, CSA practice, conservation agriculture, smallholder farmers, and sub-Saharan Africa have been consistently given high attention; (4) CSA research can be divided into three phases, and the research hotspots have transferred from essential elements of CSA to household and carbon emissions. We believe that in future research, more attention should be paid to the trade-off and synergy of the three pillars of CSA, as well as the investment, finance, and evaluation criteria of CSA. Such strengthening is of great significance to the sustainable promotion of CSA.

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The data analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71572012), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 7217020877), and the Beijing Social Science Foundation (No. 15JDJGB022). Additional thanks are extended to editors and reviewers for their careful and constructive suggestions on this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Jun Li, Enjun Xia, Lingling Wang, Kuan Yan, Li Zhu & Jieping Huang

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  1. Jun Li
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  2. Enjun Xia
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  3. Lingling Wang
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  4. Kuan Yan
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  5. Li Zhu
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  6. Jieping Huang
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Contributions

Conceptualization: Jun Li and Enjun Xia; formal analysis: Jun Li and Lingling Wang; software: Jun Li and Kuan Yan; supervision: Enjun Xia, Li Zhu, and Jieping Huang; visualization: Jun Li and Lingling Wang; writing—original draft: Jun Li and Jieping Huang; writing—review and editing: all authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jieping Huang.

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Communicated by Philippe Garrigues.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

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Table 12 Details of the World Bank’s support for Global CSA
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Appendix 2

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Table 13 Total smartness and category scores on CSA practices in 35 countries
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Li, J., Xia, E., Wang, L. et al. Knowledge domain and emerging trends of climate-smart agriculture: a bibliometric study. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 70360–70379 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20796-9

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