Environmental education and climate change: bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Environmental Education (EE) can help coping with the climate environmental crisis through the development of strategies focused on mitigating, and adapting to, the causes and effects of Climate Change (CC). Thus, the aim of the current study is to use a bibliometric approach to analyze scientific production representativeness in studies about EE and CC. Bibliometric analysis applied to the number of publications on this topic was carried out by taking into consideration the following aspects: journal, publication year, language, institution and classification of the most cited articles. VOSviewer software was used to map the results of the analyzed studies, based on the co-occurrence of keywords and cooperation networks between countries, institutions, as well as on articles’ co-citation. There was annual growth in the number of studies published in the last 10 years; 25.6% of them were published in Qualis A1 Environmental Sciences journals, according to Capes. English was the prevalent language of the analyzed publications; it accounted for approximately 98% of the published studies. The United States accounted for most of the published studies (34.5%); it was followed by European countries (27.8%). However, there was increase in the number of studies conducted in China, South Africa, India and Brazil. Therefore, although there was evident growth in the number of research about EE and CC, it is important expanding institutional cooperation to help developing inter-institutional and multinational research.