1. Introduction
Climate change is an issue that determines the characteristics of our time, and we are at a decisive moment. Climate change is mainly manifested in global warming, acid rain, and ozone depletion, among which global warming is the most urgent problem for human beings. Climate issues are related to the future of mankind. Changes in weather patterns will threaten grain yield, rising sea levels will cause catastrophic floods, and extreme climates such as blizzards, heavy rains, droughts, hail, and typhoons will occur frequently across the Earth [
1]. In addition, global warming increases the likelihood of epidemics and other public health threats. There is no denying that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is related to the climate crisis [
2]. However, because of anthropogenic global warming and pollution, we are in a state of climatic emergency, facing huge ecological and humanitarian catastrophe, far exceeding the current COVID-19 epidemics, and these effects are faster than expected and more dramatic. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its fifth assessment report, which stated that from 1880 to 2012, the global average temperature rose by 0.85 °C, and human activities were the main reason for this. In a report released by the IPCC in October 2018, it was stated that global warming must be limited to 1.5 °C [
3,
4].
The climate issue has become very urgent, and we must take emergency measures to prevent climate change and monitor the climate in real time. Environmental audit is an innovative technical management, which means that the organization can eliminate the damage that its activities may cause to the environment at the beginning of its activities, instead of eliminating the pollution after the activities cause environmental pollution [
5]. Since the 1960s, environmental audit has been widely promoted in various countries around the world [
6]. Countries have also promulgated corresponding policies to promote the development of environmental audit, and enterprises have their own environmental audit plans. Environmental audit plays an important role in the management, supervision, and evaluation of the environment.
There is an inevitable internal relationship between climate change and environmental audit. Serving to improve the climate is the trend and inevitable choice of the development of environmental audit. Environmental audits are an unavoidable requirement for reviewing and evaluating the exercise of power, the allocation of public resources, the improvement of the living environment, and the expansion of environmental carrying capacity. With the quantity of research on this background, various angles have been presented in these analyses, such as through environmental audit to reduce the environmental impact of dairy factories to improve the climate [
7]; environmental policy regulation and corporate compliance in game model [
8]; auditing of the environmental impact assessments for mining projects [
9], the relationship between residential areas, environmental carrying capacity, and continuous spatial management [
10]; urbanization perceptions and reactions to the impacts of carrying capacity of natural resources [
11]; and quantitative approaches to evaluating the effects of climate change on urban expanse [
12]. Despite a wide range of publications related to climate change and environmental audit, most of which are based on research by different scholars from their own professional background, this subjectivity and individual research has led to a lack of quantitative analysis in this field. This will lead to blind and inefficient audits instead of more efficient and targeted audits on the most climate-affected aspects.
In fact, there are no known articles that address the overall structure of its knowledge domain. Therefore, it is very necessary to give a general overview of the situation of publications on climate change and environmental audit to explore the intellectual structure of this field and its possible development trend by focusing on the scope, core author, core journal, and high frequency keywords.
The domain of mapping knowledge is to present the knowledge in the form of charting, mining, analysis, and display. The scientific knowledge graph is not only a visual knowledge graph but also a serialized knowledge map, which shows the relationship between network, structure, intersection, and evolution among knowledge groups. Compared with other visualization tools, CiteSpace, a relatively widely used information visualization tool, has the advantages of simple operation, diverse maps, large amount of information, clarity, and high interpretability of visualizations [
13]. Additionally, it provides a variety of analysis methods, such as collaboration network analysis, co-citation analysis, and keyword co-occurrence analysis. Information visualization is the use of graphics and image technology to help people intuitively and clearly understand and analyze data. Therefore, this study uses the CiteSpace software to conduct a comprehensive and quantitative visual analysis of the climate change and environmental audit literature.
Despite the popularity of CiteSpace, to our best knowledge, no attempt has been made to use CiteSpace to analyze the expanding climate change and environmental audit literature. In order to provide a systemic and objective overview of research, the scientometrics and information visualization methods will be used to analyze the literature on climate change and environmental audit between 2013 and 2021 based on the Web of Science and CiteSpace. Specifically, the research is guided by three key goals: (1) to understand the basic status and development process of climate change and environmental audit; (2) to illustrate the most influential knowledge groups and their key contents in the past nine years from the perspectives of countries, authors, and journals; and (3) to gain research hotspots from different research perspectives (clustering, high frequency keywords, keyword time zone) and implement more targeted environmental audit in the future.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In
Section 2, we describe the process of data resources collection, the analysis methods of this article, and the analysis tool advantage. In
Section 3, we make a detailed explanation of the results produced with regard to the research focus and research font cluster according to CiteSpace. In
Section 4, we focus the significant results on different varieties of evolution network of climate change which is affected by environmental audit.In
Section 5, we propose the main further development of climate change and environmental audit. In this way, it is possible to let researchers enrich and expand the related scientific research on climate change and environmental audit and provide long-term effective scientific guidance and efforts for making a contribution to tackling climate change by environment audit and environment management to set up and take the feasible measure.
4. Discussion
Knowledge mapping can provide us with valuable information about the status and trends of a certain field. Literature mining and analysis can not only quantitatively analyze and sort out the literature in this field, but is also useful for researchers to find new research directions. In a research area, often unexpected information is more valuable. In the past, most of the research focused on specific topics in climate change or environmental audit research, and did not analyze the complete research field [
51,
52,
53]. In recent years, there have been some studies that analyze the impact of environmental audits on climate change, but other researchers have not conducted similar quantitative analysis of this area [
54,
55]. It is the first study to use the scientometrics and information visualization methods to conduct a knowledge structure analysis in this area. This paper focused on the research field of environmental audit for climate change, addressed the research directions, the developing status, and future research direction. Therefore, more specific analysis of the intellectual dynamics of different timeline stages, and the high-frequency keywords and key clustering to indicate the increasing research directions under the background of climate change is needed.
Through the basic summary of climate change and environmental audit research, from the perspective of research output, there are relatively few publications on climate change and environmental audit. However, the research questions have great practicality and are widely cited by scholars. At the same time, various scholars cited each other, reflecting the characteristics of interdisciplinary research in this field. Simultaneously, it has also promoted the development of environmental audit. From the perspective of research direction, the research direction suggested the high priority of environmental sciences ecology and business economics in this field. In addition, energy fuels are also areas that deserve special attention. Moreover, climate change and environmental audit research become more interdisciplinary over time. At the same time, these areas also provide new possibilities and greater space for the development of environmental audit. From the perspective of research journals, the number of publications in each journal is very small, even if only a maximum of four. The small number of articles in various categories shows that although environmental audits were proposed early on, little research has been carried out on their actual benefits. The small number of theme and journal publications shows that there is no centralized research trend in this area, and the development of climate change and environmental audit is in its infancy. Scholars should focus on this aspect, explore better environmental audit methods, and pay attention to the result of the impact on the climate after the implementation of environmental audit, and control the climate more efficiently, rather than blindly auditing. Climate change is a concrete reflection of the benefits of environmental auditing, so it is important to study climate change and environmental audit.
Through the country collaboration, there are few countries that combine climate change and environmental audit, indicating that most countries have not paid much attention to the impact of environmental audit on climate change. Among the countries that publish more documents, most are developed countries and studies in developing countries are lacking. Through the research in this article, it is hoped that all countries can strengthen the importance of environmental audit on the impact of climate change, and at the same time strengthen cooperation between various countries. Climate change and environmental audit are the common mission of all countries in the world. From the author co-citation network, these highly cited scholars explained the environmental audit work and studied the degree of its impact on climate change from different angles. In general, the highest number of citations was six and there were no scholars with extremely high citations. This shows that there are no leading figures in the fields of climate change and environmental audit. At this time, scholars should seize the opportunity and strive for major discoveries in this area. However, from another point, although the authors have not been cited frequently, they all have stable cooperative relations, forming a concentrated scientific research cooperation circle. It shows that the cooperation between authors in the fields of climate change and environmental audit is strengthened, which is conducive to the further exchange and sharing of knowledge. The clustering map mainly shows the main research content of these cited authors. Specifically, the hot spots in the field over the last 9 years are carbon emissions, social capital, energy audit, corporate governance, diffusion of innovation environmental management system, and audit committee. In addition, in the cluster analysis, we also combined some current research progress literature to further explain clustering. They may be emerging forces in this field and may become the mainstay in the future. From the journal co-citation network, the cited journals of climate change and environmental audit in the past few years are mainly the world’s top journals, and in recent years, they have diverged outward. This trend illustrates the diversity and fragmentation of climate change and environmental audit research and no highly concentrated research content.
Combining keyword co-occurrence and keyword time zone view analysis, the highly central keywords city, policy, dynamics, biodiversity, and conservation are the key research contents of climate change and environmental audit research in recent years. Among them, dynamics, information, biodiversity, and conservation are new keywords, and the centrality is around 0.4. Information is mainly reflected in information asymmetry and accurate measurement of carbon emission information. Future audit work in this area is mainly reflected in the study of information accuracy, timeliness, and transparency, so that it is more conducive to decisionmakers to master more environment information to make more informed decisions. Biodiversity and conservation are mainly reflected in the protection of the ecological environment and biodiversity to increase the dynamic adaptability of the environment. Although these aspects are emerging keywords in the field of climate change and environmental audit, in fact, protecting the ecological environment and biodiversity is the work we have been doing all the time, and it will be better in the future, combining with environmental audit to improve the climate. Global warming, reduced biodiversity, and water and air pollution have become health problems. Dynamics are faced with complex and changing environmental problems, and audit work must also be carried out flexibly to adapt to changes in the dynamic environment, and the environmental problems to be faced in the future will be more complicated, so environmental audits must continue to innovate and constantly improve, so that the future environmental audits can be carried out more scientifically and flexibly. Although city and policy are the keywords that appeared in 2017, environmental auditing has been constantly developing, and policies indicate the direction of its development and provide strategic planning goals. The development of cities is always the focus of environmental audits and the main factors affecting climate change. Climate mitigation and adaptation measures for cities are constantly widening, advocating the combination of biophysical characteristics and sociopolitical factors [
56].
In addition, cities, policies, and adaptability are closely linked to public health. At present, more and more people are concerned about public health, which is related to the public health of the people of a country or a region. Among them are the prevention, monitoring, and treatment of major diseases, especially infectious diseases. In particular, the recent emergence of COVID-19 has raised higher requirements and challenges for the development of public health in various countries and cities. During the epidemic of COVID-19, the policies of different countries and the development of public health played a vital role in the prevention and control of the epidemic. The COVID-19 outbreak infects a large number of people, threatens the core of society, and has a devastating impact on society and the economy. For example, unemployment, vacation aggravate, and the decline in workers’ income and consumer consumption. The implementation of government policies and systems is essential to prevent such emergencies. Therefore, the establishment of a perfect public health prevention and control system is essential to the development of a country. In terms of environmental audit, from the perspective of the city, it is mainly reflected in the development of urbanization, the improvement of infrastructure, urban environmental and greening, and urban population changes, including population growth and population aging. In future urban planning, the space patterns should be optimized, more attention should be paid to the city’s adaptability and ability to respond to major disasters, and the city’s impact on the climate should be addressed. From the policy perspective, it is mainly through the implementation of national and local energy conservation and emission reduction policies to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, reduce the burning of fossil fuels, and establish an adaptive mechanism to deal with those inevitable health consequences. Adaptability is to anticipate and prepare for the effects of climate change, thereby reducing the associated health burden. The COVID-19 crisis also led to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions this year. On the contrary, after the crisis, once the economy is restored, emissions are likely to rebound, so the government must formulate appropriate policies to intervene. Implementing a green fiscal recovery plan can increase economic growth while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At this time, the environmental audit will appear more important in management, supervision, and evaluation. In addition, the combination of clustering maps, social capital (#1), diffusion of innovation environmental management (#4), and audit committee (#5), is currently the focus of continuous research, and its research trends are likely to continue. The audit committee lasted from 2014 to 2020. This is one of the longest lasting clusters, indicating that it is always the focus of research. Establishing a professional environmental audit department, formulating effective and authoritative audit standards, and cultivating more professional environmental audit talents are also things we must always carry out.
5. Conclusions
This study aimed to perform a scientometric study on climate change and environmental audit with the utilization of CiteSpace and 84 document records to obtain some knowledge about the current status of this field and detect its hot topics and research trends.
Figure 11 shows the article structure framework.
First, from the perspective of research output, since 2013, the number of papers published in the fields of climate change and environmental audit has been on the rise. From 2013 to 2016, the rate of growth was relatively slow and the number of publications per year remained below 20. Second, based on the research direction, environmental sciences ecology is the most researched direction, followed by business economics, energy fuels, engineering, and meteorology atmospheric sciences. Third, from the perspective of the distribution of journals, the distribution of journals in this field is relatively scattered, and the journal with the most articles published only four articles in this field, accounting for 5% of the total.
Then, through the CiteSpace visualization software, we detect the hot topics and intrinsic relations from the perspective of countries, cited authors, and cited journals. Especially from the analysis of the co-citation authors, we divided the research content of these scholars into six categories by the clustering method and display them in a timeline view. The most important hot spots in the field over last the 9 years are carbon emissions, social capital, energy audit, corporate governance, diffusion of innovation environmental management system, and audit committee. These are the key research contents of climate change and environmental audit. Finally, in order to clarify the research frontiers and trends, we summarize the keywords into three topics by using the keyword co-occurrence network. The keywords in the time zone view clearly reflect the research focus of climate change and environmental audit at each time point. Eventually, combining keyword analysis and cluster analysis, step by step, reveals the key content of environmental audit development. The high-frequency keywords city, policy, dynamics, information, biodiversity, conservation and clustering social capital (#1), diffusion of innovation environmental management (#4), and audit committee (#5) are likely to be the focus of future research. In addition, cities, policies, and adaptability are closely linked to public health. Environmental audit plays a vital role in responding to these measures. Therefore, this article provides an overall structure of research in climate change and environmental audit through scientometrics and information visualization methods. It is committed to future environmental audit that can be more efficient and targeted on the most climate-affected aspects. It is hoped that the majority of scholars can pay attention to the research in this area, and through auditing the environment, put forward more targeted measures to improve the climate.
This study still has some space for improvement. First, this it is limited to the Web of Science database of English journal papers. The non-English journal articles could add another layer of insights to this paper. In addition, the search range of keywords can be further expanded, and the environmental audit can be specifically analyzed in a certain field (such as natural resource audit) for relevant literature analysis, so that its impact on climate change can be analyzed from a specific and microscopic perspective.