CLUSTER ANALYSIS OF RISKS AND VULNERABILITIES FOR ENVIRONMENT SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way scholars have approached the role of concepts like ‘risks and vulnerabilities’ within the framework of environment sustainable management. We developed this bibliometric exploration on a period of 10 years including papers indexed in Scopus database and used the specialized VOSviewer software. A strong argument for the importance of this investigation is that the concept of risks associated to the environment sustainable management is frequently encountered in research papers but the concept of vulnerabilities approached in the same context has not been the focus of too many studies yet. Considering the basic premises that in any domain, organization, or system, vulnerabilities represent the sources of potential risks thus we should have the capacity to timely identify these and prevent them from becoming real risks. The analyses developed through VOSviewer software reveal several types of conclusions. Findings show that there is a strong interest for publishing papers on subjects like “environment risks”, “risk analysis” or “environment sustainability” but very low ratings of papers dealing with “vulnerabilities” in this area which results in a knowledge gap for the field. We shall present in detail the journals’ clusters and their focus in the area of environment sustainable management. A major contribution of this paper comes from revealing this knowledge gap in the scientific literature between the concepts of risks and vulnerabilities in the field of environment sustainable management. Another useful contribution might be considered the detailed journals’ cluster analysis revealing the most popular topics and their networks. Also, an important outcome is the chronological evolution of publications on the key concepts thus depicting the scholarly trend.