A Scientometric Analysis of Payments for Ecosystem Services Research: Mapping Global Trends and Directions

Changsu Song, Yuqing Liu, Longqing Liu, Chaofan Xian () and Xuan Wang
Additional contact information
Changsu Song: Department of Social & Ecological Studies, Chinese Academy of Governance, Beijing 100091, China
Yuqing Liu: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Longqing Liu: College of the Life and Environmental Science, Minzu University of China, Beijing 100081, China
Chaofan Xian: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Xuan Wang: School of Agriculture Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 21, 1-21

Abstract: Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is an innovative economic intervention to mitigate the decline of ecosystem services and biodiversity; it plays a key role in harmonizing protection and development. Based on numerous PES practices worldwide, PES has emerged as a research hotspot in the field of sustainability. This paper presents a comprehensive scientometric analysis of PES academic publications between 1987 and 2022. The study aims to characterize the intellectual landscape of PES by identifying and visualizing the evolution of the collaboration network, the co-citation network, and emerging research trends. The findings reveal a rapid increase in publications of this field, indicating its growing importance as an interdisciplinary research subject. In particular, PES has gained significant attention from numerous researchers since 2007. Environmental sciences and ecology (50.77%) have been the core subjects, followed by business economics (11.04%) and biodiversity conservation (9.58%). Engineering (3.52%) and water resources (3.40%) have emerged as new fields in recent years. Notably, productive authors and institutions in this domain are primarily located in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. However, fewer stable collaborations were found between China and European countries. Regarding the keywords, the most popular keywords of this topic were “ecosystem service” (1423), “conservation” (1324), and “biodiversity” (1029). By synthesizing the literature, this paper identifies pressing topics related to the effectiveness of PES, including the evaluation of effectiveness, efficiency assessment, and equity. Through an in-depth analysis, this paper elucidates global trends and directions in PES research. It is important to create a fair and efficient market that boosts the motivation and initiative of society to engage in PES initiatives, to increase investment in comprehensive PES projects, which helps improve the efficiency of fund utilization, especially concerning climate change mitigation. It is proposed to integrate natural sciences and social sciences to comprehensively assess the effectiveness of climate-friendly PES, which contributes to the sustainable development of PES research and application.

Keywords: payments for ecosystem services; CiteSpace; research hotpots; scientometric analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/21/15649/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/21/15649/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:21:p:15649-:d:1274730

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().