Ramakrishna Seeram, Hu Wayne, Jose Rajan
Center for Nanotechnology & Sustainability, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
Springer, Shanghai, China.
Circ Econ Sustain. 2022 Aug 6:1-13. doi: 10.1007/s43615-022-00201-w.
For a successful delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and to track the progress of UNSDGs as well as identify the gaps and the areas requiring more attention, periodic analyses on the "research on sustainability" by various countries and their contribution to the topic are inevitable. This paper tracks the trends in sustainability research including the geographical distribution on sustainability research, their level of multi-disciplinarity and the cross-border collaboration, their distribution of funding with respect to the UNSDGs, and the lifecycle analyses. Cumulative publications and patents on sustainability could be fitted to an exponential function, thereby highlighting the importance of the research on sustainability in the recent past. Besides, this analytics quantifies cross-border collaborations and knowledge integration to solve critical issues as well as traditional and emerging sources to undertake sustainability research. As an important aspect of resource sustainability and circular economy, trends in publication and funding on lifecycle assessment have also been investigated. The analytics present here identify that major sustainability research volume is from the social sciences as well as business and economics sectors, whereas contributions from the engineering disciplines to develop technologies for sustainability practices are relatively lower. Similarly, funding distribution is also not evenly distributed under various SDGs; the larger share of funding has been on energy security and climate change research. Thus, this study identifies many gaps to be filled for the UNSDGs to be successful.
为成功实现联合国可持续发展目标（UNSDGs），跟踪这些目标的进展情况，并找出差距以及需要更多关注的领域，对各国的“可持续性研究”及其对该主题的贡献进行定期分析是必不可少的。本文追踪了可持续性研究的趋势，包括可持续性研究的地理分布、多学科程度和跨境合作情况、与联合国可持续发展目标相关的资金分布以及生命周期分析。可持续性方面的累积出版物和专利可以拟合为指数函数，从而突出近期可持续性研究的重要性。此外，该分析量化了跨境合作和知识整合，以解决关键问题，以及开展可持续性研究的传统和新兴资源。作为资源可持续性和循环经济的一个重要方面，还研究了生命周期评估的出版物和资金趋势。此处呈现的分析表明，主要的可持续性研究量来自社会科学以及商业和经济领域，而工程学科为可持续性实践开发技术的贡献相对较低。同样，在各项可持续发展目标下，资金分配也不均衡；大部分资金用于能源安全和气候变化研究。因此，本研究确定了许多为使联合国可持续发展目标取得成功而需要填补的差距。
