As one of the efforts to combat climate change and the biodiversity crisis, an interest
in nature-based solutions (NbS) has been growing. Although there have been diverse
discussions on NbS, it is still insufficient to find a quantitative evaluation of
the global research trends in which field and to what extent NbS has been studied.
In this regard, this study employed latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling
and keyword analysis to quantitatively evaluate the research trends of NbS. Among
research papers on NbS searched on SCOPUS, 2,625 studies (2009–2022) were analyzed
by LDA. As a result, NbS-related articles were classified into seven topics (i.e.,
Urban governance, Urban green infrastructure, Wastewater treatment, Coastal protection,
Flood mitigation, Carbon sequestration, and Sustainable agriculture). Of these, the
urban and water-related topics accounted for the largest proportion. In contrast,
the carbon sequestration and sustainable agriculture topics accounted for a smaller
proportion, but the proportion significantly increased over time. As a result of keyword
analysis, the frequency of urban and water keywords remained high. In contrast, the
frequency of climate change and carbon keywords was low and has recently increased.
In the keyword network, the co-occurrence frequency and connection of urban and water
keywords were initially high. Still, over time, keywords related to climate change
and carbon increased similarly to those related to urban and water. The findings of
this study imply that NbS has mainly focused on urban and water-related researches.
Still, climate change and carbon-related researches may also be actively handled in
relation to NbS in the near future.
