Managing Climate Change Risks and Environmental Challenges Towards Sustainable Development within the European Union^*

Abstract

Purpose: This study aims to examine the inferences of climate change risks on the natural environment within the European Union (EU) and to explore how environmental governance initiatives that prioritise sustainability and are globally agreed upon can help mitigate these adverse effects of climate change. This study conducted an in-depth systematic review and comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature identifying the theoretical underpinnings of climate change risks and global environmental governance.

Need for study: Climate swaps pose significant risks to the environment, sustainability, and socioeconomic systems at the EU and global levels. Nowadays, every industry, company, and region worldwide is exposed to varying degrees of climate risk, which is only expected to increase as climate change accelerates.

Methodology: An extensive collection of articles, books, and book chapters available through Web of Science and Scopus was analysed, gathering key ideas, theories, directions for future research, authors, research organisations/institutes, nations, and co-citation histories. The research methodology involved was extracting information from 1,586 documents on Scopus and 1,024 papers on Web of Science and processing the data in VOSviewer. The following keywords were used for basic searches and further extraction: ‘climate’, ‘politics’, ‘risk’, ‘global’, ‘environment’, and ‘governance’.

Findings: Governance/management becomes even more important when studying climate change risks along with resilience, adaptation, vulnerability, uncertainty, and sustainability/sustainable development among EU member states.

Practical implications: This study emphasises climate change’s most significant environmental effects and risks at the EU and global levels and highlights the importance of addressing these risks through effective environmental governance initiatives.

Citation

Pirtea, M.-G., Noja, G.G., Moldovan, N.-C., Grecu, I.-M. and Ţăran, A.-M. (2024), "Managing Climate Change Risks and Environmental Challenges Towards Sustainable Development within the European Union^*", Grima, S., Romānova, I., Noja, G.G. and Dorożyński, T. (Ed.) Economic Development and Resilience by EU Member States (Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis, Vol. 115), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 159-176. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1569-375920240000115010