Despite a rise in global attention to port managers’ actions on climate change, hitherto, they still face considerable challenges in reaching collective agreements on proactive policies and hands-on actions. Considering the influence of port as the middle- man of global trade and development, the study of PortEconomics member Adolf Ng co-authored by Roozbeh Panahi and Jiayi Pang (University of Manitoba, Canada) undertakes semantic and geographic coverage analysis of major articles on port climate change adaptation to shed light on the evolution of research over last fifteen years. With semantic analyses, the authors extract material words and expressions of identified articles, based on their title and keywords, and discuss when they have been taken into consideration and how they have been jointly studied. Also, the analysis shows the formation and expansion of research communities.
Finally, geographic coverage of research and geographic distribution of researchers explain to what extent this subject has been explored and knowledge has been disseminated around the globe. The study hereby suggests that future research should claim adaptation leadership by a quick paradigm shift, to support timely decisions. It is time to move ahead, focus more on adaptation actions and approaches to bridge adaptation gaps.
The authors’ version of the port study, published at the 95th voloume of Transport Policy can be downloaded here.
