2024 Volume 12 Issue 2 Pages 1-27
Sustainable diets are food patterns that can be practised as a climate mitigation strategy. Using a bibliometric approach, a sample of 133 papers was selected from 1239 identified articles on “Sustainable diets” and “Climate change” or “climate” or “mitigation” as the query from the Scopus database. The articles were examined to identify the growth and characteristics of this body of knowledge. The data were analysed using Microsoft Excel for frequency analysis, VOSviewer for the visualisation of data, and Harzing’s Publish or Perish for citation metrics analysis. The first publication was in 2009, and the number of publications increased rapidly after that. Eighty-five percent of the publications appeared between 2019 and 2023. The United States was the highest contributor of publications, followed by the United Kingdom. The most common keyword used was sustainable diets, and the most prevalent theme was “climate change.” We conducted a thematic literature review by analysing the clusters of keywords listed by the VOSviewer. Based on the pentagram sustainability model, we identified four emergent themes: “environmental dimension of sustainability in dietary choices for climate mitigation”, “economic aspect of adopting a sustainable diet”, “policy pathways for climate mitigation through sustainable diet promotion”, and “the social dynamics in promoting sustainable diet”. The cultural dimension of sustainability was found to be still lacking in studies involving sustainable diets as a climate mitigation strategy. The findings suggest future studies should recognise the cultural underpinnings of promoting a sustainable diet as a climate mitigation strategy.
