Income Diversification as a Coping Strategy for Economic and Climate Shock: A Scientific Mapping on Global Research from 2000 to 2025

Abstract

Households in climate exposed and economically volatile environments are increasingly faced with multiple shocks, and income diversification has become a key way that households deal with this multiple shock exposure. Scholarly work on this relationship has now grown quickly and no research has systematically charted its intellectual geography, development or productivity foundation. This paper fills this gap by conducting a bibliometric study of 379 documents obtained from the Scopus database from 2000 to 2025 and analyzed using the Bibliometrix R package and its Biblioshiny interface. Until 2018, annual production was less than 20 documents annually, and, when implementing a logistic growth curve on the cumulative publication trend, the saturation point is estimated to be close to 3,790 documents; the logistic model predicts the peak annual production to be around 436 documents in approximately 2030–2031, suggesting that the field is not nearing maturity. Output is focussed on Environmental Science (25.2% of subject area classifications) and Social Sciences (23.3%), with Economics, econometrics and finance having a comparatively low proportion with 8.0% of the classification, and 84.2% of output is in the form of research articles, nearly sixty per cent of which is published via an open access route. At the author level an analysis of the distribution of productivity shows a significantly more compact distribution than the one predicted by Lotka's law: most of the authors contributing to this literature have only a single document published in it, while a small group of authors, such as Ellis, Andersen, Gautam and Dercon, form the backbone of the literature for citations. These findings place income diversification research in a context of dynamic, but structurally largely uncoordinated growth, with more of an episodic entry of scholars in climate change and economics, and reveal that the exposure to economic as well as climate shocks, and their combined treatment, were a persistent gap that future empirical and theoretical research is poised to fill in. The findings provide funders, journal editors and research-capacity building organisations with an evidence base for directing investment as the field heads towards a predicted period of peak growth.