WP 2020-87 Mapping Forward-Looking Mitigation Studies at Country Level

We survey the rapidly expanding literature on country-level mitigation pathways using systematic mapping techniques. We build a database of 4691 relevant papers from the Web of Science and Sco- pus. We analyze their abstracts and metadata using language processing techniques and an innovative topic modeling approach based on two machine-learning models. We find that the country distribution of papers matches countries share of GHG emissions, with very few papers about currently low-emitting countries. Most papers have either 2030 or 2050 as time horizon, the former being more frequent in recent publications. Topic-wise, all areas of mitigation are covered, but major differences across countries reflect both specific circumstances and gaps in the literature, for example around finance.