Research on Environmental Sustainability in Sports——A Systematic Review Based on English Journals in 2016—2020

This study gave a systematic review of the literature concerning sports and environmental sustainability in 21 English periodicals from 2016 to 2020 and adopted R and Python respectively to conduct Bibliometrics and LDA topic model analysis of the entire literature. As revealed by this study, this research field has formed obvious academic groups, featuring prominent transnational study, and has solid research paradigm and theoretical foundation. Following themes of modern Olympics, sports leagues, outdoor sports and public agendas, this study focused on the impact of sports on the ecological environment and measures to achieve environmental sustainability in sports, with special attention on Chinese issues. The study suggested that Chinese scholars, on the basis of learning from the experience in foreign research, start from the background of the Winter Olympics and adopt mature theories to carry out interdisciplinary research based on environmental impact and environmental governance.