On the frontline—Sustainability and development research amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract COVID-19 outbreak has exposed the world population to a condition of unprecedented public health and global health vulnerability. Preliminary and projected consequences have exhibited their harmfulness for socio-economic, environmental and political systems. In this framework, development and sustainability turn focal policy targets to limit the humanitarian and ecosystems impacts of the pandemic and stimulate mitigation, preparedness and adaptation to change. This work aims at furnishing a prompt array of key tools to analyse, comprehend and disentangle the sketched issues. For this scope, it is conducted a bibliometric analysis for depicting and mapping the early scholarship response on the relationship between the 2019 Coronavirus, sustainability and development within the pandemics discourse. The research finds a relevant bulk of early publications and geographical insights, principally published on environmental and economic policy, global and public health journals by US, UK, Chinese and Italian scholars. Exploiting a multiple correspondence analysis and a validated cluster analysis, the investigation detects a conceptual structural map made up of clusters of issues – environmental health, socio-economic and medical/technical topics, that can be related to the different phases of the Coronavirus. The outputs confirm the need for rapid sustainability action within the development policy to contrast the pandemic.