Based on Citespace software, this study conducted a bibliometric analysis of the current status and evolutionary trends of research in the field of carbon emissions and climate change in sports during the period 2008-2024. The study screened 445 relevant documents from the three major databases of SSCI, A&HCI, and SCIE in the Web of Science Core Collection (WOS-CC), and revealed the research dynamics in the field through visualization. The results show an overall upward trend in the number of related research publications since 2008, especially in the last five years (2020-2024), when the percentage of publications reached 52.13%, indicating that scholars’ attention to this topic has increased significantly in recent years. At the institutional level, the National Institute for Environmental Studies - Japan ranks first with 99 publications, and Japan has the largest number of research collaborations in this field, amounting to 306, which reflects the importance Japan attaches to environmental protection and its research strength in this field. In terms of discipline distribution, the research is mainly concentrated in the field of environmental sciences, with 173 articles published, accounting for 38.87% of the total number of articles, while the research in the field of physical education and sports is relatively small, which suggests that the future research can strengthen interdisciplinary cooperation, and incorporate multidisciplinary perspectives such as physical education and sports, economics, and management, in order to enrich the content of the research. In addition, keyword emergence analysis shows that “carbon footprint”, “scenarios”, “atmospheric methane”, “land use”, and so on are the hotspots of current research, which reveal the emerging trends in the research of carbon emission and climate change in sports trends. This study provides a bibliometric perspective for systematically analyzing the relationship between sports carbon emissions and climate change, and provides theoretical references and directions for future research, but it also has limitations such as a shorter time span of the data and the lack of coverage of non-English publications, so subsequent studies can further expand the scope of the data in order to enhance the systematicity and completeness of the study.