Toward Carbon Accounting and Circular Harmony in Shipping Corporations: A Systematic Bibliometric Review

This study examines how carbon accounting can be used to govern, not merely report, circular economy principles in shipping corporations. Grounded in institutional theory and aligned with the UN 2030 Agenda, this study introduces circular harmony as an accounting design principle: Circular interventions are embedded in a single well-to-wake (WTW) carbon ledger with audit-ready KPIs, explicit allocation rules to avoid double counting, and marginal abatement cost (MAC) to prioritize projects. This study conducts a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of 60 peer-reviewed articles (1990 to September 2025) retrieved from the Scopus database (core) with Google Scholar used only for forward-citation snowballing. Four clusters emerge (policy/regulation, technologies, circular strategies, and carbon accounting/SDGs), yet none provides an integrated, WTW Scope-3 treatment within a decision-ready accounting architecture. We therefore operationalize circular harmony as an audit-ready ledger design (boundaries, allocation rules, WTW factors, and MAC) and propose a minimum KPI set to make circular choices assurance-ready. The SLR synthesizes mechanisms linking waste/circular practices to measurable abatement and distills a minimum, ledger-embedded indicator set. This study contributes an operational definition of circular harmony for sustainability accounting, a template of KPIs and attribution rules to make circular choices assurance-ready, and a MAC-based decision lens that connects abatement to compliance cash effects. For practitioners, aligning carbon accounting and circular choices within a WTW ledger improves MRV/ETS readiness, investment ranking, and stakeholder assurance.