Climate Adaptation Projects for Resilient Cities and Social Value: A Scientometric Review

Abstract

The risks associated with climate change are escalating in communities, and the benefits of adaptation projects are often assessed by focusing primarily on the technical gains of increased resilience, with comparatively less attention to the social value they create for those communities. This study reviews academic evidence on how climate change adaptation projects implemented in the urban built environment translate these strategies into two outcomes: the city’s resilience and social value, through the lens of the delivery of urban planning and construction projects. The scientometric analysis was carried out on 58 peer-reviewed documents identified from the Web of Science (n=51) and the Scopus database (n=7), with relevance to English-language publications. The results of the keyword co-occurrence analysis using the VOSviewer tool, with a minimum of five occurrences and 22 keywords, clustered into four distinct themes: Policy Frameworks, Urban Resilience, Risk Management, and Planning Governance. The results of the study suggest a highly interconnected body of knowledge networked around the keywords of climate change, adaptation, cities, and resilience, representing a dynamic shift from a traditional framework of risk and vulnerability to a more contemporary approach that focuses on the roles of policy, planning, governance, and sustainability. It is also interesting to recognise the limited appearance of social value as a high-frequency keyword. The paper contributes a cluster delivery logic that links strategy, project selection, design needs, coordination, and implementation management to outcomes of resilience and social value. The discussion of implications suggests the need to integrate a criterion of social value into appraisal, procurement, and review processes, and to develop African evidence through African-led evaluations and context-related delivery research.