Energy resilience in the built environment under disruptive events: hazard-, climate- and equity-informed systematic scoping review

Buildings are primary sites where climate hazards translate into human crises, yet research on their ability to withstand and recover from energy disruptions remains conceptually fragmented and rarely integrates building physics with social science perspectives. Energy resilience is increasingly critical as climate extremes, grid instabilities, geopolitical shocks, and widening socioeconomic inequalities increasingly disrupt energy services.
This systematic scoping review synthesises evidence across the built environment to examine how energy resilience is defined, conceptualised, and measured across technical, climatic, and equity dimensions. Following PRISMA-ScR procedures, Web of Science and Scopus were searched for studies between 2000 and 2025, yielding 167 studies supplemented by 9 foundational resilience frameworks (n = 176).
The analysis reveals three structural challenges. Only 25% of studies (44 of 176) provide operational definitions, with most using resilience as a rhetorical construct. The field utilises twenty-nine distinct building-scale indicators, including several mathematically equivalent formulations that remain unrecognised across disciplines. Most studies rely on single-building, short-term, event-based metrics, with limited attention to multi-hazard trajectories, district-scale dynamics, or equity weighting. Empirical evidence is geographically skewed toward heat-related hazards in high-income regions, with fewer than 10% of studies addressing the Global South and limited coverage of cold-climate events. Passive envelope performance emerges as the most consistent determinant of resilience across climate contexts, while efficiency-resilience trade-offs remain underexplored.
This review identifies an inverse relationship between research density and climate exposure and highlights the absence of a cold-climate passive survivability standard as a critical gap. A six-step assessment framework is proposed, integrating hazard, climate, and equity dimensions to support harmonised metrics and policy development.