Mapping Urban Socio-Economic Resilience to Climate Change: A Bibliometric Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Global Research (1990–2025)

Urban socio-economic resilience to climate change has emerged as a central research theme as cities increasingly confront interconnected environmental, economic, and social risks. Despite the rapidly expanding body of literature, the conceptual boundaries, thematic evolution, and analytical priorities of this field remain fragmented across disciplines, and no prior study has systematically mapped the socio-economic dimension of urban resilience through a combined bibliometric and thematic analysis over a multi-decadal horizon. This study addresses that gap by providing a systematic review of global research on urban socio-economic resilience to climate change, integrating bibliometric and thematic analyses of peer-reviewed publications from 1990 to 2025. Following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, records were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and subjected to a multi-stage screening procedure that combined automated relevance scoring with mandatory manual validation of the socio-economic dimension, resulting in a final dataset of 5076 publications. The analysis examines conceptual interpretations of socio-economic resilience, dominant climate hazards affecting urban systems, methodological approaches and assessment indicators, adaptation strategies and governance responses, and emerging research gaps. The results reveal a marked acceleration of scientific output after 2015, driven by the Paris Agreement and the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (2018). The bibliometric network analyses identify adaptation, vulnerability, flooding, and sustainability transitions as the core thematic clusters. The findings trace a paradigmatic trajectory from equilibrist recovery frameworks toward transformative, socio-economically grounded resilience models and reveal persistent gaps in the operationalization of governance, equity measurement, and geographic representation. By synthesizing three-and-a-half decades of scholarship, this review clarifies the intellectual structure of the field and proposes four specific post-2026 research pathways that emphasize longitudinal cross-city comparisons, mixed-methods assessments, sector-specific compound hazard analyses, and governance mechanism studies.