Urban heatscapes and environmental injustice: Structural drivers and governance pathways for equitable climate adaptation – A scoping review

Research on environmental justice in urban green space (UGS) access and urban heat exposure has expanded since the 2010s, yet these issues remain weakly integrated with governance and policy analysis. This scoping review uses the concept of urban heatscapes, socio-ecological configurations in which environmental knowledge, planning decisions, and power relations co-produce unequal thermal environments, to synthesize structural, institutional, spatial, and social dimensions of injustice. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, a search was conducted in Web of Science, Scopus, and SciELO, and the final corpus comprised 71 peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025, which were synthesized through narrative, comparative, and tabular analysis. Evidence shows that unequal thermal environments are shaped by income, race, segregation, colonial legacies, governance fragmentation, market dynamics, fragmented canopy cover, peripheral urbanization, speculative greening, and weak equity mandates, while gender, age, and migration status further condition vulnerability. Adaptation strategies remain largely technocratic and investment-driven, with limited incorporation of distributive, procedural, and recognition justice. Persistent geographic imbalances within the indexed evidence base, especially the dominance of Global North scholarship, underscore the need for intersectional and policy-oriented research in the Global South. By framing heat and greening inequities as systemic features of urban heatscapes, this review reframes vulnerability as socio-political and advances a justice-centered framework for context-sensitive climate adaptation.