Cities and climate change: combining bibliometric trends and city-level evidence to understand the connections between urban resilience and adaptive capacity

Climate change poses escalating challenges to urban systems, intensifying risks from extreme temperatures, flooding, sea-level rise, and socio-environmental inequalities. Cities are increasingly recognised as critical arenas for climate adaptation, where resilience and adaptive capacity shape the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and respond to climate-related impacts. This study maps research on urban resilience and adaptive capacity through a bibliometric analysis of Web of Science publications (2010–2023), identifying dominant thematic clusters via keyword co-occurrence and collaboration patterns via co-authorship networks. To connect research trends with practice, this study also reports on a qualitative meta-synthesis of twelve published city case studies from diverse geographic and socio-economic contexts. Explicitly linking bibliometric themes with city-level adaptation evidence, this study identifies areas of convergence (e.g., governance, nature-based solutions, and risk assessment) and persistent gaps, particularly in the operationalisation of social equity, participation, and maladaptation risks. The findings provide an integrated evidence base that may help inform future urban climate adaptation research and policy.