Existing evidence on the impact of climate risk on real estate valuations: a systematic map

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Identifies key research gaps in climate risk and real estate valuation, guiding future empirical work and evidence synthesis.

🏢実務担当者:Provides context for understanding how climate risks are currently valued and where data and methods are lacking, though no direct implementation guidance.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for standardized climate risk assessment frameworks and better data to support real estate valuation and disclosure mandates.

Global climate change is set to create a future where natural hazards become more catastrophic and more frequent, with impacts on real estate expected to be substantial. At the same time, the transition to a low-carbon economy is reshaping asset values, with high-emission assets becoming less attractive. We adopted a systematic map approach to assess how the impact of climate risks, i.e., physical climate risks and transition climate risks, has been assessed in the academic and grey literature related to real estate valuation, published between 2014 and 2023. The retained corpus of 130 documents was coded according to a pre-defined coding framework, covering geographic distribution, evaluation methods, the type of real estate assets and impact assessment methods. Across the 130 included documents (peer-reviewed and grey literature), the evidence base is dominated by studies that quantify physical climate risk effects on real-estate values, most often using econometric capitalization approaches (e.g., hedonic regressions, DiD, repeat-sales). The most frequently studied hazards are hydrological ones, especially coastal and fluvial floods, typically operationalized using official hazard maps (particularly in US case studies) or through proxies such as elevation and distance to from the shoreline. A smaller subset of studies evaluates adaptation-relevant outcomes (e.g., damages via depth–damage functions) or uses alternative valuation variables such as asking prices, appraisals, or operating and maintenance costs in retrofit-focused works. Evidence on transition climate risks is present but much smaller in volume and is concentrated on a limited set of drivers, notably minimum energy performance requirements, energy labels and local externalities linked to renewable-energy deployment. This patterns partly reflects the study’s focus on transition risks explicitly linked to decarbonization. In terms of geography, the literature is heavily concentrated in the United States, while European studies cluster in a few large economies (notably Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom). The corpus is overwhelmingly focused on one- and two-family housing, with comparatively fewer studies examining multi-family housing and commercial real estate. A small number of papers touch on ecosystem or environmental amenities changes affecting values, including cases linked to invasive or alien species (e.g., algae blooms), but these studies remain relatively rare in the overall corpus. The systematic map highlights several priority gaps for future research and evidence synthesis. First, transition risks remain underexplored beyond a narrow focus on energy-performance regulation, energy labels and renewable-energy proximity; more work is needed on additional channels such as disclosure regimes, financing and insurance repricing, changing tenant demand, and stranded-asset dynamics. Second, compound and cascading risks are rarely analyzed explicitly, even though real-estate exposure often reflects interacting hazards and changing baselines; advancing datasets and methods that represent multi-hazard interactions is therefore a key priority. Third, the geographic evidence base is skewed toward the United States, and more comparable, data-rich studies are needed across Europe to strengthen external validity. Fourth, research remains focused on single-family housing, limiting transferability to urban contexts where multi-family and commercial assets, and different ownership, tenancy, and financing structures, are central. Finally, ecosystem-related valuation impacts appear in only a small portion of the academic corpus and are limited in grey literature, suggesting a need for clearer conceptualization and more systematic integration of biodiversity and ecosystem mechanisms in real-estate climate-risk assessment.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-026-00389-6first seen 2026-06-29 08:17:31