the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 11 Jun 2026
Review article: Climate hazards and risk in African cities – knowledge gaps and research needs
Abstract. This study presents a semi-systematic synthesis of scientific literature published between 2015 and 2025 on climate risk in African cities. From an initial set of 1,832 records identified through broad climate- and urban-related keywords, 273 articles were selected through title and abstract screening. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines quantitative mapping of geographic coverage, climate hazards, methodologies, and keyword networks with expert review and AI-assisted synthesis of research gaps. Results reveal a rapidly growing but uneven knowledge base. Research is concentrated in a limited number of regions and large cities, while Central Africa and secondary cities remain underrepresented. Studies focus mainly on a restricted set of hazards, with few adopting multi-hazard risk perspectives. Earth Observation is widely used but remains underexploited, while high-resolution urban climate modelling and integrated assessments of social vulnerability, governance, and health impacts are still limited. Most studies are retrospective and rarely combine future climate scenarios with projected urban growth, highlighting a gap between scientific knowledge and urban planning needs.
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Status: open (until 23 Jul 2026)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-2901', Milad Basirifard, 15 Jun 2026 reply
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1.The manuscript aims to synthesize “climate risks in African cities,” but this is an extremely wide topic covering hazards, vulnerability, governance, EO, AI, urban growth, health, infrastructure, and planning. The paper identifies many gaps, but many are already well known: limited data, geographic imbalance, lack of multi-hazard studies, weak integration of social vulnerability, and few future-looking studies. The authors need to make clearer what this review adds beyond existing review papers, rather than mainly confirming broad and expected gaps. The abstract itself already lists many generic findings, such as underrepresentation of Central Africa, secondary cities, multi-hazard studies, urban modelling, and social vulnerability integration.
2. The authors used “urban* OR city OR cities OR metropol*” in the title and “climat*” as the only topical keyword, without hazard-specific or risk-specific terms. This may miss many relevant studies on flooding, heat, drought, landslides, coastal hazards, vulnerability, exposure, and adaptation that do not use “climat*” prominently. At the same time, the broad strategy created many irrelevant records, later filtered manually. The authors need to justify this design more rigorously and provide a reproducible PRISMA-style screening process, including exclusion criteria, reviewer agreement, and examples of included/excluded papers.
3. The paper states that 1,832 records were reduced to 273 articles through title/abstract screening, with uncertain cases retained. However, it does not explain how many reviewers screened the papers, whether screening was independent, whether disagreements were resolved, or whether inter-reviewer consistency was checked. For a semi-systematic review, this is a major weakness. Without this information, the final corpus may reflect subjective judgement rather than a reproducible evidence base.
4. The authors used SciSpace outputs and then processed more than 50,000 words with GPT-5.2 to generate knowledge gaps. This is potentially useful, but the manuscript does not provide enough information about validation, hallucination control, prompt sensitivity, reproducibility, or whether outputs were checked against the original papers. This is a serious issue because AI-generated “research gaps” can easily reproduce generic language rather than extract evidence-based findings. The authors should either move this to supplementary material as an exploratory check or provide a much stricter validation protocol.
5. Figures on climate-zone representation, city-size representation, keyword networks, EO trends, and hazard frequency are useful, but the interpretation often remains surface-level. For example, the city-size comparison shows strong underrepresentation of small cities and overrepresentation of large cities, but the implications for bias in risk knowledge are not deeply analysed. The authors should connect these patterns more directly to what kinds of adaptation decisions may be distorted by this bias.
6. Each article was assigned a dominant hazard, while many urban climate risks are compound by nature. This can artificially separate flooding, sea-level rise, water stress, heat, and LST, even when they interact. The manuscript itself criticizes the literature for studying hazards in isolation, but its own classification partly repeats this limitation. The authors should add a multi-label hazard classification and report how many papers address compound or cascading hazards.
7.Some thematic sections read like mini-literature reviews with many citations but limited synthesis. The flood section, for example, contains many claims and examples, but the writing becomes dense and sometimes repetitive. Other hazards, such as windstorms, receive much shorter treatment. This imbalance weakens the review. The authors should reduce citation-heavy narrative and replace it with clearer synthesis tables: key methods, geographic focus, limitations, evidence strength, and research needs for each hazard.
8.Currently, many gaps are repeated in different forms across the abstract, results, thematic review, AI synthesis, and conclusion. The final message would be stronger if the authors organized the contribution around a clear framework: hazard evidence, exposure/vulnerability evidence, future scenario evidence, modelling/EO evidence, and decision-use evidence. This would make the review more useful for researchers and urban planners.
9. The conclusion states that research has grown but remains limited by data scarcity, high-resolution modelling gaps, geographic imbalance, and weak integration of social and forward-looking dimensions. This is reasonable, but not sufficiently novel. The authors should end with a more actionable research agenda, including specific datasets, minimum reporting standards, recommended cross-city comparison designs, and priority regions/city types.