Transportation Equity and Natural Hazard Resilience: A Scoping Review

As climate-related hazards intensify, transportation systems play a central role in shaping who is exposed to risk, who can respond, and who recovers mobility and access after disruption. This scoping review synthesizes 88 studies to assess how transportation and hazards research has engaged equity and justice frameworks, what outcomes are used to evaluate inequity, where findings converge or diverge across hazards and disaster phases, and what conceptual gaps constrain progress. We find that the literature is effective at documenting disparities in exposure, evacuation, adaptation, and recovery, largely through population-based comparisons and novel mobility datasets. However, equity is most often treated implicitly, with unequal outcomes reported absent explicit normative or theoretical grounding. As a result, differences are frequently described without clarifying when and why they constitute inequities, limiting comparability across contexts and policy relevance. Evidence is strongest for inequities in transportation-mediated exposure, particularly for extreme heat and access loss driven by network failure, indicating a maturing understanding of transportation systems as active producers of vulnerability. Findings on evacuation disparities are less consistent, reflecting methodological limitations and contextual variation, while recovery outcomes show greater convergence, with marginalized communities experiencing slower or incomplete mobility restoration. Across domains, mismatches persist between commonly used mobility metrics and lived disaster needs, and mechanisms producing inequity—such as disinvestment, governance capacity, caregiving constraints, disability access, labor precarity, and information asymmetries—are often underexamined. We argue that greater engagement with explicit justice frameworks is necessary to move beyond documenting disparity toward explaining inequity and guiding equity-oriented transportation decisions under growing risk and uncertainty.