Climate change risks on railway infrastructure: A systematic review and analysis

• Identifying and categorizing 24 climate hazards and 29 associated impacts. • Clarifying hazard-impact relationships and risk interconnections. • Identifying climate risks and regions that are frequently studied or underexplored. • Reviewing approaches to address climate change impacts on climate risks. • Highlighting critical gaps to effectively guide future research. As critical urban infrastructure, railways are highly vulnerable to climate hazards intensified by climate change. However, awareness of these risks is low, and comprehensive studies outlining these hazards and their impacts on railways are also scarce. To address these gaps, this review aims to identify climate-related risks, clarify the hazard-impact relationships and risk interconnections, and explore strategies to account for the influence of climate change on these risks. To this end, a systematic literature review was conducted in two stages. First, 71 peer-reviewed papers were collected through developing search strings, applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, and performing backward/forward citation searches. Second, the required information was systematically extracted from the papers and critically analyzed to address the research objectives. As a result, 24 climate hazards and 29 associated impacts were identified and categorized. The hazards and impacts having the most and least occurrence in the literature were also highlighted. Informative matrices were developed to correlate hazards with impacts and illustrate the cascading effects of the impacts. Four distinct approaches used to address the effects of climate change on climate risks were identified and critically discussed. The study also highlights critical gaps in the literature to guide future research.