From vulnerability to viability: A framework for equitable, climate-resilient EV infrastructure investment

Transportation electrification offers significant potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve public health, and promote energy justice. However, without intentional planning, electrification risks reinforcing spatial and social inequities in infrastructure access, environmental exposure, and climate vulnerability. This study introduces a multi-burden framework for prioritizing equitable and resilient EV infrastructure deployment. The approach integrates four domains of potential disadvantage: EV access, environmental exposure, socioeconomic vulnerability, and flood risk into a composite viability score (EVVS) that identifies communities where investment can most effectively address cumulative burdens, advance equitable electrification, and deliver the greatest justice-informed benefits. Each domain is assessed using publicly available indicators and summarized via Principal Component Analysis to preserve latent structure while reducing dimensionality. To avoid compensatory effects and preserve the salience of high burdens in individual domains, a Crowding-distance Pareto ranking method is used to produce a non-compensatory prioritization score. Demonstrated through a statewide case study in Connecticut, the framework delineates where intersecting social, environmental, and hazard-related burdens concentrate and where EV infrastructure investments can deliver the greatest equity and resilience gains. Results show pronounced spatial heterogeneity in burden patterns across towns. Across weighting schemes, EVVS values range from a mean of 0.49 (Pareto-based) to 0.59 (weighted schemes), with reduced variability under weighted configurations (standard deviation = 0.12). Burden domain means range from approximately 0.45 to 0.68 across the four burden components. Areas such as Windham and Litchfield County exhibiting consistently high, multi-dimensional burdens and emerging as viable locations for equitable EV infrastructure investment. More advantaged regions such as Fairfield County show lower intervention urgency. By embedding energy justice principles, the framework advances a transferable, policy-relevant approach for aligning EV infrastructure deployment with equity and climate-risk reduction goals.