What evidence exists on the impact of climate change on real estate valuation? A systematic map protocol.

Background: As natural disasters increase in both frequency and magnitude because of climate change, assets, such as buildings and infrastructure, are exposed to physical climate risk. In addition, as our societies transition towards a greener economy, the transitional climate risk will manifest itself in different forms: reputational issues, market solutions that may drive out those that do not comply, technological disruptions and policy initiatives. How both risks, physical and transitional, impact the economic value of real estate assets is not well understood and will be investigated as the main scope of this systematic map.

Method: we use systematic mapping to collate and configure existing evidence on how climate risk has affected the economic value of real estate assets. After designing a search string, English language peer-reviewed publications will be retrieved from the two largest and most popular scientific research databases, as well as a database containing policy documents. This corpus will be tested for comprehensiveness using a benchmark of 50 highly relevant articles. Once the comprehensiveness test is passed, a consistency test will be carried out on the screening of a randomly selected list of 200 articles by three reviewers. If a kappa score of at least 0.6 is achieved, one of the reviewers will carry out the remainder of the screening, with another reviewer quality assuring 10% of the screening. The retained corpus will then be distributed over the three reviewers, who will carry out the extraction of metadata according to an agreed coding strategy. The final output of the coding will consist of a heat map, showcasing where substantial evidence is available, and research gaps, providing recommendations for further research. In addition, the results will provide insight into the methodology to quantify the impact of climate risk on real estate value. Figures and tables will be designed to make it easy to comprehend the results of the mapping.