Climate Justice and Heat Inequity in Poor Urban Communities: The Lens of Transitional Justice, Green Climate Gentrification, and Adaptation Praxis

Urban heat stress is becoming increasingly urgent, yet it remains understudied within the broader intersection of climate change and spatial justice. While urban climate scholarship has largely focused on climatic impacts such as flooding, rising sea levels, and prolonged droughts, the socio-spatial lens of urban heat in marginalised and low-income urban communities has received limited attention. This article, grounded in a systematic review of the global literature, foregrounds the mechanisms through which heat functions as a site of socio-environmental injustice. We argue that fragmented urban morphologies, entrenched spatial inequalities, and uneven adaptation strategies collectively produce and sustain heat vulnerability. The article identifies three interrelated conceptual framings that elucidate the production and persistence of heat inequity: transitional injustice, green climate gentrification, and intersectional adaptation praxis. These lenses reveal how heat risk is differentially distributed, governed, and experienced with broader discourses of urban marginalisation, environmental dispossession, and epistemic exclusion. We contend that advancing climate justice in the context of urban heat requires moving beyond technocratic and elite-oriented adaptation, toward multi-scalar planning paradigms that recognise embodied vulnerability, structural inequality, and the socio-political ecologies of thermal exposure. By theorising urban heat through the lens of climate justice, this article contributes to a more expansive and critical understanding of urban climate risk, one that situates heat inequity within the broader structures of power, governance, and spatial exclusion shaping contemporary urban environments.