Productive renewable energy as climate-resilient infrastructure: A conceptual framework for energy–livelihood continuity in climate-vulnerable economies

Climate adaptation planning and energy policy have often evolved along separate analytical and institutional pathways despite the growing dependence of climate resilience on reliable energy services. While the broader Productive Uses of Energy (PUE) literature has demonstrated the developmental importance of decentralized energy systems for livelihoods and local economic activity, their contribution to climate-risk governance and resilience-oriented infrastructure planning remains comparatively underexplored. Drawing on a structured conceptual synthesis of literature spanning productive energy, climate adaptation, resilience theory, infrastructure planning, and impact assessment, this study develops a conceptual framework that reframes Productive Renewable Energy (PRE) as climate-risk infrastructure within the energy–economy–livelihood nexus. Building on the hazard–exposure–vulnerability perspective, the framework demonstrates how reliable productive energy systems sustain irrigation, agro-processing, cooling, storage, mobility, and other productive functions during climatic disruption, thereby reducing socio-economic interruption and strengthening adaptive capacity. To enhance practical applicability, the framework integrates three interconnected analytical layers (technical reliability, economic continuity, and livelihood resilience) and identifies representative operational indicators together with an illustrative application pathway for resilience-oriented infrastructure assessment. Rather than serving as a predictive modeling architecture, the framework provides a structured analytical basis for evaluating how infrastructure reliability, redundancy, and service continuity influence climate-risk pathways across interconnected socio-economic systems. The study concludes by outlining implications for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), resilience-oriented infrastructure governance, and future engineering and policy research on decentralized renewable energy systems in climate-vulnerable regions of the Global South.