Stadiums as climate-exposed socio-technical infrastructures: a scoping review of fragmented risks and emerging challenges

Dimitri Defrance, TIffanie Lescure

Stadiums are among the most climate-sensitive infrastructures in global sport, yet the evidence available to characterise their climate-related risks remains fragmented. Although billions of spectators attend sporting events each year and climate change is recognised as a multiplier of existing hazards, research on stadium environments continues to treat risks separately. Heat is examined through comfort or ventilation studies, precipitation through drainage engineering, wind through fluid dynamics, and energy through HVAC performance—almost always under present-day conditions and without reference to changing extremes.

We conduct a scoping review of stadium-focused studies across ten thematic domains to evaluate how climate-sensitive risks are currently addressed. Explicit references to climate change are scarce and largely confined to sustainability or energy-efficiency discussions. Existing contributions capture isolated components of hazard, exposure or vulnerability—such as semi-outdoor thermal comfort, structural behaviour, or drainage performance—but they remain conceptually disconnected. Crucially, no study addresses systemic or compound climate risks, and heat-related behavioural risks are entirely absent despite robust evidence linking high temperatures to aggression, agitation and increased medical demand during mass gatherings.

This review demonstrates that current knowledge is insufficient to anticipate how climate change will reshape stadium safety, operations and infrastructure performance. As a way forward, we propose the hazard–exposure–vulnerability (A×E×V) framework as a conceptual pathway to organise disparate findings, reveal missing interactions, and guide future climate-informed risk analyses for stadium systems.