Assessing the impact of sea level rise to the coastal airport: a systematic review and meta-analyses

Sea level rise poses a significant threat to coastal airports as it endangers infrastructure, puts the economy at risk, and interferes with aviation operations. Despite the advancements in geospatial techniques for assessing sea level rise impacts, the relationships between airport infrastructure and rising sea levels remain sparse. This systematic review provides a comprehensive analysis of assessing the impacts of sea level rise on coastal airports. This study adopted PRISMA approach and VosViewer to show research trends and relationships among key studies from the year 2020 to 2025. The survey includes 397 papers, highlighting a growing research focus on GIS-based modelling, remote sensing applications, and hydrodynamic simulations to assess airport inundation risks. Key findings indicate an upward trend from 2020 to 2024, indicates increased awareness of the concerns associated with sea level rise as well as developments in GIS and remote sensing regarding coastal vulnerability, but a steep drop in 2025 as the year is ongoing and more articles could still be indexed. This review demonstrates how geospatial technologies can aid in evaluating airport vulnerability to sea level rise and thus in improving risk assessments. The research is bound to English published articles and uses open-source materials to guarantee credibility and confirm the absence of bias on selection criteria. The results show a heightened increase towards published works for sea level rise and coastal studies. Nevertheless, there is still a considerable deficit in research targeting the coastal infrastructure, and especially the airports as the elements of the coastal transportation system. A conceptual framework is developed in this study to address research gaps and guide support further research. This systematic literature review identifies key findings on the role of geospatial technology in assessing coastal airport vulnerability to sea level rise, highlighting existing research gaps and opportunities for future studies.