Climate-Resilient Estate Management in Ghanaian Universities: A GIS-Based Assessment of Campus Infrastructure Vulnerability and Maintenance Priorities

Climate-related flooding, heat stress, intense rainfall, water scarcity and windstorms increasingly threaten the serviceability of university buildings and supporting infrastructure. Yet estate-management decisions in many Ghanaian universities remain dominated by reactive repairs, fragmented records and annual budget pressures rather than spatially explicit risk evidence. This systematic review synthesised research on climate vulnerability, geospatial assessment and facilities-maintenance prioritisation in university and comparable institutional estates. Searches covering January 2015 to July 2026 were conducted across academic publisher platforms, Google Scholar and institutional repositories using combinations of terms relating to universities, climate resilience, geographic information systems, infrastructure vulnerability and maintenance. The review followed PRISMA 2020 reporting guidance. Of 168 records identified, 24 studies met the eligibility criteria and were subjected to thematic coding and structured quality appraisal. Flooding and stormwater failure were the most frequently reported hazards, followed by extreme heat and building-energy stress. Buildings, roads, drainage networks, utilities, laboratories, residences and emergency-access routes emerged as the principal vulnerable asset groups. The evidence showed that weighted GIS overlays, remote sensing, digital elevation models, building-condition surveys, multi-criteria decision analysis and BIM-GIS integration can support campus-scale vulnerability mapping; however, few studies connected hazard maps directly to maintenance programmes and capital budgets. The review therefore proposes a Climate-Resilient Asset and Maintenance Prioritisation (C-RAMP) framework that combines hazard exposure, physical condition, service criticality, life-safety consequences, adaptive-capacity deficits and implementation urgency. The framework offers Ghanaian universities a transparent basis for ranking assets, programming preventive maintenance and aligning estate investment with institutional continuity and national climate-resilience priorities.