Examination of existing facilities management approaches to climate change and future directions

It is widely accepted that human activities have contributed to changing the world’s climate and that the pace of this change is ever increasing. Two approaches are being promoted by the international community to address the issue of climate change (1) Mitigation, seeking to reduce the amount of CO2; (2) Adaptation, which seeks to alter the way humankind live and work in response to the changing climate. Whilst facilities managers and their organisations have prioritised mitigation action, there is less evidence to suggest that they are addressing the implications that a changing climate may have on the demands being placed on their organisation’s hard and soft facilities (adaptation). This paper reports findings from a case study and questionnaire survey to ascertain the present approach taken by facilities managers to address mitigation and adaptation, their respective drivers, their view on climate change and their environmental inclination. It concludes that the facilities manager's approach to climate change is derived by a combination of factors; namely a) Organisation approach to climate change b) Legislation and c) the facilities mangers perception of the risks posed by future climate change and of the use of risk assessment methods and climate change projection data. The study concludes that the prevailing measure for addressing climate change impacts is reactive in nature, taking the form of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning. The practical implication of the work is in the realization that mitigation, being quantifiable and legislative driven, is viewed as a strategic issue and of importance to an organisations Corporate Social Responsibility agenda which can be planned over the longer term (10-20 yrs). Adaptation on the other hand is measured through successful survival, increased resilience and adaptive capacity (absence of quantitative performance target), each of which are viewed as short term operational issues and as such adaptation struggles to find strategic importance. If organisations are to adapt to inevitable climate change then this situation needs to change