Developing building design resilience strategies to climate change risks

A resilient building design assessment tool is developed and presented to assist architects in preparing designs to meet the challenges of climate change. The tool incorporates a set of resilience factors that have been selected as a result of information gathered from an extensive literature review (from 1980 on) and a detailed questionnaire sent out to a sample of architects working in the field, together with a statistical analysis of the collected data. Climate change poses the built environment with an increasing threat of more frequent and severe meteorological events, including heavy precipitation, flooding, powerful storms and winds, lengthy and intense heat waves, and globally rising temperatures. The literature review revealed that there have as yet been few attempts to develop systematically models that integrate climate change risks (CCRs) with corresponding resilience factors in order that CCR resilience can be included in all aspects of a building and its site from the outset. The methodology adopted in this research is based on a critical analysis of the literature and the development of a prototype assessment model. Central to the success of this model is the capture of a set of resilience factors (SFs). As a first step, the researcher clustered climate change risks (CCRs) into four categories: physical, social, economic and management. Next, six aspects of resilience as applied to buildings were identified: site, layout, structure, envelope, system and operation. To ensure that appropriate resilience factors were chosen and incorporated into the model, the author extracted the most relevant factors from the review and divided them among the six key building aspects. In total 85 SFs were incorporated into the model. A questionnaire was prepared and sent out to a large number of practicing and academic architects of differing levels of experience. A statistical analysis of the replies, which included a scoring by the respondents of the effectiveness of each resilience factor, was used to refine and reduce the number of resilience factors, to 28, for inclusion in the assessment tool. The tool was then trialled on three projects to demonstrate its capabilities and effectiveness in assessing the resilience of a building against CCRs. It is hoped that the tool described here will, with further refinements and improvements, become a practical aid to architects faced with designing buildings in a world of increasingly severe hydro-meteorological events