Business Case for Adapting Buildings to Climate Change

Innovate UK’s Design for Future Climate, Adapting Buildings programme has produced a report and summary on how buildings can be prepared for climate change.

This report analyses the drivers that affect the market for professional building design services to ready buildings for the changing climate. Recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports confirm the climate trends that make adaptation important and urgent.

Even small increases in average temperatures and their consequent effects on the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events can have far-reaching direct consequences for the built environment; complex indirect consequences will exacerbate the situation.

The technical challenge of adapting to future climate change in the built environment is to optimize building design now for the most effective phased transition to what will be needed in the future. Since the lives of buildings are measured in decades, this means anticipating the future and developing a gradual adaptation strategy that makes use of maintenance cycles for timely, effective and proportionate upgrades.