Climate Resilient Buildings. Understanding climate change risk and resilience.

There is a lack of appropriate methods or metrics available for measuring climate resilience at the building level (CISL, 2019) and the current practice of ESG reporting does not reflect how well a building or company is prepared for the transitional or physical risks of climate change (Clapp et al., 2017). Many design standards currently are not deemed appropriate, as they are based on historical climatic trends, in addition, sustainable design standards such as BREEAM and LEED, do not take into account exposure to future climate change.
The aim of this research is to address these gaps in knowledge to understand the challenges surrounding climate change risk and resilience for those who invest in, own, design, develop and operate buildings, in addition, consider, develop and test a resilience framework for buildings addressing these challenges.
Research Questions:
1) To what extent would a resilience standard address the challenges of climate risk for the built environment?
2) What aspects and parameters of climate risk and resilience should be included in a climate resilience standard?

As the topic of climate resilience is relatively immature in the built environment sector and no agreed standard exists that could be presented or tested, a purely quantitative approach to address this gap would not be appropriate at the start of the research project. It is therefore proposed to utilise a combination of deductive and inductive qualitative methods.