Urban Climate and Energy System Resilience and Adaptability

The project aims to explore the interactions between energy and climate at the urban scale, to find early stage design solutions which will increase resilience and adaptability.
Energy systems and the climate are changing rapidly in the UK, requiring dense urban environments to evolve quickly over the coming decades. Resilience is the ability to respond to, cope with, and recover quickly from system change or shocks - whilst adaptability relates to the capability to change in response to new factors. Increased resilience and adaptability are both urgently needed in our built environment from an energy and climate perspective.

Adaptability and resilience emerge from technology choice in the context of energy can be embedded in our cities through interventions such as better building design, integration of nature-based solutions, promoting behavioural change, smart metering and control, holistic systems-thinking, and utilisation of new energy generation and storage technologies. Buildings have a key role to play in the wider energy system as an essential component in our national decarbonisation strategy towards net zero, and in contributing to the resilience of local, regional, and national energy system.

This project will explore the interactions and integration of these interventions in real-world building and urban design applications, focusing on early-design stages.