Our climate is changing and the impacts on our buildings, infrastructure and way of life are set to increase.
It is not enough to mitigate against future climate change, we also need to adapt to the inevitable impacts we are locked into.
As highlighted through the IPCC’s ‘Climate Change 2022: Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability’ report, much greater investment in adaptation measures and solutions is needed, in cities especially, and nature offers huge potential to reduce climate risks.
Solutions to enable climate resilience within the built environment already exist, but they aren’t always common knowledge or well understood. And we don’t have time to individually search for them or generate new ideas from scratch.
To help seek out some of the solutions, UKGBC launched two climate resilience challenges in January 2022, searching for the best solutions in need of greater profiling and adoption. The solutions could be from anywhere in the world and either stand alone, or work with other solutions, to answer either challenge.
These challenges were:
- How can communities and local authorities implement, maintain, and assess the impact of nature-based solutions to enhance climate resilience?
- How can existing buildings be made more resilient to climate change, with as little disruption to their occupants as possible, by 2030?
UKGBC has shared the final outcome of these challenges – a publication showcasing all solutions submitted that met the high standards of our judging panel and were identified as being scalable, impactful, having an acceptable cost-benefit, and were able to be implemented now. Within the document are a large range of solutions to the different challenges faced by those with varying resource capabilities and needs.
For the first challenge, the report includes digital tools, practical guidance and community engagement models that can be used by local authorities and communities. For the second challenge, the responses range from overarching digital tools to more specific solutions for roofs, facades, and water management.
This document is intended to be a go-to for built asset owners, providing quick access to a range of practical responses to climate resilience challenges that they can then pilot and implement. It helps streamline the process of finding a solution, making action on climate resilience quicker and easier. A wide range of other solutions can also be found in UKGBC’s Solutions Library.
