Understanding Climate Risk in the Built Environment

About this course.

Climate risk is the risk that a changing climate — and the world's response to it — will harm the things we value, including people, buildings, infrastructure, businesses and the money invested in them. In the built environment it has two broad sources: the direct effects of a changing climate on physical assets (physical risk), and the effects of the economy shifting away from high-emission ways of doing things (transition risk). Long-lived built assets are especially exposed because a building or piece of infrastructure designed and built today may still be standing in fifty, eighty or a hundred years, over which time both the climate and the rules, markets and expectations around it will change substantially.

That long life is the heart of the problem. Most of the decisions that determine how an asset copes with a changing climate — where it is located, how high its floor level sits above a flood, how it handles heat, what materials it is made from, how it is serviced with energy — are locked in at the design and construction stage and are expensive or impossible to change later. A poor siting decision cannot be undone once the building exists; a design that assumed a cooler, calmer past may be uncomfortable, costly or unsafe in a hotter, more extreme future. Decisions made for the next few years therefore carry consequences for many decades, which is exactly why climate risk deserves attention at the very start of a project rather than as an afterthought.