The World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) has launched a new industry guide on ‘Climate Change Resilience in the Built Environment’, collating effective and practical steps that can be taken on a building, community and city scale in order to adapt and build resilience to the changing climate.
Under the inevitable impacts of climate change, which are affecting at least 85 per cent of the world’s population, bringing acute hazards such as droughts, rising sea levels, heat waves and floods increasing frequency and severity, resilience action is essential to build community capacity to survive and thrive in our built environments.
That’s why WorldGBC’s flagship Health and Wellbeing global programme Better Places for People (BPFP) has partnered with the UN High-Level Climate Champions and C40 Cities to deliver this resource for enabling adaptation at different urban scales and inspiring decisive action to deliver on the needs of communities around the world.
The guide presents principles of built environment management for changes to weather related climate change impacts such as: storms, high winds, droughts, floods, severe temperature change, and wildfires. These principles are focused on measures of mitigation and damage protection from continual or gradual climate impacts and in some cases, extreme weather events.
The impacts of climate change and damage from extreme and gradual weather events will occur at building, community and city scale across all corners of the globe. Therefore, measures to mitigate damage and ensure recoverability must be implemented at a systemic level. To incorporate climate resilience strategies across a series of complex systems, all built environment stakeholders and decision makers will have to engage and take responsibility. Leadership from local and national government is essential to activate meaningful adaptation and resilience solutions.
WorldGBC CEO Cristina Gamboa said the resource will support the much-needed transition towards people-centric infrastructure solutions considering different urban scales.
“It’s time to scale low carbon, highly resilient and equitable built environment solutions for everyone, everywhere. And it’s time for impactful policy responses from local and regional leaders, to enable this much needed transformation.”
Green Building Council Australia (GBCA) Head of Market Transformation Jorge Chapa said in Australia, many of the communities who fought bushfires in 2019 are today inundated with floods.
“The climate is changing, here and now. It’s time for the built environment to respond.”