Climate adaptations is one of four scans that forms part of Environmental Challenge theme for RIBA Horizons 2034.
Climate change is currently underway. We will increasingly feel its effects over the next 10 years as extreme weather affects our buildings and infrastructure.
There’s a growing concern that, without immediate and deep efforts to slow climate change, global temperatures will surpass the critical 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels by 2027. [1]
Simultaneously, the world is becoming more urbanised, with major urban areas becoming extremely vulnerable to the hazards of climate change. This situation has intensified the need to depart from traditional business-as-usual strategies in urban areas in favour of more sustainable development.
In general, actions to address climate change broadly adopt a two-pronged approach: mitigation and adaptation. As Abimbola Windapo shows in her Horizons 2034 scan, mitigation strategies slow climate change by reducing carbon emissions. Adaptation strategies, on the other hand, accept that climate change is already underway and respond by bolstering our capacity to cope. Adaptations, in their most basic definition, permit “adjusting to the actual or anticipated climate and its effects.” [2]
An approach centred on people, places, and practices is founded on the tenet that species adapt to changing environments. This allows them to minimise or avoid harm while evolving under stress. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it will be difficult to avert the effects of climate change even with “the most stringent mitigation efforts”. [3] Consequently, climate adaptation becomes indispensable and unavoidable.
Climate adaptation in the field of building science and design is not new. The earliest builders improved their buildings in response to varying local climate extremes to maintain a stable indoor environment.
Over time, they integrated technological advances and adjusted design parameters to, for example, enhance airtightness, weather resistance and insulation. New materials like cement and concrete were incorporated to make more enduring shelters to accommodate the expanding human population.
Had it not been for the challenge of carbon emission reduction, the building design industry would have persisted along the same trajectory of innovation in materials and technologies.
Partly because of these first-generation building design innovations (such as introducing materials like cement and concrete), the construction sector contributes approximately 40% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
Apart from buildings’ increased carbon emissions, studies also suggest that they fail to foster good health. According to recent estimations, current building design practices contribute to approximately one-fifth of chronic diseases. [4] While buildings need to mitigate their greenhouse gas impact, they also need to adapt not just to inevitable changes in the climate but also for the health of their occupants.
Designer’s dilemma – challenges in climate adaptation?
Adapting to climate change is a complex challenge that necessitates preparing for multi-dimensional severe weather phenomena, including intense fluctuations in temperature and precipitation, rising sea levels, flooding, prolonged droughts, and intense winds.
Since climate scientists assert with “very high confidence” that the planet is facing a 1.5°C rise in temperature, even the most optimistic will likely agree that we need robust adaptive measures to counter its negative effects. [3] Such a temperature rise will present unique challenges to humanity, infrastructure, economies, and natural systems, all of which will deviate from what is currently considered normal.
Nonetheless, there is still uncertainty about the rate of climate change, and how soon its negative effects will kick in. This uncertainty is a dilemma for building design scientists. Presently, the practice of architectural design is advancing to meet the demands of a changing climate, which includes departing from traditional building materials and construction practices to embrace climate resilience.
Yet, without precise predictions of when these changes will occur, achieving the Goldilocks design that ensures effective adaptation is a formidable task.
Also, while climate change affects the entire planet, its impacts are unevenly felt, with the people of the Global South experiencing more severe consequences due to widespread poverty. Adaptive building technologies such as mechanical cooling systems are often not designed for local climatic differences and may not be universally applicable.
Most design norms are derived from empirical studies conducted mainly in the Western context, leading to adaptive design parameters that cater to those specific environmental and societal contexts. Yet, despite facing more acute climate vulnerabilities, the developing world often adopts these same design standards without modifying them to suit their own unique environments. [5]
The challenges in moving beyond these misunderstandings are multifold. They include a scarcity of comprehensive information. For example, there is a significant lack of data on human adaptive thresholds that consider historical climate exposure, social behaviours and cultural norms. This gap means that current standards may not effectively meet the needs of diverse populations facing varied climate impacts.
There is a pressing need to gather more inclusive data and develop accessible adaptable design parameters that recognise and address the specific vulnerabilities of different regions, especially those most affected by climate change.
Foundations for climate adaptation through design
Architectural design science is grounded in the principle of constructing environments that foster a sense of physical and mental well-being while ensuring sustainability. Due to climate change, buildings now have the dual function of reducing carbon emissions while simultaneously enhancing the health, well-being, and productivity of their occupants. This is achieved by protecting them from the extremities of future climate by maintaining a ‘good’ indoor environment.
Realising the health potential of adaptive design strategies is still at an early stage, yet there is empirical evidence that they can improve indoor air quality and the thermal environment, which can affect human behaviour and impact health outcomes.
Approaches to climate-adaptive designs can be defined as fitting within eight foundation principles, which between them, delineate specific and practicable ways to enhance the resilience of the built environment to climate change.
Contextual knowledge
One of the daunting challenges for the science of designing for climate adaptation concerns how to include local knowledge. The only way to ensure that buildings are resilient to specific local weather patterns and cultural practices is if their design harnesses accurate contextual knowledge.
This is about understanding unique region-specific data on historical climate exposure, stress-coping mechanisms, thermal history and socio-cultural dynamics to design and construct buildings that not only respond to the local climate’s idiosyncrasies but also resonate with the community’s way of life.
By incorporating indigenous materials and traditional construction techniques alongside modern technology, designs built with contextual knowledge ensure sustainability and comfort. At the same time, they foster a harmonious relationship between the built environment and the natural ecosystem.
Tailored approaches like these enhance resilience, diminish environmental impact, and uphold the local community’s cultural traditions.
We can capture contextual knowledge by using methods from the social sciences and humanities, including narrative surveys, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews. These methods inform designs by using grounded data that reduce uncertainty about climate change risks. [6]
Innovative technologies
Innovative technologies harness data-driven methods, smart materials, and bioclimatic principles to create built environments that respond dynamically to changing environmental conditions.
Utilising advancements such as weather-responsive façades, green and energy-efficient methods, and AI-driven climate control systems, innovative technologies help designers optimise comfort, reduce energy consumption and adapt to the current and future impacts of climate change.
However, the implementation of this technology is often hindered by uneven access, limitations in widespread application, and asymmetry in communities’ preparedness to integrate new technologies, particularly in resource-constrained settings. As a result, useful technologies may not be suitable for adoption, especially if they are very sophisticated.
Transformative gender mainstreaming
Climate change has an uneven impact on different genders, often exacerbating existing gender inequalities. Women are disproportionately impacted by climate change. For example, pregnant or elderly women are more prone to dehydration and can suffer more from extreme heatwave days. This leads to – and from – their continued marginalisation and underrepresentation in accessing and co-designing effective adaptive strategies.
The disparity in how women are affected by climate change is frequently determined by their designated roles and unequal power dynamics arising from customs and societal norms. All of which are influenced by historical, cultural, and social factors. This results in maladaptation. [7]
Incorporating climate-resilient designs that take into account gender-specific roles within a community can help to break the link between poverty and the dual pressures of health and energy costs.
This is particularly relevant in low income areas where women's decisions to use active cooling solutions indoors are often influenced more by social norms and the cultural expectation to be the family's stabilising force, rather than by a direct need to manage thermal comfort. Unfortunately, these ingrained behavioural patterns, deeply rooted in social customs, are frequently overlooked when developing strategies for climate-adaptive designs.
Data on the gendered differences in climate change impacts and processes of adaptation are currently scarce but crucial for successful climate adaptation.
Nature-based solutions
Nature-based solutions (NBS) in architecture promise to reduce the whole life carbon of buildings while also offering various multi-scalar ecological regeneration benefits.
For example, using green roofs can lower the temperature of buildings and their surroundings, a useful adaptive strategy in areas where extreme heat is on the rise. Green roofs also reduce operational carbon by lessening the need for air conditioning and mitigating the urban heat island effects.
Another advantage of NBS is that they present the opportunity to utilise local knowledge, which allows ethical factors to influence climate adaptive designs.
NBS can encompass design approaches that imitate natural processes, such as biophilic design, ecosystem-based 'arbortecture', [8] and design for disassembly, frequently using natural materials such as timber, clay, and bamboo.
NBS systems are inherently adaptive. Unlike rigid, engineered solutions, they can grow, self-repair, and adjust to changing conditions, which makes them more resilient to climate change. Also, they are easily accessible to people and disrupt daily lives minimally, allowing them to gain community acceptance naturally.
Being natural ecosystems, NBS remain effective over the long term, and their acceptance by local communities ensures their continued care, protection, and longevity. In short, they are long-lasting sustainable systems. Coincidentally, some NBS also allow buildings to work as material banks and carbon sinks, [9] which are both useful mitigation strategies.
Although there is currently a move towards using multiple NBS, a significant constraint is that they require extensive interdisciplinary knowledge and comprehension of natural materials and ecosystems. Effectively utilising NBS in this way will necessitate expansive collaboration between people in the fields of natural sciences, engineering, and design.
Monitoring, reporting, verification and feedback
Reliable data on the effectiveness of designs’ adaptive potential is crucial for their successful implementation. We can only know how successful they are with extensive monitoring, reporting and validation through post-occupancy evaluations and other forms of research.
The feedback can be used to inform and improve models and simulations and develop data-driven design heuristics to ensure design consistency, which will help designers to verify that their designs will be effective.
To evaluate the tangible advantages of adaptive designs, it will be necessary to develop new metrics and tools that can accurately assess the economic, social, and environmental benefits and reliably correlate them with particular climate adaptive design strategies.
Influencing human behaviour
Design interventions can have an impact on human behaviour. To influence behaviour reliably to support the effectiveness of adaptive measures, we must comprehend the behavioural dynamics of inhabitation and resource utilisation that could hinder climate adaptation strategies.
The literature on how designs interact with their occupants to enhance good climate adaptive behaviours is scarce. Although still evolving, the fields of salutogenic design potentially hold useful insights.
Community action
Community action (through climate action groups, for example) is probably the most effective way for individuals and communities to have their voices heard. Listening to them can help to identify viable strategies for adapting to climate change, and by engaging with relevant groups, designers are more likely to devise successful strategies.
To ensure that the community’s perceptions, sentiments, and needs are properly represented, design processes should incorporate co-creation and participatory design approaches. Groups within the local community with relevant information thus have the opportunity to become catalysts for positive change. In short, the approach ensures that people are central to both the design process and the resulting products.
Emerging methods like computational social science have the potential to capture and process the community information required, especially in the early design stages. [10]
Policy frameworks
Policy support is necessary for climate adaptive designs to work. Presently, many building design regulations and policy guidance (and the codes they refer to) fail to account adequately for the upcoming effects of climate change. When designers recommend adaptive design measures, they encounter barriers from local approval bodies.
Effective adaptation requires an in-depth understanding of possible risks in the context of evolving community needs. As a public good, developing and monitoring this regionally specific understanding is a government responsibility. It can be used to inform policy frameworks to either nudge or, if the risks are serious enough and public interest strong enough, regulate building design practice towards outcomes that are properly resilient to local climate change risks.
Adaptation for a better future
Design science offers a multifaceted toolkit for climate adaptation, crucial for the reconfiguration of our built environments to better withstand impending climate change.
The essence of sustainable development lies in a dual approach: reducing emissions through innovative design while bolstering our built environment’s resilience to potentially damaging climate change.
Eight foundational principles underpin architectural design that harmonise with environmental exigencies, integrate community knowledge, leverage technology, and align with gender and policy frameworks. This holistic approach aims to protect our built environment and the people most at risk from climate change.
Overcoming entrenched conventions, bridging data gaps, and democratising access to these solutions remain significant challenges. Yet, the promise of climate adaptive design – rooted in rigorous data, inclusivity, and community engagement – paves the way towards sustainable living and a climate-resilient built environment.
As we navigate the unpredictability of climate effects and consider the practice of architecture over the next 10 years, it’s critical to embrace and champion design breakthroughs that embody climate resilience. Although the risks posed by climate change can appear catastrophic, such change can also bring opportunities. Adopting climate adaptive design strategies is one such opportunity, with the power to propel humanity forward.
Author biography
Dr Ronita Bardhan is Associate Professor, Director of Research, Deputy Head, and has chaired the EDI committee of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She holds a visiting position at Cambridge Public Health and the Department of Computer Science and Technology.
She leads the Cambridge Sustainable Design Group and works on built environment intervention-led health and energy inequalities in the warming climate, harnessing data-driven design for precision prevention.
Ronita has been awarded the prestigious EPSRC Women Ambassador in Engineering award (2023), the Exceptional Woman of Excellence accolade by the Women Economic Forum (2019), and a notable felicitation by the Ministry of Health, Government of India (2022).
RIBA Horizons 2034 sponsored by Autodesk
References
[1] World Meteorological Organization (2023). WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update Target Years: 2023 and 2023–2027
[2] National Aeronautics and Space Administration (n.d.). Responding to Climate Change
[3] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022). Summary for Policymakers. [Pörtner, H.-O. et al.]. In: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, pp. 3-33
[4] L.D. Frank, et al. (2022). Chronic disease and where you live: Built and natural environment relationships with physical activity, obesity, and diabetes. Environment International, 158, p. 106959
[5] B. Dong, et al. (2022). A global building occupant behavior database. In Scientific Data, 9(1)
[6] R. Bardhan and J. Pan (2023). The why? how? what? and what-IFS of mass slum rehabilitation housing in India. In Informal Settlements of the Global South, pp. 254–275
[7] R. Bardhan, R Debnath and B. Mukherjee (2023). Factor in gender to beat the heat in impoverished settlements. In Nature, 620(7975), pp. 727–727
[8] F. Ludwig, H. Schwertfreger and O. Storz (2012). Living systems: Designing growth in Baubotanik. In Architectural Design, 82(2), pp. 82–87
[9] A. Amiri et al. (2020). Cities as carbon sinks—classification of wooden buildings. In Environmental Research Letters, 15(9), p. 094076
[10] R. Debnathet al. (2023). Facilitating system-level behavioural climate action using Computational Social Science. In Nature Human Behaviour, 7(2), pp. 155–156
