A new report from Saint-Gobain and Arup has highlighted that the incoming issues caused by climate change are unavoidable, and buildings must be adapted to this
The report urges developers to embrace the reality of climate change and create or retrofit climate change-adapted buildings. This is an issue other organisations have also made calls for action for.
The report highlights that global temperatures have already exceeded 1°C of warming, and in 2024 exceeded 1.5°C, dangerously close to the 2°C warning.
Even with mitigation, issues from warming will continue
Climate change will increase the frequency and severity of heatwaves, heavy rainfall and flooding, droughts, wildfire, winds and storms, and raise the sea level more than it has already.
In the UK especially, buildings are mostly unprepared to face this, and are vulnerable to stresses from energy required to cool, a lack of modern efficient heat retention, and urban canyon effects – the trapping of air between tall buildings, especially in cities, that lead to raised temperatures, trapped pollutants, and lower air quality.
Due to these issues, the report estimates that residential cooling electricity costs could double by 2050, and commercial cooling demand could increase by 30%.
Therefore, the issue must be tackled through retrofit rather than just new construction alone.
Nine key actions
In order to effectively tackle these issues, the report has nine points for action:
- The adaptation imperative: Climate change is the defining challenge of the current and future built environment: existing buildings must be retrofitted and new buildings fundamentally rethought.
- A dual relationship with climate: Buildings must cope with acute (extreme winds, storms, wildfires, floods) and chronic pressures (rising average temperatures), while also reducing their Urban Heat Island input into cities.
- A challenge of scale: New better design must be accompanied by largescale retrofitting as in some regions up to ~90% of building in 2050 already exists today scale retrofitting is critical.
- Complementary design strategies: Climate adaptation relies on a mixed approach combining robustness, adaptiveness and flexibility, allowing light, low carbon construction to coexist with resilience.
- Pathways to adaptive design: Multiple techniques are in use—risk analytics, reframed architectural relationships with the environment, climate data, adaptive technologies and digital tools—to integrate present and future risk in workflows.
- Evolving building codes and risk transfer: Codes are starting to integrate climate change but at a measured pace; in parallel, mechanisms to transfer residual risk that cannot be excluded are gaining importance, with uneven maturity across regions.
- A growing market for adaptation: The construction solutions sector is moving towards hazard specific products, performance enhanced mainstream solutions and repositioned offers for climate risks, acknowledging the investment opportunity.
- Performance and integrated systems: The market is shifting from isolated products to integrated, performance based systems—assemblies of components designed to work together under multi hazard climate conditions.
- Buildings’ first lines of defence: Building envelopes and site are the primary defences against climate stresses, which construction systems can target adaptive solutions focus on building envelopes and their immediate surroundings as the primary defences climate impact.
The report can be read in full here.
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