Ready to unlock the potential of climate change resilience?

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we will increasingly face long-term shifts in global weather patterns, as well as more frequent and intense extreme weather events.

Communities and places will be affected in disproportional and often unjust ways by these changes. Not only due to the geographical location or characteristics of the physical conditions, but also because of socio-economic, cultural, and historical aspects as well as local policies and regulations. These underlying, place-based characteristics are central to our journey towards resilience and to unlocking the full potential of our related investments. Influencing how we will be affected by climate hazards, they also impact our preparation and ability to respond to such events. Yet too often, these aspects are overlooked or underestimated.

Understanding physical climate

The IPCC defines physical climate risk as the potential for adverse consequences from the impacts of climate change. This can result from the interaction of the climate-related hazard (the probability of an event), exposure (people or assets in harm's way), and vulnerability (susceptibility to harm and capacity to respond). Bearing this definition in mind, we must identify which climate-related hazards, such as heatwaves, floods, and storms, are relevant to a given place, how often they occur, how they affect assets, ecosystems, and the value-chain, and how communities can effectively prepare for and recover following an event.

To advance climate resilience, we need to focus on reducing exposure, reducing vulnerability, or reducing both. Reducing exposure often centers on familiar solutions, traditional engineering measures or nature-based solutions. Although valuable, we have relied for too long on infrastructure-based solutions. By also reducing vulnerabilities, we protect assets from impacts while elevating organisations and strengthen communities. This work reaches beyond climate risk into issues of equity and justice, addressing the systemic inequalities that shape who should bear the greatest burden and who has the fewest resources to respond.

Many of our current design practices are outdated and unfit for our current planetary complexities and future climate variability. To meaningfully reduce emissions and adjust to a future climate, we cannot rely on the same high-emission methods of our industrial past. Both the World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group identify inaction and maladaptation as top global risks, along with climate change related hazards, underscoring both the urgency of acting now as well as acting wisely.

So, how do we design for a more equitable, climate resilient future?

Small actions can lead to big impacts. However, it is important to understand our direction and how best to proceed.

We recommend four steps to advance climate resilience:

1. Define climate-related risks
   
   We use local climate reports and projections to identify which physical hazards are relevant for a given place, both today and in the future. We also look at “who” and “what” can be exposed to each hazard, and we dive into their vulnerabilities. Understanding the potential consequences of an exposed site, critical infrastructure, or uninsured asset is key to carrying out a physical climate risk assessment.
2. Co-create interventions
   
   We engage stakeholders and communities to collectively identify actions and interventions that are suitable to a specific place and directly respond to the climate risks and the underlying socio-economic conditions. We combine centralised and decentralised interventions, and we prioritise multi-purpose and nature-positive designs to advance resilience. In doing so, we aim to increase adaptive capacity, create connections, and incentivise ownership of strategies and interventions with everyone involved. We do this through the recognition that social cohesion and local anchoring are fundamental aspects of successful climate resilience.
3. Co-evaluate strategies
   
   We evaluate resilience strategies and climate adaptation designs through additional modeling to identify the residual risk and provide recommendations. We engage stakeholders in the conversations around distribution of risk and benefits, design pathways, and prioritisation, both spatially and temporally.
4. Outline resilience pathways
   
   Climate adaptation is often seen as a cost. However, when designed with intention and offset in potential adverse consequences, climate resilience can be documented to be a sound investment. In this step we combine the intervention costs with the reduced climate risks (benefit), and the added value that multi-purpose, nature-based interventions also give to our communities (co-benefit) in a cost-benefit analysis. This system approach builds resilience into planned investments.

Our call to action

Too often, climate risk assessments fall short by stopping at hazard exposure, identifying which climate hazards could pose a risk. But this only tells part of the story. It does not reveal whether assets, systems, or populations are at risk, or the degree to which they might be impacted. To get there, we must ask deeper questions: What exactly is exposed? How is it exposed? And by how much?

Answering these questions requires broadening the scope beyond isolated assets, such as buildings, and critical infrastructure to include the livelihoods of citizens, the well-being of vulnerable groups, and the survival of natural habitats. In practice, this means assessing not only the physical exposure of assets, but also the vulnerabilities of place, portfolios, and communities.

Therefore, working with vulnerability is, in essence, working with inequity. It highlights who has the resources to prepare and recover, and who does not. It brings forward the uneven distribution of risks across society, and the disproportionate burdens faced by those with fewer means. Ultimately, incorporating vulnerability into climate risk assessments is fundamental to building resilience. Only by recognising these inequities can we design responses that are both effective and just.

These responses are seldom “one-size-fits-all”. Instead, we need to challenge our preference for business as usual and standards to allow for a diversity of interventions that together bring about resilience. This will not only require new skills, but also new mindsets and perspectives.