Three steps to climate-adapt your buildings

If you knew there was a storm approaching your neighborhood, would you start preparing for it or would you stick your head in the sand? Would you get an insurance in case it hits your building, or would you gamble?

The time for talking about why real estate companies should adapt their buildings has expired. Now is the time to talk about how to climate-adapt them. I will give you three crucial steps.

Step 1 – Screening of risks

The most important question to answer is “What are the main physical climate risks to your buildings?”. The list of acute and chronic climate-related hazards is long but hopefully your buildings will not be exposed to all of them. It all depends on the local climate and geographical location of them. For example, one building is located near a stream that has been flooded several times the past ten years, or one building is in a region where heat waves will extend up to 40 days in 2100, compared to 12 days now.

A good way to start is to google “national adaption strategy of X (insert country)” to read about the identified climate risks. Second would be to google “climate risk map of Y (municipality or region)” to narrow down the screening and map out your buildings.

Step 2 – Risk assessment

When you have identified the main risks to your buildings, it’s time to assess their vulnerability and materiality to the risks. This could be done from a desktop but includes preferably site visits and ocular inspections to assess its condition and features to the property that might lead to damages and costs. For example, an assessment of heavy precipitation:

Office building X is in an area where the intensity of heavy precipitation will increase with 15-20 % until the year 2100. There are several impermeable surfaces with no vegetation next to the building and the inclination of the ground is slightly tilted towards the fa?ade. The building has a basement, where the power station and other technical equipment are located, and a garage. There are several basement windows a couple of centimeters over ground, which have not been maintained in 20 years, and one unroofed entrance for cars. The building lacks check valves on water pipelines.

Conclusion: The basement is at great risk of being flooded. Apart from water damages, there’s a risk of electric and heating failures if the power station is damaged. The costs of repairs are estimated to Y and cost for a new power station is Z.

Step 3 – Asset-specific adaption plan

Develop an asset-specific adaption plan, with solutions that reduce the most important physical climate risks, and integrate it to the maintenance or business plan of the asset. Depending on the type of solution, the costs could be accounted for as OpEx or CapEx. Replacements of ill-maintained basement windows goes into the OpeX-bucket while adding greenery and installing stormwater reservoirs would go to the other one.

It’s always too late to get an insurance when your house starts to burn and probably disastrous for your finances. Don’t wait for the storm to hit, start adapting your buildings to climate change now – and see their value increase.