As climate risks like floods and wildfires intensify, existing buildings must be strengthened. There’s no way around it – today’s buildings will still represent two-thirds of the global building stock by 2040.
Retrofitting buildings to prepare them for climate risks is a daunting challenge: resilient retrofits are a more difficult task than designing new buildings to withstand natural hazards. Scaling up retrofits into mainstream practice faces significant barriers of cost, design complexity, policy, social equity, and market inertia.
However, the need for resilient retrofits is also a generational opportunity: the chance to remake the world’s vulnerable buildings in a more fitting image for the hazards they will face.
Luckily, retrofit strategies exist for many hazard and building types, and as our project profiles on Developing Urban Resilience demonstrate, resilient buildings and retrofits present a strong business case that can include:
The Urban Resilience program’s foundational research on retrofits can be found in the Resilient Retrofits: Climate Upgrades for Existing Buildings report and other resources below.
Resilient Retrofits: Climate Upgrades for Existing Buildings introduces real estate actors, designers, policymakers, and finance professionals to the opportunities and challenges of preparing existing buildings for accelerating physical climate risks, including extreme temperatures, floods, storms and high winds, seismic risks, water stress/drought, and wildfires.
Resilient building retrofits can provide solutions for buildings of all types and sizes – however, planning and paying for retrofits remains challenging. Watch this webinar to understand the strategies and considerations for resilient retrofit designers, policymakers, and finance professionals that can be applied within real estate portfolios large and small.
Ever since the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the New York City Housing Authority has been prioritizing hazard and resilience planning for its developments to better adapt and prepare for future climate-related hazards and extreme events. As part of this effort, in February 2021, NYCHA requested a ULI Technical Assistance Panel (TAP) to closely examine how one of its developments, Marlboro Houses, could be made more resilient to climate-induced hazards.
ULI convened a vTAP to focus on land-use strategies, building requirements, and other policies and programs that can help mitigate the effects of heat in downtown adjacent neighborhoods in Nashville. Specifically, the panel addressed building and site-scale landscape heat design resilience strategies, building retrofits and land use heat mitigation, and equitable heat financing opportunities.
Extreme heat kills more people annually than any other climate hazard. At the request of Houston’s Chief Resilience Officer, ULI Houston and the ULI Urban Resilience program hosted a virtual Technical Assistance Panel as part of the Resilient Land Use Cohort to identify heat resilience design and construction strategies.
In September 2021, Hurricane Ida barreled across the Caribbean and the U.S., causing $75 billion in damage. The northeast U.S. was taken by surprise by the storm’s severity as 3 inches of rain fell in an hour. Extreme rain events, whether from hurricanes like Ida or Harvey or the cloudburst that hit Copenhagen in 2011, are increasing in frequency due to climate change and many cities’ infrastructure and landscapes are not equipped to manage the intense volumes of water. To address this challenge, ULI’s Urban Resilience program and ULI New York collaborated with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to seek innovative strategies for cloudburst management, hosting a one-day workshop with expert panelists in landscape architecture and engineering.