Building performance must consider climate resilience alongside energy efficiency, carbon, cost, safety and user wellbeing.
A resilience expert recently remarked to me that everyone suddenly seems to be talking about resilience as if it were a new topic and it’s not. He’s right but it is becoming more visible and there is now an expectation that it should influence real decisions.
With resilient cities high on the agenda of the 2026 UN Climate Conference (COP31), the built environment faces a very practical question: when a material climate risk is identified, does it actually change how a building is designed, financed, operated or retrofitted?
Perceptions seem to be shifting. The 2026 Sustainable Construction Barometer shows that, across 30 countries, resilience gained another five points in how stakeholders and citizens define sustainable construction, after an eight-point rise between 2024 and 2025.
At the same time, climate risk analytics are becoming more sophisticated and recent World Economic Forum analysis put forward that resilience is increasingly measurable. Yet measurement is not the same as integration. A risk assessment can sit alongside a project without materially changing its brief, design, financing or operation. Nor is measurement fully resolved in practice.
Twenty-one interviews conducted for the Barometer with commercial banks, development banks and insurers found growing attention to resilience. It also found continuing uncertainty around definitions and how to demonstrate a clear return on resilience investment.
The next step is to make resilience consequential.
1. Define performance against the climate a building will face
Energy efficiency, carbon, cost, safety and comfort remain essential building performance criteria. Climate resilience should not displace them. However, it should change the conditions against which performance is assessed.
The distinction between adaptation and resilience is useful here. Adaptation focuses on adjusting a building to changing conditions. Resilience asks a wider operational question: can it withstand disruption, limit damage, maintain critical functions and recover?
The Saint-Gobain-Arup report Adapting Buildings to Climate Change shows what this means in practice. Climate risk assessments are increasingly used to identify hazards over a building's lifetime, while engineers are beginning to supplement historical design data with forward-looking climate scenarios – for example when sizing drainage, testing structural robustness or reassessing cooling loads.
The report also identifies robustness, adaptiveness and flexibility as complementary strategies. Its “Anatomy of resilience” infographic illustrates how the building envelope and immediate surroundings can become a first line of defence.
This is as much a renovation issue as a new-build issue. In advanced economies, around 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing. A recent French white paper on climate adaptation similarly highlights the need to address existing buildings, infrastructure and territories rather than treating resilience as a concern only for future projects.
2. Bring resilience upstream without pretending every risk can be eliminated
Timing matters. Orientation, massing, facade proportions, site design and system choices can all respond to projected climate conditions. Once major technical and economic parameters are fixed, the range of possible responses narrows and later measures may be more difficult or costly.
However, buildings face different risks, fulfil different functions and operate under different economic, social and climatic constraints. There is no one-size-fits-all model for resilience and protecting every building against every conceivable hazard would make little sense.
Proportionality is key. Resilience can therefore involve trade-offs: between upfront cost and avoided future losses, between robustness and embodied carbon, between redundancy and resource efficiency, and between today’s needs and the certainty of a changing climate, even as the timing, intensity and local impacts of specific risks remain uncertain.
The more useful questions are context-specific. Which hazards are material here? Over what time horizon? Which functions must continue during disruption? Which interventions are proportionate to the risk? Which residual risks have to be accepted, managed or financially transferred?
Different contexts lead to different responses. At Boston's Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, for instance, the ground floor was elevated above the 100- and 500-year flood elevations, while critical building systems were located on the roof.
3. Make clear who needs to act, and when
Buildings do not have a single decision-maker. Developers establish requirements. Architects and engineers translate them into design assumptions. Policymakers set codes and standards. Investors and lenders assess long-term value and risk. Insurers price some financial consequences. Owners and operators ultimately manage performance in use.
In construction, decisions are fragmented across actors who intervene at different stages and operate under different incentives. That fragmentation is precisely why collaboration matters here: not as a communication principle but because no single actor controls all the decisions that determine a building’s resilience.
The Sustainable Construction Observatory's Action Paper identifies the full integration of adaptation and resilience and stronger collaboration across the value chain as priorities for accelerating sustainable construction. The challenge is not to make everyone responsible for everything. It is to identify which decisions each actor can influence and to make climate risk visible at the moment those decisions are taken.
Building codes illustrate the point. The Saint-Gobain and Arup research finds that climate change is beginning to be integrated into codes but at a measured pace, while some climate-informed practices remain beyond-code rather than standard practice.
Insurance can help transfer the financial consequences of residual risk but it cannot remove the physical risk or ensure that a building continues to function.
Resilience becomes a meaningful performance criterion only when it changes a choice: the brief, the design assumption, the investment threshold, the standard, the retrofit priority or the operating plan.
As climate conditions change, questions about future hazards, critical functions and residual risk should become as routine as questions about cost, carbon, energy or safety. That is how resilience moves from an ambition to a building decision.
