Buildings are intended to provide us with safe shelter from the outdoor environment. However, this functionality cannot be guaranteed under climate change. Read on to learn about how the building sector is responding and the resources currently available to help improve the climate resilience of buildings in the face of a changing climate.
Buildings are a central component of society. By providing shelter against sometimes harsh outdoor environments and weather, buildings provide us with safe spaces to live, work, and play. It is difficult to imagine a prosperous future that doesn’t include well-designed and resilient buildings. However, in light of the changing climate, our understanding of what constitutes climate resilient buildings is evolving.
Developing and maintaining building resilience in the face of a changing climate is a monumental undertaking, and raises many questions: What practices should building professionals adopt to account for future climate change, and to deal with uncertainty in the magnitude of that change? How might adaptation measures be factored into risk-based insurance pricing, terms, and conditions? How can planners manage development to minimize future climate vulnerability? How can resilience in the existing building stock be improved, given limited resources and current market realities?
Key to answering questions like these is making use of our best available knowledge of future-projected climate, including changes in weather extremes. This knowledge can inform building-specific climate change impacts, vulnerability, risk assessments, and planning. This Buildings Module provides a landing zone for building professionals – from building designers to asset managers to property owners – to develop a buildings-focused view of future climate change projections.
Your exploration of the Buildings Module starts right now. Below, you will find information on the current state of the building sector in Canada, as well as new and emerging climate change-specific resources, tools, and data relevant to this sector.
In support of ClimateData.ca’s Buildings Module, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) was commissioned to explore the state of climate change considerations in Canada’s building sector.
A pair of surveys, conducted in the latter half of 2020, were disseminated to a wide range of professionals within the building industry. Respondent groups spanned federal, provincial, territorial, and local governments, and included federal agencies, Crown corporations, industry, insurers, non-governmental organizations, and academia.
The results of the surveys were quite clear. Over 80% of building professionals surveyed believe that climate change should be used to inform work in their sector, for both new and existing buildings. Similarly, most respondents believed that they should not wait until climate change is incorporated into official codes and standards before taking action.
Respondents highlighted that many building components and systems, including building envelopes, site drainage, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (HVAC), are potentially affected by changes in climate, and that these vulnerabilities need to be addressed in order for buildings to remain safe and functional (Figure 1).
Reflecting these concerns, an ecosystem of national climate change-specific guidelines, standards, data and codes, funding, and networks are fast emerging.
The 2016 Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change has helped spur recent progress, as it highlights that “climate-related infrastructure failures can threaten health and safety, interrupt essential services, disrupt economic activity, and incur high costs for recovery and replacement,” and that “integrat[ing] climate resilience into building design guides and codes” is vital for ensuring the standardized consideration of future climate hazards in building design and retrofit.
In support of the Framework and its goals, the National Research Council launched a major program in 2016 (funded by Infrastructure Canada), titled the Climate-Resilient Buildings and Core Public Infrastructure (CRBCPI) Initiative. Five years later, the CRBCPI Initiative and broader Framework have yielded a range of pioneering new guidelines, including:
The Framework has also supported work to integrate climate into new and emerging building standards, including:
For a complete listing of the above-mentioned standards, guides, and reports, please see Annex A of the Standards in Action: Building a Climate-Resilient Future report by the Standards Council of Canada.
A 2020 CRBCPI report is Canada’s most detailed foray yet into providing building-specific climate change metrics. These data are being considered for adoption in the 2025 National Building Code, and are powering tools like the new climate resilience for low slope membrane roofing systems application.
Federal funding for climate-resilient buildings supports the application of new climate-aware standards, data, and codes to real world building design and retrofit. Via the federal Climate Lens and related initiatives, Infrastructure Canada is working to ensure that new major infrastructure projects initiated under funding opportunities like the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund and Green and Inclusive Community Buildings program include robust assessments of present and future climate risks, informed by national networks of communities of practice such as the Infrastructure and Buildings Working Group under Canada’s Adaptation Platform.
Provinces and territories are showing leadership in the area of climate resilient building planning and design. Examples include Ontario, which in 2016 tasked its Minister of Municipal Affairs with “…a review of the Building Code to support low-carbon standards for new buildings and to ensure that buildings continue to be safe and accessible,” and Quebec, which stated the need to “collaborate in the development of criteria, codes, guides, and other tools necessary for adapting the built environment to climate change,” in a 2013-2020 Government Strategy for Climate Change Adaptation. Provincial and territorial bodies can set a tone for change, which can spur innovative thinking. In British Columbia, for example, BC Housing’s Mobilizing Building Adaptation and Resilience project is supporting capacity building and innovation in resilient, low-carbon building design. Quebec’s Société québecoise des infrastructure (SQI) is identifying climate risks and climate adaptation measures for its institutional building stock through the use of their new assessment framework, which may be adapted for use by other interested property owners and managers.
Municipalities are uniquely positioned to accelerate climate resilience in the buildings sector, as they integrate climate change-related provisions through zoning and planning, local construction requirements, guidelines, and programs, and also provide provincial code interpretations that target regional building vulnerabilities. In many cases, existing planning pathways and governance structures (for example, disaster response and recovery) can be effectively leveraged to enable excellent, vulnerability-motivated or ‘bottom-up’ climate adaptation actions that directly address known vulnerabilities.
Where there are gaps in provincial codes, local jurisdictions have applied other regulatory tools at their disposal to reduce building vulnerability. This allows for climate considerations to be included at a local level that are tailored to unique interactions between local buildings and local climate. Increasingly, integration of future climate information into these municipal-level building and planning efforts is occurring via municipal Climate Action Plans. At the national level, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is an important foundation for enhancing capacity and knowledge-sharing between municipalities.
Across Canada, most building-related activities in both the private and public sectors – planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance – are ultimately implemented by private sector companies. Within this community, a paradigm shift in the relationship between climate change, profit, and professional liability is underway. Actions to reduce climate vulnerability and risks to buildings are increasingly viewed as an opportunity to provide a differentiating, value-added product. Climate change is also being incorporated into the duty of care definitions that define professional conduct, building project risk, and issues surrounding liability.
As a result of these considerations, building proposals that minimize present and future climate risks will be increasingly favoured by large clients and permitting organizations, such as municipalities. Project financing and insurance coverage for major building projects should also become easier to obtain for such projects. Accordingly, professional organizations are working hard to establish capacity in this sector, and to integrate appropriate guidance and policies into building design best practices and standards of care. Some examples of recent steps forward include Engineers Canada’s national guideline on Principles of Climate Change Adaptation for Engineers, multi-partner development of the PIEVC Protocol for assessing climate change risks to public infrastructure, the Canadian Institute of Planners’ Policy on Climate Change Planning, and the formulation of Climate Action Plans by provincial engineering and geoscience licensing bodies.
On the financial impacts side, several bodies, such as the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction and the Insurance Bureau of Canada, are considering how to manage climate change impacts to building insurance and property value trends. The Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation was established by the Intact Financial Corporation (the largest provider of property and casualty insurance in Canada), to identify and reduce risks to buildings and infrastructure from the negative impacts of a changing climate. Finally, long-term lenders to many building projects are increasingly requiring that climate risk be included in financial risk statements, via frameworks such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures guidance.
The importance of adapting buildings to future climate change is also recognized on the international stage. For example, the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC) has recently produced the first output of the GlobalABC Adaptation Working Group (launched at the 24th Conference of the Parties – COP24). Their 2020 report details the challenges and benefits of climate change adaptation in the building and construction sectors, and provides suggested actions for a variety of stakeholder groups.
It is clear that expectations and opportunities for practitioners to integrate resilience to climate change in Canada’s buildings sector are growing. Together with ongoing efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions from the sector, these efforts should ensure that our buildings contribute to the overall sustainability and safety of communities across the country.