ClimateData.ca announces today the release of Future Building Design Value Summaries to support engineers, architects, and other buildings sector professionals in designing climate-resilient buildings and bridges. These comprehensive one-page PDF documents provide future climate-adjusted design values and design guidance for more than 660 locations across Canada, encouraging the development of infrastructure that can withstand the climatic challenges of the coming century.
Traditionally, Canada’s National Building Code and Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code have relied exclusively on historical climate data. However, in a changing climate, it is inadequate to rely on historical data that is no longer representative of the current or future climates that buildings and bridges will experience over their long service lives.
A comprehensive, multi-year initiative called Climate Resilient Buildings and Core Public Infrastructure (CRBCPI) helped to address this data gap by funding efforts to model so-called “design values” using the Canadian Regional Climate Model known as CanRCM4. Through the collaboration of Infrastructure Canada, the National Research Council (NRC), Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), and the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC), the Design Value Explorer was published to share these new data.
“We know Canada’s climate is changing so it no longer makes sense to design our infrastructure for the climate of the past. We have a responsibility to design our buildings and bridges for the climate they will actually experience, to ensure the health and safety of building occupants, and to avoid shortened service life and costly retrofits.”
-Marianne Armstrong, Director of the National Research Council’s Climate Resilient Built Environment initiative
Recognizing the challenge of providing curated design data, and the need for advisory guidance language on its use, the Canadian Centre for Climate Services (CCCS) undertook work, in close collaboration with the CRBCPI team, to produce a set of Future Building Design Value Summaries.
These summaries, available for over 660 locations in Canada, provide many of the future climate design values you can access through PCIC’s Design Value Explorer, including driving wind rain pressure, design snow loads, hot day design temperatures, and more. The summaries incorporate advisory guidance language on how buildings professionals can use the data, including their presentation by levels of global warming, in language designed to align with the release of future standards and codes. The Summaries also include helpful links to sources where readers can find more in-depth guidance.
“A major challenge when it comes to using data to future-proof our buildings is information overload, not being sure which data to use and where to find them,” said Trevor Murdock, a climate scientist from the CCCS. “These Design Value Summaries encapsulate complex data into a user-friendly format, equipping designers with the information they need to account for climate change in their projects.”
As briefly referred to above, another unique aspect of these design values is that their projections are not tied to a specific climate scenario. Instead, they reference Global Warming Levels (GWL) to directly relate local climate projections to global temperature change. One of the benefits of aligning with GWLs is the ability to compare results with climate policy. For example, the 2015 Paris Accord, which saw most nations of the world agree to limit global warming to well under 2 °C by end of century compared to a pre-industrial climate (and ideally 1.5 °C), is a well-known GWL tied to policy.
“The design value projections are presented by global warming levels rather than specific climate scenarios, aligning with global climate policy goals and regional changes,” explains Murdock. “This approach can get around the rabbit hole of which scenario to assume, focusing instead on warming levels and the associated design implications.”
You can learn more about GWLs from the newly published Learning Zone article on this topic.
With the Design Value Summaries, ClimateData.ca empowers architects, engineers, planners, and other building design professionals to lead the way in constructing climate-resilient buildings.
“One of the biggest obstacles to adapt to climate change is overcoming all the uncertainties of using future climate data. The Future Building Design Value Summaries remove a lot of that uncertainty and grants building professionals the confidence to use future climate data to make informed adaptation decisions as part of their design”, says Dr. Robert Lepage, P.Eng., founder of Climes Group Engineering, and one of the lead authors of the Summaries.
The introduction of the Future Building Design Value Summaries marks an important step forward in equipping Canada’s building professionals with the tools necessary for creating climate-resilient structures. This initiative is part of a broader array of resources designed to support the construction of durable, safe infrastructure capable of withstanding the challenges posed by a changing climate.
For those interested in delving deeper into the specifics of climate-resilient design, a wealth of additional resources is available, including: