Design for a future climateExploiting the opportunities of adapting our buildings

This £5m investment is improving the climate resilience of building projects worth a total of £4.2bn.Fifty projects, comprising client and project teams, have been funded. They range from teams master-planning new towns to detailed design of new commercial developments and refurbishment of existing buildings. Each project was awarded up to £100k to develop an adaptation strategy.

At present, the industry cannot afford the cost of the first adaptation strategy to then sell this service to subsequent clients. We are removing this initial barrier to the uptake of adaptation by making it more cost effective for clients in the future.

Conclusions

For every project where the client was engaged in developing the adaptation strategy, they adopted some recommendations to adapt the building to be resilient to climate change.

Climate change adaptation is becoming a greater concern for clients wishing to ensure comfort and commercial viability.

This is a growing opportunity for design teams to improve the comfort and resilience of our building stock over the next century.

Everyone is familiar with the drive to radically reduce our CO2 emissions but adapting buildings to tackle the potential effects of climate change is a new opportunity for businesses.

There are an estimated 24m dwellings and 566m square metres of commercial

buildings in England and Wales, of which over 60% will still be in use in 2050. Many of these buildings would benefit from climate change strategies to improve their performance and commercial viability.

But how should design teams approach refurbishment for adaptation?

The Design for Future Climate programme

Design for Future Climate, Adapting Buildings is the largest programme on climate change adaptation of buildings in the UK.

It is working with the UK buildings industry to take advantage of this commercial opportunity by funding design teams to create adaptation strategies for ongoing building projects.

The challenge is to make buildings resistant or resilient to flooding, overheating and extreme weather events such as storms through to the 2080s and beyond.

Technology Strategy Board 0201 Technology Strategy Board

The range of building types across the 50 projects

Funding awarded in 2010

Funding awarded in 2011

Housing

University buildings

School

Offices

Hospital/care home

Retail

Museum

Rail station

Swimming pool

Laboratory

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 97 8 1210 11

The range of clients across the projects

The projects are geographically spread across the UK, with the majority located in

the south of England where overheating is already recognised as a concern.

The probable impact of climate change over the next 30 years demands two main responses: Mitigation of carbon emissions and Adaptation to be comfortable in the future climate.

Funding awarded in 2010

Funding awarded in 2011

Private developers

Building owners& occupiers

Local councils

Universities

NHS trusts

Registered sociallandlords

Real estateinvestment

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 97 8 1210 11 1513 14

How to prepare an adaptation strategy

The programme has developed a guiding methodology for those preparing adaptation strategies, which gives good results:

1. Qualitative assessment of client and user tolerance to climate risk, for example hospital occupants need close control of internal temperatures while housing developments focus more on flood risk and drainage

2. Quantitative assessment of climate risks for the specific site, for example,

water management, thermal management and structural and material stability using modelling and existing climate data sets

3. Options appraisal and presentation to the client on the subset of climate risks of most concern to their building project

4. Detailed design and costing of adaptation measures to manage these risks

5. Creation with the client of an adaptation strategy over the lifetime of the building.

This provides clients with the right information in a timely and costed fashion so they can adopt recommendations for adaptation measures.

Technology Strategy Board 0403 Technology Strategy Board

As a result of developing its strategy NW Bicester Eco-town masterplanning project has agreed to implement a sustainable drainage system (SuDS) comprising soakaways, swales and pounds as well as using overland flow as a predominant pathway. Adaptation measures being planned include managing water scarcity through rain water harvesting, grey and black water recycling.

Another interesting example is a mixed use seafront development in Brighton, called PortZed, which is incorporating elliptical buildings and helical wind turbines in a site expecting higher wind speeds. The design team have focused on mitigation of energy use as well as adapting to sea level rise and wind speed risks.

What have we learnt so far?

Persuasion

The main challenge faced by the projects is in communicating the commercial opportunity to their clients, in particular of the climate risks and finding ways to present the large volume of detailed climate change data and modelling outputs in a digestible way.

It helps to identify the key risks and keep the focus of the detailed design stage narrow.

Tactics

Some projects chose to work with those climate changes that are very high in probability as a way to engage the client in adopting the lowest cost adaptations with highest return on investment. Other design teams assessed the cost benefits of worst case scenarios to maximise the perceived benefits to clients. The approach depends on the client’s attitude to risk.

Useful information

The projects have identified many sources of information to assist in adaptation modelling:

UK Climate Impacts Programme, Environment Agency, PPS15, PPS25, CIBSE TM36, CIBSE TM48 and Prometheus weather files.

The adaptation risks and measures detailed in the Design for Future Climate report (Gething 2010) are a useful resource for assessing all climate risks to the building and identifying solutions. See useful references at the end of this document.

Timing

Timing is an issue. It is best to develop adaptation strategies before or with planned refurbishment projects as there is more opportunity to influence project briefs and spend. The earlier you can engage with the client on the need and benefits of adaptation the more clients seem to adopt recommendations.

Ensure that priorities are confirmed at an early stage with the client by presenting an options appraisal. This careful planning will aid in keeping costs down and avoid overloading the client with data and issues.

Technology Strategy Board 0605 Technology Strategy Board

Case study - Church View Doncaster

Church View is a refurbishment of a 1913 office building which is being given a new lease of life as an incubator for artists and the creative industries, offering managed workspace for micro enterprises and small businesses.

Located within a conservation area in Doncaster, it had lain empty since it closed as a technical college in 2006.

Bauman Lyons Architects, who led on the adaptation strategy, have created workspace which varies from shared areas with sofas, ‘hot desks’ and open plan workstations to fully segmented offices and a variety of studios.

The building faces south and features large areas of glass, so the main climate risk was found to be overheating.

The project therefore features behavioural, psychological and physiological adaptations which will allow the occupants to tolerate higher temperatures, even in prolonged periods of hot weather. The adaptive comfort threshold is a set of equations to replace the single maximum figure of 28°C as set out in the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers’ Technical Memorandum (CIBSE TM36) and related to the external temperature on each day. Applying these equations to this site shows that occupants in summer

2080 should be able to comfortably withstand temperatures up to 1.4°C hotter than today’s climate.

This project found that dynamic modelling tools, such as IES, have limitations for adaptation studies. That is because they cannot credit the benefits to thermal comfort of green roofs and walls, shading from trees, evaporative cooling or the albedo effect (reflecting power of a surface).

Valid and effective adaptations should not be discounted simply because they cannot be simulated by software that was developed to address a regulatory framework with a different focus.

The project’s adaptation strategy took a room-by-room approach to assessing overheating and in recommending low cost adaptation measures to the facilities management company. By taking account of passive measures and occupants’ own adaptation, solutions focused on low cost, easy-to-install measures such as:

• ceiling fans

• external planting and water features

• shuttering

• glazing

• shading

• reducing IT gains

• introducing night and cross ventilation.

Whole life costing carried out by the project indicates that over 70 years the adapted building would be cheaper to run in terms of energy bills by just under £4m – a 20% reduction when compared with the same building unadapted, with enhanced air conditioning.

Bauman Lyons Architects is now offering a similar room-by-room, low-cost adaptation service for buildings which have high ceilings, high thermal mass, shallow floor plates, good daylight and potential for natural ventilation.

Over 70 years the adapted building should save £4m in energy bills – a 20% reduction.

Technology Strategy Board

North Star House North Star Avenue Swindon SN2 1UE

T 01793 442700 E enquiries@tsb.gov.ukwww.innovateuk.org

This brochure has been printed by the BAPC (British Association for Print and Communication) ‘Environmental Printer of the Year’ 2008 using waterless printing, a lithographic process that eliminates water consumption and the release of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere. Printed on an FSC certified paper made with 100% post consumer waste and bleached using a Totally Chlorine Free process.©

Tec

hnol

ogy

Str

ateg

y B

oard

S

epte

mb

er 2

011

T11/

060

For further information on the programme see:The discussion forum on _connect: https://ktn.innovateuk.org/web/design-for-future-climate

Factsheets at: https://ktn.innovateuk.org/web/design-for-future-climate/articles

Further information at:

www.innovateuk.org/adaptation

Useful references

CIBSE TM36 Climate change and the indoor environment: impacts and adaptation (2005)

UK climate projections (UKCP09), Defra, 2009 www.ukclimateprojections.defra.gov.uk

CIBSE, TM48: The use of Climate Change Scenarios for Building Simulation: the CIBSE Future Weather Years, CIBSE, 2009

Coley, D., Prometheus probabilistic reference weather years using UKCP09, University of Exeter, 2010, www.exeter.ac.uk/cee/prometheus

Gething, W, Design for Future Climate: Opportunities for adaptation in the Built Environment, Technology Strategy Board, 2010, www.innovateuk.org/adaptation

Lists of project leaders

AECOM, Aedas Architects, Arup, Baca Architects, Bauman Lyons

Architecture & Urbanism, BioRegional Quintain Ltd, BRE, Building

Design Partnership Ltd, Broadland Housing Association, Buro

Happold, Cornwall Council, Deloitte LLP, ECD Architects, Exeter

City Council, Gale & Snowden Architects Ltd, Harbour View

Developments Ltd, Hoare Lea Consulting Engineers, Hyde Housing

Association Ltd, Kassanis+Thomas, LDA Design Consulting

LLP, Leadbitter, Medical Architecture and Art Projects Ltd, Miller

Construction (UK) Ltd, Octavia Housing, Penoyre and Prasad LLP,

Ridge and Partners LLP, Skelly & Couch LLP, Space Craft Architects,

St. Faith’s School, Stanton Williams, Thanet District Council, Triangle

Architects Ltd, Waterman Energy, Environment & Design, White

Design, Worcestershire County Council, WSP UK Ltd.