Commercial Property Resilience

As London’s climate changes, we need to ensure the city’s infrastructure, buildings and services are resilient enough in order to manage extreme situations that may be beyond our current capacity to cope.

In addition, the built environment has a huge impact on the natural world: globally, it accounts for 40-50% of natural resource use, 20% of water use, 30-40% of energy use and around a third of CO2 emissions. It is thus crucial to create buildings that minimise environmental impacts on the planet and help provide people with a better quality of life.

Climate impacts on cooling of commercial buildings

LCCP and Sturgis Carbon Profiling are currently working on a study of the impacts of climate change on the cost and effectiveness of cooling in urban office buildings. This will explore the interaction between climate impacts and resource efficiency, and enable the commercial property sector to better understand the costs and benefits of the options available to them. The project is aiming to provide an appraisal of the risks with regard to:

(i) obsolescence and the ability of services in commercial buildings to cope with the additional demands which will inevitably be placed upon them as a result of projected increase in summer temperatures

(ii) the impact on energy use / carbon emissions when occupiers inevitably have to increase air conditioning in order to cool the building to an appropriate level for a working environment.