UK Green Building Council announces Climate Resilience Roadmap
- Coby Mumford
- Jun 26
- 3 min read
The UK Green Building Council announced today its Climate Resilience Roadmap – an urgent and comprehensive action plan regarding climate resilience in the United Kingdom.
Combining knowledge and expertise from across the built environment industry, the Climate Resilience Roadmap aims to contribute to progress on climate resilience through a range of plans and policy recommendations. Working with the industry, the UKGBC has compiled a series of reports that stress the vision of a climate resilient future, and how the built environment should adapt accordingly to protect people from an ever-changing climate.
What is “Climate Resilience”?
According to the UKGBC, climate resilience refers to:
"The ability of a system, community or society exposed to climate hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to, and recover from the effects of a hazard. A climate-resilient system responds in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions." [1]
Regarding the built environment, climate resilience centres on the ability of buildings, infrastructure, natural ecosystems and society to withstand climate changes, including extreme weather events. Withstanding alone is not enough – the built environment must also anticipate, prepare, endure, adapt, and then recover from the effects of climate changes.
Key Messages from the Climate Resilience Roadmap
The roadmap identifies the shortcomings of the current system whilst also stressing the costs of inaction. As they say, it is cheaper to act now than to pay later. The UKGBC stresses that this is an opportunity not just to protect, but to enhance our environments and make them better for all. Buildings are our first line of defence – be they homes, workplaces, or public buildings – and ensuring that people are safe requires consideration of how we design, build and adapt.
The UKGBC argues that climate resilience must be placed front-and-centre, included in all phases of the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of our built environment.
Furthermore, they advocate for a systemic approach to development – one which connects people and nature through their environments. This necessitates a long-term approach, rather than the current process of continual short-term fixes. They call on the government to create a joined-up approach that reaches across departments, centralising and aligning policy in all aspects of the industry.
Most importantly, climate hazards must be tackled in a way that understands their discriminatory nature – they affect the most vulnerable the hardest, and thus an inclusive and people-centred approach is vital.
How can acoustics help deliver climate resilience in the built environment?
Acoustics is an important enabler for climate resilient design. There are many ways acoustics can help deliver climate resilience within the built environment. Some examples include:
Prioritizing natural ventilation façade design to remove the need for carbon intensive mechanical cooling whilst avoiding over-heating.
Enabling building retrofit schemes by working with existing structures and minimizing additional resources needed. This significantly reduces the materials required in many retrofit cases which substantially lowers the embodied carbon of the building.
Making urbanism work for a range of adjacent uses, enabling urban areas to locate various use-classes at close proximity to one another, thus optimising land use.
Enabling clean energy systems and technologies to be installed within the built environment that do not exceed noise limits for the users, which would otherwise lead to degraded health outcomes for occupants.
Designing our cities and urban spaces to optimise healthy and natural soundscapes - encouraging the inclusion of nature within the design process to benefit people and biodiversity - including tree planting to help keep our cities cool in the face of rising temperatures
Discover more
We are proud members of the UKGBC, and are committed to a resilient and sustainable future. If you are interesting in learning more about the UK Green Building Council's purpose, reports, and actions plans, go to their website at: UKGBC - The UK Green Building Council.
If you would like additional information about Climate Resilience, and the chance to download and read the Climate Resilience Roadmap, click here.
Want more blogs? Read our World Environment Day 2025 fact file, where you can learn about how plastic pollution is choking our planet, as well as our insights into the current state of the UK Film Industry.
