Insight from London Climate Action Week 2025
As London Climate Action Week 2025 draws to a close, the urgent need for a climate-resilient built environment has taken centre stage with a week of reflections on intense dialogue, critical debates and renewed commitments. The overarching themes of accelerating the global transition to net-zero and ensuring a resilient, equitable London have resonated strongly, with the built environment emerging as a central and recurring focus of the week's discussions.
Smart building consultant, Aleksandra Dasala, shares her take on the launch of the Climate Resilience Roadmap.
Unveiling The UK Climate Resilience Roadmap
Launched by the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), this vital tool is designed to transform how we design, build and manage our urban spaces amidst escalating climate threats.
The session underscored the urgent need for an adaptive built environment capable of withstanding the growing dangers of extreme heatwaves and flood risks.
The newly launched roadmap is designed to be more than just a theoretical science-based framework. It's a practical, actionable strategy for industry professionals. Its core principles are strategically aligned with the RIBA Plan of Work, ensuring that climate resilience is integrated at every stage of a building's lifecycle. This alignment aims to embed resilience as a core consideration from conception to completion and beyond.
Developed by the UK Green Building Council (#UKGBC) with partners, it maps climate vulnerability down to hyperlocal levels, acknowledging that unlike amorphous global carbon emissions, climate impacts are felt directly in our communities. It analyses five major hazards: flooding, overheating, wildfires, droughts, and storms. Framing their collective threat as a national emergency that demands immediate, unified action.
What the Roadmap Is For & How It Helps
The roadmap serves a dual purpose: to empower the industry with practical action plans, tools, and guidance, and to inform the government on the essential policy frameworks needed to drive investment.
Its ultimate goal is to shift us from a fragmented, siloed approach to a systemic, joined-up strategy for climate resilience. Fundamentally reshaping our built environment for a climate-changed world.
This innovative tool significantly advances sustainable asset design, strategy, and adaptation through:
- Granular Vulnerability Mapping: By pinpointing climate vulnerabilities at a local level, the roadmap enables precise risk identification, facilitating effective engagement with local authorities and policymakers.
- Comprehensive Tools and Resources: The core report is a treasure trove of practical resources, including guides and checklists for asset owners and occupiers to assess risks and formulate action plans.
- Integrated Design Thinking: It offers detailed methodologies for project teams to weave advanced resilience thinking into every stage of the design and construction process, aligning strategically with the RIBA Plan of Work.
- Standardised Metrics: Supported by new, standardised metrics, the roadmap empowers the industry to robustly assess risks, prioritise interventions, and track adaptation progress.
- Data-Driven Planning: Leveraging AI, machine learning, and satellite data, the roadmap aids in identifying heat-vulnerable zones, monitoring project evolution over time, and forecasting future impacts, moving us towards truly data-driven urban planning.
- Open-Source Vulnerability Map (GIS): An upcoming free, open-source GIS map will provide built environment professionals with a powerful resource to develop business cases for adapting buildings, allowing for scenario testing across various asset types and climate projections.
The Minister's Key Message: Urgency & Collaboration
Miatta Fahnbulleh MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Energy Security and Net Zero and Minister for Energy Consumers, underscored the immense challenge facing the UK's built environment. She highlighted:
- A staggering one-third of the UK's housing stock predates WWII, contributing to 22% of national emissions due to inefficiency.
- The government is committed to a £13.2 billion "Warm/Cool Homes Plan," aiming for 300,000 upgrades this year and millions annually, focusing on consumer confidence, delivery scale-up through partnerships, and supply chain development.
- New building standards will mandate solar panels on new homes by default and focus on creating "fit for the future" buildings with integrated carbon savings and technology.
- The shift to a net-zero economy presents a huge opportunity to cultivate a skilled workforce, impacting one in five jobs.
- Climate resilience is a "massive priority" and central to the clean power mission, with ongoing research to understand building adaptation needs, particularly for overheating.
- Crucially, the government cannot achieve these goals alone, emphasising the need for close collaboration with industry to tap into expertise and drive practical solutions.
- Technology should serve a dual function: keeping homes warm in winter and providing ventilation and cooling in summer.
Panel Insights: Action, Value & Mindset
The panel discussion echoed the roadmap's significance:
- Roadmap Reception: Panellists expressed excitement and relief, seeing the roadmap as a clear, instructive, and achievable guide that provides a "unifying vision" for industry and policymakers.
- Systemic Approach: The roadmap encourages a systemic approach, looking for synergy between climate resilience, decarbonisation, and nature support, ultimately benefiting health and wellbeing.
- Practical Implementation: Organisations like JLL and The Crown Estate intend to use the roadmap for strategic advice to clients, improving governance, and applying its guidance across diverse asset types (real estate, rural land, seabed), emphasising the link between the built environment and surrounding rural assets.
- Financial Imperative: High levels of ambition on sustainability and ESG correlate with strong financial performance. Climate physical risk and insurability are rising concerns for senior business leaders (68% concerned). The roadmap is seen as a tool to help clients plan for reducing this risk and protecting long-term value.
- Funding Responsibility: Funding for building resilience should be a mixture of public and private finance, seen not as a cost but an opportunity for regeneration and value creation. Investors are increasingly looking at climate physical risk in acquisitions, recognising that the cost of inaction will be significantly higher, even costing lives.
- Promising Adaptations: Include integrating public realm initiatives with multiple benefits (reducing flood risk, urban heat island effect, improving air quality) and developing cooling technologies while ensuring alignment with climate mitigation.
- Mindset Shift: The solutions exist, but the next step requires a "mindset shift" and behavioural change to encourage adoption and action.
- Call to Action: Participants are urged to engage with the roadmap, understand its implications for their businesses, identify risks and opportunities for innovation, and consider joining the UKGBC to contribute to ongoing efforts, including developing stakeholder action plans.
The Path Forward: Act Now
London Climate Action Week 2025 may be at an end, but the work to build a resilient future for our built environment is just beginning.
Where is your organisation on its climate resilience and asset strategy journey? Share your insights!