Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on the Building Stock of a Region: Identifying an Appropriate Methodology

Abstract

Mechanisms underlying building deterioration operate at the small scale of building materials and components. The impact of climate change on a regional building stock could be assessed in theory by working upwards from these small scale mechanisms, which can be understood analytically and measured empirically, to give an estimate of likely damage to the whole stock. However, the climatic parameters that relate the rate of deterioration at the small scale to the severity of climate are often poorly predicted by climatic modelling, making it difficult to estimate the effect of climate change on the future rate of building failure by this method.

There are other impediments to the application of the method, which are to do with the complexity of extrapolating upwards from these small scale mechanisms to the scale of whole buildings and built areas. Different kinds of deterioration acting on the same building element will interact in an unpredictable and opportunistic way. Moreover, at each step upwards in scale a variety of contextual influences come into play, such as orientation and exposure, design and detailing, which are different for every building.

This paper proposes methodologies for assessing the impact of climate change that attempt to avoid these problems by keeping the analysis at as large a building scale as is practicable. The methodologies fall into two classes — those for background events leading to gradual deterioration and those for extreme climatic events leading to sudden failure.

It would be reasonable to expect that, in European regions, extreme events will have the greater impact. The methodology for extreme events is the more practical of the two and the more likely to give useable results, but it requires prediction of the future likelihood of extreme climatic events.