Welcoming Olivia O'Brien to the team as Head of Climate Resilience
This newly created role further strengthens our focus on climate resilience and adaptation across the built environment.
Civic, the team of system thinkers shaping the built environment, has appointed Olivia O’Brien as Head of Climate Resilience. The newly created role reflects Civic’s continued investment in climate-conscious delivery and design, strengthening its climate resilience approach.
The role spans both physical risks, such as flooding, overheating and storms, and business transition risks linked to reputation, policy, regulation and shifting market expectations. The focus ensures resilience is considered at the earliest stages of design for our clients, shaping decisions from the outset of projects rather than them being implemented retrospectively, which often brings with it avoidable economic and environmental cost.
The appointment formalises and strengthens work already taking place across Civic’s wider team, bringing a clearer focus to how climate risk is identified, understood and addressed in practice.
Olivia will work across Civic’s teams with a primary focus on engineering, sustainability and environment at an urban scale, connecting skillsets and supporting projects from early strategy through to delivery. Her remit includes assessing climate risk on sites that vary in scale from individual plots to city districts, stress testing designs against future scenarios and working with project teams to adapt proposals to improve long-term performance.
Olivia joins from Longevity Partners, where she was Global Head of Climate Resilience. Over seven years, she built and led a dedicated climate resilience team, working closely with investors, asset managers and developers in both the public and private sector on the financial and operational implications of climate risk. Her experience spans regulatory and reporting frameworks, as well as developing tools to link climate risk with asset value and performance.
The appointment comes as Civic continues to grow and broaden its integrated, future-facing offer across the built environment, investing in its people and capabilities to support the next phase of the business. Bringing climate resilience into a dedicated role reflects a shift towards more coordinated approach and strengthens Civic’s position.
Julian Broster, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Civic, said:
“Civic is growing, and the challenges our clients are facing are changing. Climate risk is a central consideration in how places are planned, designed, delivered and then maintained. Climate sensitive design has been a core consideration across our services since Civic was founded, and creating this role strengthens our ability to connect that expertise and continue evolving and expanding our approach. Olivia’s experience and perspective will build on our ability to turn analysis into action, while continuing to educate our clients and the industry and support our ambition to deliver long-term value for people, place and planet.”
Olivia O’Brien, Head of Climate Resilience at Civic, said:
“Civic’s approach allows me to move into a role where I can see solutions carried through into delivery. In my previous roles, much of the work focused on operational assessment and reporting.
While that remains important, the greatest value comes from considering climate change much earlier in the process. Designing with future climate conditions in mind is often far more effective, and cost-efficient, than adapting a building once it’s already in use.
At Civic, resilience can be built in from the very beginning of a project, shaping decisions rather than reacting to them later. Climate risk doesn’t stop at site boundaries, so taking a wider, system thinking approach and working across services is key to making a lasting difference.”
Operating out of studios in London, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin, Civic’s ambitions continue to extend beyond traditional engineering. This approach has seen the business grow to a 250 strong team offering a carefully curated set of complementary services across the built environment. An early adopter of climate resilience, the company has developed a reputation for integrating system thinking into its work and connecting services to deliver better outcomes. The creation of this role signals a more defined step in that direction.
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