Making the case for climate resilience in a time of challenged viability
As climate risk becomes harder to ignore, how can we make sure long-term resilience remains part of the investment conversation?
Olivia O’Brien, our head of climate resilience is exploring just that at Festival of Place: Climate Resilience.
The case for building more climate resilient places is becoming increasingly clear and our towns and cities are already experiencing the impacts of a changing climate, from overheating and flooding to more unpredictable weather patterns. At the same time, development is operating within a challenging economic environment, with viability pressures making decisions about where and when to invest more complex.
This creates the difficult question of how we make the case for investing in resilience when the benefits may be felt much further into the future?
That’s the focus of Olivia’s session, ‘Viability in the time of climate risk’, at Festival of Place: Climate Resilience on the 5th – 6th October. As our head of climate resilience, Olivia works at the intersection of climate risk, development and place making. Her session will explore the tension between short-term viability and the longer term risks facing places, asking when those risks become significant enough that they need to influence decisions being made today.
A key part of this is understanding climate risk earlier in the process. Rather than treating resilience as something to consider later in the design or delivery of a project, climate risk assessment can be embedded into early decision-making, helping to inform investment, design and development choices from the outset.
Olivia will also explore the importance of taking a place-based approach. Climate risks are not experienced equally everywhere, and the right response will depend on the characteristics, communities, infrastructure and wider context of each place. Understanding that context can help ensure investment is targeted where it can have the greatest long-term value.
The session forms part of Festival of Place: Climate Resilience, which brings together new research, pilot schemes and real-world case studies exploring how places can respond to uncertain weather, changing policy and the wider challenges of climate change.
Across two lunchtime sessions, the programme will cover topics including overheating and land use, alongside practical examples of how climate resilience is being approached in different places.
