Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

63 Climate Change Resilience Strategies for the Building Sector: Examining Existing Domains of Resilience Utilized by Design Professionals by Nicholas B. Rajkovich and Yasmein Okour This article was originally published in Sustainability, 11(10), 2019. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11102888 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license ABSTRACT Recently, climate change resilience efforts in the building sector have increased. Previous studies have examined the theoretical frameworks that have shaped the concept development of resilience. However, little is known about the theoretical approaches adopted by building professionals in their climate change resilience work. A literature review identified climate change resilience across four academic domains: ecology, engineering, disaster risk reduction, and the social sciences. To better understand how resilience is defined in the building sector, we examined eighteen climate change resilience documents developed to provide guidance to building sector professionals in the United States. Our analysis of these documents helps to understand how professionals are framing and possibly incorporating these strategies in their work, though we did not measure the adoption rate of each of the documents. We find that resilience is mostly a discourse on bouncing-back, preserving the status quo, and/or developing emergency responses to major hazards. Fewer documents incorporated an ecological or social science-based logic. This highlights the challenges of translating resilience from four academic domains into building strategies for the professional community. In closing, we discuss how competing conceptions of resilience may impact the implementation and effectiveness of climate change resilience strategies in the built environment. Keywords: building sector; building codes; building standards; building design; climate adaptation 1. INTRODUCTION Recent climate-related events, such as Hurricane Sandy that struck New York City and the Northeastern United States in 2012, have highlighted the resilience, or lack thereof, of the building sector. Events like Hurricane Sandy, and other weather-related phenomena, illustrate that the climate is shifting rapidly in many parts of the globe; planning for future building stock can no longer rely solely on historical data. After Hurricane Sandy, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) reported loss of power, heat, and hot water in approximately 35,000 housing units; 94% of the 62,000 damaged properties inspected by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) experienced flooding damage [1]. In response, the City of New York proposed a comprehensive plan titled “A Stronger, More Resilient New York”, with the goal of increasing the resilience of infrastructure and buildings in communities across the city. New York City and New York State are not the only U.S. locations grappling with this threat. Due to multiple large-scale events in recent years, resilience efforts to reduce risks related to the building stock have been deployed by policy- and decision-makers [2]. These organizations are disseminating reports, toolkits, voluntary standards, and other “how-to” information to build resilience in the built environment. While the interest in resilience in the public and political sphere has largely been in reaction to climate disasters, literature on climate change resilience in the built environment is growing rapidly. According to Longstaff et al., due to its recent popularity, resilience risks turning into another buzzword with no meaning [3]. Some argue that the diversity and ambiguity in resilience thinking challenges its operationalization [3,4], while others have suggested that resilience’s conceptual vagueness facilitates interdisciplinary communication [5]. Reaching a holistic definition may be difficult, however efforts to explore how different definitions of resilience modify the approach of professionals is important. To this end, this paper examines how resilience is translated from four academic domains into practical guidance currently in use by built environment professionals. In the following three subsections of this paper, we provide an overview of the concept of resilience across four academic domains identified within the resilience literature. Next, we illustrate how resilience is translated into practice. In the final subsection, we highlight how the building sector approaches and conceptualizes climate change resilience by analyzing existing climate change resilience documents providing guidance to building professionals.