Building resilience to a warming world: A contribution toward a definition of “Integrated Climate Resilience” specific for buildings - Literature review and proposals

Abstract

With the forecast of a warmer world, with longer, more frequent and more intense heat waves, it becomes essential to have buildings that are resilient to a rapidly warming climate and able to withstand extreme temperature events. This research investigates the concept of buildings’ resilience. Specifically, the article collects definitions of resilient building found in 32 scientific articles referring primarily to thermal aspects and seeks to associate each definition with one of the two interpretations of resilience, namely the engineering and ecological ones, mainly identified within the theory on resilience. This aimed to assess whether there is a predominant and – more importantly – a clear understanding of resilience for buildings, to which extent this concept is well defined and clear, which is a topic that, to the best of our knowledge, no study on thermal resilience of buildings seems to have examined to date. Results showed a significant lack of consensus regarding the interpretation of buildings’ resilience within the selected literature. Such lack of consensus highlights the ongoing confusion about the concept of buildings’ resilience to the threats posed by the current and future climate; what should this concept include concretely? A certain discrepancy also emerged even between the interpretation used to define resilience and that used for its indicators. Furthermore, the available definitions are observed to be rather generic, not specific to buildings and, in any case, it does not seem easy to make them operative. In addition to the literature analysis, the article proposes a tentative approach, which could usefully arrive at an attempted definition of resilience that is specific to buildings and operative. Starting with buildings, the proposed “bottom-up” approach is innovative compared to the prevailing approach in the literature that starts with definitions of ecological and engineering resilience (top-down) instead. Furthermore, the article delivers a couple of considerations to be accounted for when applying the concept of resilience to buildings: the importance of considering not only extreme events but also climate change understood as an increase in average air temperature and the importance of also including the inherent resilience due to the presence of occupants, whose thermal adaptive behavior can mitigate the risk of power outages by making the building less vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. By providing an operational tool for researchers, engineers and planners who intend to strengthen the resilience of the building in the face of climate change, the research contributes to achieving a clearer and shared understanding of how the concept of buildings’ resilience should be declined.