The potential of adapting existing rating tools to incorporate resilience at the building scale

This is a period of rapid urbanisation, population growth and manifestation of climate change (RICS 2015). Simultaneously the notion of resilience, resilient cities and resilient buildings is gaining traction. Resilience issues are either chronic; that is slow and continuing or acute; rapidly occurring and unpredictable. Resilience issues can be governance and policy or social, economic or environmental in nature. Some resilience issues, such as flooding, is an acute resilience issue that can be mitigated through effective building design. A response at the city scale has been the 100 Resilient Cities initiative where member cities set out resilience issues affecting them and a strategy to address them. The Rotterdam resilience strategy has a model with concentric circles showing buildings at the smallest level, followed by precincts, cities, metropolitan areas, countries, regions and finally the world. The inference is resilience needs to be embedded at building level and it will filter outwards. However to date, no appraisal tool/model exists to relate the 49 resilience issues to buildings. Furthermore none of the existing rating tools for building sustainability explicitly deal with resilience. The debate to date about resilience is largely at the city scale and practitioners have little awareness or practical guidance as to how resilience might be mitigated at the building scale in new build or retrofit. This paper identifies the gaps in knowledge and practice, and investigates the viability of using addendums to existing voluntary rating tools and mandatory tools as a means of acknowledging the building related resilience issues.