What understandings and processes do built environment actors need to address mitigation and adaptation risks in the built environment?

Although technical knowledge exists for responding to climate change mitigation and adaptation, who owns (or should own) responsibility and accountability for making and recommending decisions about the climate risks in production, management and regulation of the built environment? Who is responsible/accountable for managing them throughout a building’s/built environment’s life cycle? What are the particular circumstances surrounding the longevity and interdependencies of the built environment and these responsibilities? The relative lack of research and guidance on the subject within the field means this is a pressing task for the sector and a significant challenge to all involved.

Guest editors: Simon Foxell and Ian Cooper

As climate change is a present reality and even more extreme and volatile weather conditions are anticipated in future with a high degree of confidence, the capacity to address and act appropriately in response to risks and uncertainties in the built environment sector becomes ever more pressing. There is an urgent need for work in this field – to be followed by sector leadership, for professional and other responsibilities on climate risk to be recognised and for individuals, organisations and governments to decide how to respond; whether though policy, guidance, best practice exemplars, insurance reform, behaviour and culture change, codes of practice or regulation.

The contributions in this special issue share common characteristics. Despite the varying locations under examination, the different spatial scales being addressed, and the separate (but overlapping) focuses of attention, all the authors are more concerned with social problems raised by attempting to tackle climate change than with dealing with climate-related risks themselves. Although they look in different directions, they have a shared point of convergence: the need for governance to control who makes decisions and so whose voices get heard. They also share a common diagnosis of what needs to be done: the governance arrangements currently in place for making decisions about how to respond to the challenges imposed by climate are defective and unlikely to prove successful. In aggregate, they advance a common remedy too. Decision-making needs to become more integrated by enrolling a wide range of top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up actors – from national and local government and their agencies, through professionals and private sector organisations, to local communities. Localising decision making is deemed particularly important, authors argue, if selected interventions are to be sufficiently grounded in local knowledge about the contexts in which they will have to work.

Table of contents

Climate change risk and decision-making [editorial] 
S. Foxell & I. Cooper

Climate-related risks: implications for municipal governments in Brazil
C. Nastari Fernandes, P. Ciminelli Ramalho & F. Lima-Silva

Towards a new neighbourhood-scale climate risk-adaptation approach
C. Rigoni, S. Oliveira, O.  Romice, A. Moreno-Rangel & A. Chatzimichali

Urban informal settlements in Africa: transforming adaptation governance
K. Buyana & H. Sseviiri

Anticipating chronic climate risks [commentary]
J. Baker

Chronic climate risks to urban infrastructure [commentary]
S. Greenham & E.Ferranti

Reimagining climate action, community engagement and professional responsibility [commentary]
J. Robinson, E. Smit, P. Robinson & A. Gloger

Professional ethics in a climate crisis [commentary]
C. Davies & H. Ellis

Who is responsible for climate change? [commentary]
I. Cooper