UK Climate Resilience Roadmap

What do we need to accomplish?

This is a critical time for climate action. In the most recent assessment of risks the UK faces from climate-related hazards, over 60% were given the highest urgency score, a staggering increase in urgency compared to the previous assessment. Destructive climate impacts and extreme weather changes will affect all members of our society, devastate lives and livelihoods, and have a detrimental impact on the buildings, infrastructure and environments that keep us secure from climate-related hazards.  

As noted by the Climate Change Committee, the UK currently lacks associated targets or goals for resilience standards at a national, local or sectoral level. This is reflected in UKGBC’s 2025 strategy which identifies the need to define these targets through collaborative research and engagement with the wider built environment industry. 

UKGBC now aim to address this gap by catalysing more urgent, comprehensive, and cohesive action on climate resilience throughout our industry and beyond.  

UK Climate Resilience Roadmap

Building on the experience of UKGBC’s groundbreaking Whole Life Carbon Roadmap launched at COP26 in Glasgow, the UK Climate Resilience Roadmap will be a collaborative effort between some of the built environment’s most influential, trusted, and experienced players using cutting-edge insights at the forefront of global industry.  

This group will collaborate to drive progress on climate resilience in the UK built environment through: 

• Setting measurable metrics and science-based targets for climate resilience 
• Identifying key actions for stakeholders across the industry 
• Identifying key policies for to drive forwards local and national policy 
• Creating a pathway for UK built environment stakeholders to follow to achieve a climate resilient built environment by 2050. 

Creating a vision

Global warming is making climate-related hazards like heatwaves and floods more frequent and severe. Current policy measures across the globe are predicted to limit global warming to between 1.7 to 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, meaning that we can expect significant changes in weather patterns and the frequency of extreme weather events. These changes are predicted to cause harm, excess deaths, and socio-economic breakdown, which is why we need a built environment that prepares for, and responds to, these hazards. This vision, created by the stakeholders involved in our UK Climate Resilience Roadmap project, sets out our definition of what a climate-resilient built environment could be, and how the built environment industry plans to achieve it.

Industry Recommendations

The process of building climate resilience has been created as a cycle that includes four stages: be aware and educated, anticipate, prepare and adapt, and sustain resilience. Within each of these stages key components of resilience and vulnerability to hazards are considered. The continuous nature of the process allows for ongoing learning, improvement and adaptation, helping to build long-term resilience against evolving climate challenges.

Within each of these four stages we propose industry aims, goals, high-level actions and examples of metrics and indicators to help stakeholders take meaningful next steps towards climate resilience.