Climate Resilience in Design

The climate crisis, and its exacerbation of natural hazards such as wildfires and flooding, requires a robust and joined-up response. In the following article, climate resilience experts within Foster + Partners and the broader design sector discuss how architects, engineers, and urban planners can create projects that are adaptable, long-lasting, and quick to recover.

Forming the first of a series, the following article asks how climate resilience fits into a broader question of resilient design.

In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton Fires destroyed approximately 12,000 structures and burned down about 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of land across Los Angeles, California. A few months earlier, in October 2024, flash floods hit Valencia in south-eastern Spain, causing billions of euros worth of damage. Climate change is not a future threat: it is already underway. As homes and communities face increasing climate-related disasters worldwide, the question for architects, engineers, and urban planners is no longer only: how can we prevent further climate change? But also: how can we be more resilient to it?

What does climate resilience mean?

Dr Juan Sebastian Canavera Herrera, Sustainability Engineer, and Rob Newman, Architect, state that 'it is important, first, to outline what resilience means, as well as how the term can be applied to the relationship between climate change and the built environment.'

Resilience is not a new concept, and has, over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, accumulated multiple names: emergency preparedness, disaster risk reduction, then risk reduction. Today, ‘resilience’ is a term applied to a range of global concerns – from climate policy to healthcare planning, cybersecurity, and earthquake and tsunami preparedness. It is therefore important, each time that we call upon ‘resilience’ that we are clear on the following: resilience of what and resilience to what?

One useful definition of resilience that works across industries comes from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction: (UNDRR):

This definition can be used to think specifically about climate resilience, and its application to the built environment. To bring the concerns of climate resilience and architecture to the UNDRR’s definition: the hazards can be understood as climate-related, and the system response can be understood as design.

This allows a new set of questions to emerge for practitioners of the built environment when beginning a project. What is a climate hazard to the design, or to the community or the ecosystem? How severe are the hazards? How should a design respond? And when, and how frequently, will this response be required, and how will this capacity to respond be maintained? Equipped with an understanding of how resilience functions – not as the eradication but as the management of hazards – proposals can then be made for designs that face different climate hazards such as, wildfires and flooding, but also droughts, storms, and agricultural loss.

Alongside the UNDRR’s definition, there are other ways to think about climate resilience in the built environment. An interdisciplinary view taken by Foster + Partners’ Environmental Engineering Group, for example, is that climate resilience must involve both the management of risk and the management of change.

In the design and built environment sector, the management of risk has, historically, been performed by engineers with the help of statisticians, economists, and those in the natural sciences. The management of change, meanwhile, had tended to be overseen and analysed by policymakers, anthropologists, historians, and campaigners – those in the humanities. Resilience requires us to simultaneously manage risk and change, meaning its implementation must employ expertise from both the sciences and the humanities. Applying climate resilience to architecture and urban projects therefore demands cross-disciplinary collaboration between a wide range of consultants. At Foster + Partners, a studio founded on interdisciplinarity, this steer toward resilience – of which climate resilience is an essential part – is already taking place within the practice.

How climate resilience fits into sustainability

Conversations around sustainability in the built environment are often heavily weighted towards the environmental impact of architecture – sometimes called ‘green architecture’ – or carbon reduction goals – often referred to as ‘net-zero’. Reports on the embodied and operational carbon of a building, for example, are used to monitor how much carbon the design and construction industry contributes to global emissions – which are causally linked with climate change. However, other metrics of environmental impact are more local and immediate. Sustainability accreditations, as well as planning applications, for example, request information on the effects of a project on local biodiversity, the changes in traffic to the area, and the effects on local water quality and supply.

It is not enough to think about environmental impact; a sustainable building is limited in success if it cannot adequately survive. We must also think about how our buildings can be protected and repaired over time. To achieve sustainability across environmental, social, and economic aims, a project needs to both reduce its negative impacts on the environment and build resilience to the environment and its changing hazards.

This is because natural hazards such as wildfires and flooding, which occur naturally, are likely to become increasingly frequent and extreme. In 2018, the IPCC concluded that a degree of climate change will occur – the effect of which can be mild or catastrophic depending on our collective actions until 2030. As the Swiss Re Institute reports, costs associated with natural hazards have been rising since 2000 and are projected to keep doing so; Bloomberg states that most of the economic losses associated with natural hazards are shouldered by the Global North, while the WWF reports the greatest biodiversity loss was taking place South America, the Caribbean and Africa: the Global South.

Globally, failures to implement climate resilience are often linked with poor policy or lapses in building safety regulations in the face of natural hazards, as well as inadequate financial aid in their wake. Further, even if funding is allocated and insurers pay out, there is also a risk that towns and cities will be rebuilt as before (with the aim of a quicker recovery for the community) without a long-term, policy-level consideration of future disasters – meaning that mistakes might be repeated.

What is being done already?

At a policy level, strategies for resilience, risk management, and building adaptation are outlined in the Sendai Disaster Reduction Framework (a UN agreement that provides a roadmap for implementing disaster risk reduction) and the Paris Agreement (a legally binding international treaty that aims to reduce greenhouse gases); these agreements ultimately work towards achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals – a call to action from the United Nations, of which a response to climate change plays a major role. Within design, organisations such as the World Green Building Council and the World Bank have proposed sets of guidelines for designers and urban planners to follow, and certification bodies such as LEED and BREEAM have begun to promote climate resiliency as a criterion for their accreditations.

Supported by these guidelines, there are many routes to resilience. Sri Lanka, for example, is a country that frequently suffers from landslides and flash flooding. This is due to the monsoon season – a period of rainfall that is vital for both the rainforest and the agriculture, but which also puts homes and communities at risk. With the support of the World Bank, the Sri Lankan government identified a nature-based solution, in the form of native wetland ecosystems that could be protected and restored to absorb excess water and reduce the risk of flooding and landslides. The Netherlands, a country with 26 percent of its landmass below sea level (the city of Rotterdam is 90 percent below) has a long history of investing in flood-resilient engineering – as early as the fourteenth century. It has recently been trialling amphibious and floating homes. These are architectures with a global and long-spanning history, ranging from practical to ambitious – from the floating fishing villages of the Tanka people in China, to the grand floating homes, or Nemi ships, built by Roman Emperor Caligula in 1st Century AD.

In the world of data science, technical data on the built environment is collected so that climate projections, risk assessments and risk scenarios can be calculated. Google, for example, has recently invested in using its advanced computational resources to predict wildfire dynamics at both small and large scales. Their research into operational forecasting exploits machine learning (ML) techniques on remote sensing and geographic datasets, enabling predictions of ‘next day wildfire spread’ on the scale of a large city; other simulations can focus on individual fires, which are in principle detailed enough to be applied to individual buildings. While the model itself is not publicly accessible, a dataset has been released that covers a wide range of scenarios and is intended to be used to assess mitigation strategies.

Other technological developments are also proving promising. The UNDRR recently reported that drone technology and artificial intelligence is being trialled to monitor bushfires in Australia; drones used to fight fires ‘may carry cameras and thermal detectors, provide communications links, or hold water or retardant to douse flames’ and can safely cover more distances, day or night, than firefighting crews.

Alongside technology, growing research into the psychological impact of natural hazards has also contributed to resilience planning. Public Health England found that people who had experienced floods also had comparatively poorer mental health; TIME magazine forecasted years of psychological trauma for LA residents following the wildfires. It is imperative that resilience strategies enter our designs to protect our ways of living, working, and communing. This, perhaps, is where the more creative aspects of design can help with the multiscale implementation of climate resilience. And it is this unique ability of design, to bring infrastructure and habitability together, that make it a vital tool in our move towards climate resilience.

Resilience is an opportunity to call upon both low- or high-tech, ancient or modern, socially aware designs to respond to our climate crisis, and the specific hazards of a region. Resilience is both a local and a global problem, with disasters in one region leading to frameworks and technologies that prevent disasters in another.

Challenges to implementing resilience

Despite the importance of climate resilience, and a noticeable shift in favour of its implementation, three main challenges persist. Firstly, the availability and quality of information – on both the threats of climate change to the built environment, and the implementation of design solutions – is often limited in scope and specificity; many architectural courses do not adequately teach the concept of climate risk or of data interpretation. Secondly, the resources allocated to a project – whether financial, material, or labour-based – can be a limiting factor to implementing a climate resilient design. Thirdly, there persists a lack of incentives or pressure from markets – such as stronger regulations and policies – to motivate the different actors in our society to properly invest efforts in climate resilience, meaning that these projects are often curtailed at an early stage, or the responsibility for resilience is avoided or offloaded. These challenges come into play even before a longer-term maintenance plan is proposed.

The Thames Barrier, for example, was completed in 1982 at a cost of £535 million, and is a leading example of how the challenges of implementation and maintenance must be overcome to ensure robust and long-term resilience. The Barrier costs around £6 million per year to run and requires 80 staff to operate it; the costs of its failure, in comparison, would cause billions of pounds worth of damage to London. A close associate of maintenance calculations is disaster insurance – an industry that is facing its own crisis in the face of climate change. In Los Angeles, many home insurers had already stopped issuing residential policies due to the high risk of wildfires; the recent blazes resulted in countless uninsured losses, almost certainly making future coverage more expensive and leaving many more homes ‘uninsurable.’ This question of ‘who pays?’ is therefore central to climate resilience. Though it extends beyond the realm of the architect, there are proposals that an architect can make to mitigate harm. As the intermediary between a site and a project’s construction, the architect can advocate for climate resilience by using policy benchmarks, climate data and research, and, of course, design proposals to do so.

Flood resilience

Dr Ed Barsley of The Environmental Design Studio reminds that 'flooding can occur in many scenarios and locations and at many scales: storm surges, snow and ice melt, sudden rainfall or rising groundwater can all lead to flooding – which can take hold slowly or rapidly.' Some of the world’s largest cities (with high populations and economic activity) are in coastal areas and therefore extremely vulnerable to flooding (often multiple types, simultaneously). Venice is projected to be underwater by 2100 and the city of Jakarta, home to 10 million people, as early as 2025.

Resilience to flooding can occur at different scales. Nature-based solutions, such as plans for ‘sponge cities’ or wetlands and mangroves, or engineered solutions such as flood barriers and the fortification of infrastructure, are key ways to add resilience. As with wildfire resilience, flood-resilient designs do not aim to eradicate risk, but to respond quickly and capably to those risks – the key is to manage this risk and to live with it .

Alongside wide-scale infrastructure, there are also design decisions that can be taken at an individual property scale and a street and community scale. There is a great deal that can be done at an individual property scale. Homes can be raised on stilts or planned such that a living area, kitchen, or bathroom can be moved upstairs if needed. Flood doors, as well as raised sockets and wiring, and disconnected downpipe and rainwater harvesting, can all reduce the immediate impacts of a flood. Material finishes, such as water-compatible floor and wall-finishes, or moveable furniture, can make recovery quicker and more cost-effective. It is also important to add that, though resilience guidebooks might focus on the adaptations of a domestic environment, the protection of community infrastructure such as schools, supermarkets, and hospitals must also be considered.

Other interventions can be considered at an urban and community scale. Trees can be planted in gardens, streets, and parks, to reduce the velocity and turbidity of water. Plans for overflow spaces can alleviate pressure and reduce peak flood levels. And, in certain cases, communities and infrastructure can be repositioned, and land use classification changed.

The way in which people move around and between buildings should also be considered. Spatial strategies for access and egress range from temporary, to permanent, to moveable structures that allow people safely to move between buildings, even as areas flood.

Resilience case study: New Slussen Masterplan with Spencer de Grey and Angus Campbell, Foster + Partners

Flood resilience also extends beyond the home and the community, to the urban and multi-terrain plan. Foster + Partners’ New Slussen Masterplan is an urban planning exercise that combines a robust climate resilience infrastructure with city planning. In 2009, the City of Stockholm commissioned the practice to design and deliver a masterplan for the Slussen area. This was a gigantic undertaking, described by Angus Campbell, Senior Partner and architect, as an ‘iceberg problem’, where ‘a great deal of the design and engineering was hidden from view.’

The initial brief required rerouting an outdated and inefficient twelve-lane traffic interchange from 1935, reinstating the existing and unsuitable Karl Johan lock system to improve flood management for both Stockholm and its hinterland, streamlining maritime traffic, and safeguarding a drinking water basin for two million people. The first phase of the New Slussen Masterplan opened in 2024.

Slussen has long used locks as a way on controlling the flow of water between the lake and the sea – the earliest example being Queen Christina’s Lock in 1642, with subsequent upgrades following over the centuries. The area remained a public thoroughfare at the centre of Stockholm until the 1930s, when the pedestrian connection to the city waterfront was cut by a ‘cloverleaf interchange’ that reflected the growing popularity of the car at the time. Foster + Partners proposed, therefore, to reinstate this pedestrian connection, arguing that Slussen had long been an instinctive centre to the city.

In the place of the 1935 motor interchange, a new ‘Water Plaza’ was introduced. This public space was arranged around the new navigation lock and offers improved north-south pedestrian and cycling connections that link Stockholm’s Old Town with its cultural district, and animate the quayside with new restaurants, cafes and cultural amenities. Not only has the area dramatically increased in attractiveness to residents, businesses and investors, but, as the Vice Mayor commented, Slussen is now a ‘meeting place for everyone in Stockholm.’

Slussen was infrastructure in need of a designer’s eye. Prior to Foster + Partners’ involvement, the City of Stockholm had rejected previous proposals for the waterfront, which had focused mainly on the engineering of the lock systems and not the surrounding realm. It was Fosters + Partners’ wider-ranging architectural and urban planning lens, applied to an engineering problem, that eventually convinced the city. As Angus Campbell puts it: ‘If the money is going to be invested in climate resilience and infrastructure anyway, we might as well push for this climate resilient design to also work for people, and for the wider city.’

Wildfire resilience

Like flood resilience, designs for buildings and cities in wildfire-prone areas must work at a technical, urban, and community level. In 2019, the California State Climate Task Force issued a stark warning: the endless development in the state’s high-risk wildfire zones was magnifying wildfires and putting more people in their path. The combination of this unchecked development in these wildfire zones was combined with the effects of climate change. As Dr Maria Lucia Ferreira Barbosa, wildfire scientist for the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), said:

Images of the devastating fires in Los Angeles seem, in many ways, beyond the control of architects. However, as emerging research and analysis suggest, there are still steps that can be taken, at multiple stages, to reduce the effects of wildfires on an urban population.

It should also be noted that wildfires are not wholly negative; controlled fires are essential to land stewardship (often enacted by Indigenous populations), as they help to uphold the natural processes by which a forest has evolved, where smaller fires make way for regrowth. However, as wildfires increase in scale and severity, their impact on both the natural environment and the urban realm has proven catastrophic.

Cameron MacBean, Senior Fire Safety Engineer at Foster + Partners reports that 'wildfires tend to damage people and property at the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) where the edges of an urban development meet wildland.' The WUI has grown, worldwide, by 35 percent since 2000, due to rapid and sprawling urbanisation; and with it, concerns about the increasing risk of wildfires transferring to the urban realm. At the WUI, direct flame, ember attack, or radiative heat can all cause a building to set fire, which can then spread to the surrounding neighbourhood and enter more densely developed areas.

How can design address and reduce these risks at the WUI? At the level of the building, designers can enclose open eaves from ember intrusion, install ember-resistant mesh around ventilation grates, and use non-combustible covers over gutters. Tempered glass windows are less likely to shatter and allow embers inside a home. These measures all reduce the likelihood of an ember attack and are relatively cost-effective.

Landscaping outside of a building is also key as nearby vegetation can quickly catch fire and ignite adjacent structures. Creating ‘defensible space’ around buildings with ‘fuel-free’ zones will limit the opportunity for a fire to spread. As such, these measures are often required by home insurers or planners in locations such as Los Angeles and the bush in Australia (another WUI where wildfires are frequent). However, as The New York Times recently pointed out in Los Angeles, such requirements often apply only to new buildings. A 2018 analysis of a fire in Paradise, again in Los Angeles, concluded that roughly 44 percent of homes built after 2008 survived, compared with about 12 percent of those built before 1997. The New York Times suggested that this is because ‘older homes are more likely to be constructed with wood, have less hardy roofs, include more surrounding vegetation and be closer to other homes — all factors that make them more likely to ignite.’

This can be interpreted by architects and urban planners in multiple ways. Firstly, we have relatively cost-effective materials that can reduce the risk of ember intrusion, and there is an urgent need to assess and retrofit existing buildings with these materials to make them safer. Secondly, there needs to be increased awareness, at an urban planning level, of how older and newer buildings and the spaces between these buildings can protect one another. Thirdly, and moving beyond these design considerations at the level of individual property, it is useful for evacuation routes and places of refuge to be factored into urban plans. (These strategies address not only for wildfire resilience, but other types of emergencies, too.)

Within the practice, Foster + Partners has developed and continues to refine its wildfire resilience framework. This is an internal set of standards and recommendations informed by international codes, emerging climate data, and best practices in fire safety design. This framework guides our approach to integrating non-combustible materials, defensible space strategies, and resilient urban planning principles into projects, ensuring that wildfire resilience is embedded from the earliest design stages.

Climate resilience and responsibility

If our buildings and urban plans express climate resilience as a continual process of disturbance and recovery as well as an opportunity for design innovation, perhaps we might – as the City of Stockholm did with Slussen – learn to celebrate our infrastructure and live with a better understanding of our changing climate and environment. Climate resilience can drive innovation within architectural and urban planning, while remaining highly sensitive to the surrounding environment. As images of the wildfires in Los Angeles and flooding in Valencia filter through our media channels, it seems that a lack of resilience is often more visible than its presence – a reminder that we rarely report on the disasters that didn’t happen. Architects, engineers, and urban planners must therefore work even harder to uphold and assert the importance of long-term, climate resilience in design (alongside policymakers, climate scientists, and developers). Beyond projects such as Slussen, it is increasingly important to advocate for such an approach even when climate resilience is not an obvious or stated aim. At a practice level, standards and review processes set by climate resilience experts within Foster + Partners are essential to ensuring that climate resilience is upheld as a key concern, and that narrow and short-term thinking is resisted in favour of more sustainable and multifaceted design practices.

Climate resilience is fundamental to the material survival of a project and is therefore essential in building practice. However, if people do not value or feel connected to their homes, communities, and cities, then the benefits of climate resilience planning are limited to functionality rather than habitability. Other forms of resilience in design – such as inclusivity, flexible workplace planning, and long-term ‘loose-fit’ urban strategies – must therefore intersect with climate resilience. Considered together, designers can imagine how, in a rapidly-changing and increasingly pressurised world, people can live with dignity, security, and community.