Director of Sustainability Ariane Laxo and colleagues examine barriers to industry-wide adoption of reliable projected climate data for building design.
Architects and engineers have long viewed climate change as a problem of the future. Yet the impacts are already here and this changing reality must inform the design process.
Building professionals typically rely on historical weather data as a primary resource for performance analysis and design, such as the Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) dataset produced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) here in the United States. This data—based on past median weather conditions for a given location that is sometimes more than three decades old—has traditionally been considered sufficient for establishing a regional or national climate norm, and is reinforced by existing standards, laws, and conventions. However, a changing climate makes such characterizations much less useful for designers, poorly reflecting the range, frequency, and intensity of potential future weather conditions a building will need to withstand during its lifespan.
There is now enough data available for professionals to take scientifically defensible, repeatable, and rigorous actions based on projected climatic data. But while projected climate data is readily available from reliable sources, significant barriers prevent adoption within the building industry and the government agencies that set our codes and standards.
These barriers include:
- Lack of consensus on the methodology for creating climate projection data for buildings based on climate models.
- Lack of a publicly available platform for providing climate projections for use in a format suitable for building analysis.
- Lack of consensus on a standardized framework for communicating results of simulation with long-term climate data projections.
- Liability concerns with using projection data.
A coordinated response to these challenges is necessary across building design disciplines to promote widespread adoption of projected climate data. Professional institutions, codes and standards organizations, and national government agencies should play a key role to ensure that buildings created today are fit for climatic conditions, and their impact on health and the environment, in 20, 50, and 100 years’ time.
Providing this framework will enable the building industry to better plan resilient buildings that can adapt to—and anticipate—a changing climate.
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For more information, read the full peer-reviewed whitepaper, “Projected climate data for building design: barriers to use,” in Buildings & Cities.