Effects of climate change on the built environment

New buildings will have to be designed to cope with the effects of climate change. These include warmer weather in which keeping cool will be important, more extreme and wet weather, and increased subsidence risk. Flood risk areas will increase, requiring measures for both resistance for initial protection and resilience for rapid recovering. At the same time, new buildings must use less fossil fuel in a low or zero-carbon world. Homes, offices, schools and other buildings will need to maximise passive measures of more effective insulation, improved airtightness and greater thermal mass. They will also need to make more use of solar energy and other renewable inputs. New buildings will incorporate a range of new technologies to reduce their energy use, and to cut the energy needed to build them, including the embodied energy in the materials they contain.