03.5 CLIMATE RISK

Our Global Impact strategy is our primary response to the climate crisis, but assessing climate risk associated with our projects necessitates new perspectives on established design processes. Climate risk accounts for warming average temperatures, increased rainfall or periods of drought, sea-level rise, wildfire exposure, and the accompanying public health, social, and economic impacts of these environmental changes.

Our Global Impact Assessment tool lays the foundation for embedding strategies to address the climate crisis in our work, but we have also committed to developing tools that specifically provide the analysis and evidence we need to engage our clients on these issues. In 2022, we invested in the largest bulk purchase of future weather data from the UNIPCC-aligned WeatherShift tool, which generates future weather files based on climate change scenarios for 2060 and 2090 time horizons.

These future weather files will inform a new climate risk module for our Environmental Performance Toolkit to allow project teams to assess future performance of buildings during early design phases to better address climate risk.

Future climate data has been incorporated into the climate risk assessments included in the Climate Playbook for each studio.

In 2022, we developed a climate risk analysis option within a new application called the Pre-design Analysis. This web-based tool allows users to access “future” weather data based on UNIPCC climate change scenarios for all 17 of our studio locations. Comparing historical weather data, which is the current basis of design for our industry, to predicted weather conditions under a climate change scenario is an effective way to assess the climate risk a project may experience in the lifecycle of the building. This new application is our first step in integrating climate risk into our workflow and we will seek to expand this in 2023 and beyond.