Climate change

While organisations transition to net zero carbon or look at other routes to carbon reduction, many do not yet understand their full exposure to climate risk. Hotter summers, changing rainfall patterns and extreme events coupled with changes in policy, technology, markets, and legislation can expose organisations – both public and private – to a range of climate related risks. These can damage the bottom line, hurt investor confidence or impact on the ability to deliver a product or service.

Greengage can help organisations to understand exactly how climate change can and will impact on their organisations from internal culture and governance to the physical and transitional impacts on their portfolios and assets. Using a mix of CRREM, TCFD principles, climate projections and our own extensive industry experience, Greengage can map the physical, transitional and social risk exposure of organisations and prepare a mitigation strategy to manage these risks.  

Greengage provide technical support, design advice and coordination relating to climate change resilience. This can help developments to exceed basic legislative and policy ‘box-ticking’ requirements, enabling delivery of schemes resilient to a changing climate. Our technical approach is able to focus on multifunctional GI design, energy efficiency, urban heat island risk, surface flood water management and the impacts of climate change. This holistic approach benefits the placemaking process, helping to create spaces which will continue to function despite future climate risk, reducing management and cost burdens for developers, managers and landowners.

Greengage can deliver this service with a focus on individual technical disciplines or else coordinate the climate resilience design process within a wider design team. The output of this support would be the production of a Climate Change Resilience Strategy, which would draw from all relevant technical disciplines, outlining the measures embedded within proposals to address climate risk, and quantifying the benefits for the scheme. Such a strategy would be suitable to address planning commitments but can also be produced to complement bespoke corporate policy or project aspirations which exceed minimum requirements.

Greengage provide climate change resilience advice and strategy production relating to management of existing assets/portfolios. The drivers for doing this are twofold:

• To meet investor demand for information about the resilience of built assets to climate change and other resilience issues;
• To provide more information about the strategies used by property companies to assess and manage climate risks.

Following the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations, we can support organisations in addressing two key risks:

• Transition risk related to the shift towards a low carbon economy required to meet the UN Paris Agreement Goals. Companies reliant on inefficient, carbon intensive technologies will see future liabilities and competitive disadvantage; and
• Physical risk related to short term climate related shocks or longer term chronic stresses such as increased rainfall or temperature. Being able to prepare for and resist these risks provides a considerable long term advantage.

Our guidance will help you to devise a process for understanding your exposure to climate related risk, develop resilience related business strategies for your assets, including specified targets and measurement of performance over time. This strategy will be aligned with a client’s corporate policy and aspirations relating to climate change resilience. We would work closely with the team to identify what elements are valued highly by your business, identify where these may be at risk, and present measures to protect and improve assets. This often has the benefit of improvement workplace environments and reflecting wider health and wellbeing improvement targets.