How AI Can Help European Cities Adapt to Climate Change
Turning the tide: confronting the need to adapt
By Flaminia Borelli, ESG Consultant, Expert @ Urban AI
“Europe is not prepared for rapidly growing climate risks.” This is the headline of the presentation of the latest European climate risks assessment, run by the European Environmental Agency in March 2024.
The European Climate Risks Assessment outlines 36 climate risks which might have potentially severe consequences based on a cluster system: ecosystems, food, health, infrastructure, and economy and finance. The report outlines that, while Europe has made substantial progress in understanding climate risks, policy implementation is lagging the rapid increase in risk levels. Adaptation arises as a key element to ensure the resilience of our society to the fast-changing climate we are experiencing. Urgent action is needed to prevent collapse.
Our cities
What will cities and buildings look like in 30 years? New buildings will and should have one main thing in common: concept design is done in accordance with climate risks analysis. However, our cities today have vibrant stories that go back in time, and so do their buildings. What about those buildings that according to the average life cycle of a building (60 years) will not have exhausted their life yet in the upcoming climate change scenarios? Climate change is currently disrupting the way we think and operate the built environment and the new constructions. We are conscious that, together with other aspects of our economy, such as finance, business and policy, the future of construction and the buildings we will be living in needs to factor in something that before it was only considering the contingency, i.e. the risk of a changing climate.
Climate risks are increasingly integrated in due diligence practices by market participants during acquisitions, as the legislation has become particularly demanding for assets’ financing and refinancing. Regarding new developments, both the legislation and building certifications sometimes provide criteria for risk mitigation or adaptation measures taken into account for the future buildings to be resilient to these risks at the delivery and operational phases.
The question is: why is climate risk such an important factor in the real estate sector and how technology can help with adaptation?
The Loss of Value
In economic terms, a stranded asset is a building (in general, a real estate property) that has become economically obsolete before coming to the end of life. In the case of climate change and physical risks, an asset could become stranded because of acute and extreme events damaging the building and preventing its normal functioning.
Existing and new buildings alike are susceptible to climate change impacts when they lack integration of adaptation measures. For instance, as temperatures rise, buildings without features like light-colored façades or roofs struggle to mitigate heat buildup, resulting in increased energy consumption for cooling. Moreover, the absence of strategies to address precipitation increases flood risks, particularly with impermeable ground surfaces exacerbating runoff. Implementing permeable surfaces or buffer systems such as green roofs can effectively absorb and slow down rainwater, reducing the strain on drainage systems and lessening the impact of storms. Lacking these adaptation features, a building which is highly exposed to climate risks can be overly sensitive to climate risks impact, and hence to stranding.
Beyond building focused impacts, there is a long list of indirect impacts that do not only belong to the economic sphere of a building, namely its ability to produce revenues, but rather to its societal and socioeconomic one.
Because buildings are not only concrete, but rather places of aggregation and of life of their users, the threat of climate change is also a social one. For instance, the inability to access certain areas due to disruptions to public transport caused by climate hazards or being unable to return to one’s home due to damages caused by climate hazards, results in medium- and long-term impacts that extend to financial repercussions. Displacement, increased inequality and poverty emerge as significant challenges attributable to climate change.
It is therefore imperative that building owners and public municipalities define adaptation plans as a collective effort.
Compliance Demands in Europe
The European Union has set up a substantial set of reporting rules that are tackling climate change and climate risks. These regulations address a broad spectrum, targeting businesses as a whole and specific activities within sectors. One key regulation in this regard is the EU Taxonomy, which provides guidelines for defining sustainable economic activities. By establishing clear criteria for what constitutes a sustainable economic activity, the EU Taxonomy plays a crucial role in guiding investment decisions and fostering the transition to a sustainable economy. With the release of its Climate Delegated Acts, the EU Taxonomy marks a significant milestone for providing companies with guidelines on integrating climate mitigation and adaptation into their activities.
The Perfect Recipe: Mitigation and Adaptation
While the transition risk associated with greenhouse gas emissions, for which the call to action to reduce has been now well established by a large part not only of the expert public but also by the collective action, adaptation still falls behind this largest attention.
What is climate change adaptation? According to the IPCC, adaptation is “the adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities”. By looking at human history, we would say that adaptation is a structural trait in humankind, for it has built the wheel to transport goods, and built locally, adapting to material availability and specific climate conditions, as vernacular architecture teaches us.
Scientific evidence has proved that extreme climate events that pose a physical climate risk to human beings are associated with emissions, so it is mandatory to engage in a commitment to reduce emissions to avoid the projected impact of the worst climate scenarios (RCP 4.5, 8.5).
However, it is important to consider that adaptation is as much required as some of the catastrophes depicted in the scenario analysis are already happening. Such adaptation should and could tackle both existing buildings which have not been built under the same conditions of today, and new buildings, for which location analytics play a role as much as innovation does for both cases.
Technology and artificial intelligence have proven to be very handy when big data analytics come, but there have recently been new ways that this can serve very pragmatically for adaptation of both existing buildings and new construction or renovation.
In the scope of the adaptation of existing buildings, nothing is more interesting than the concept of self-repairing cities promoted by H3 Dynamics. The company has created a client operational scale system of the detection of building defects to allow the analysis of high-rise buildings in Asia. The H3 Zoom platform allows companies and governments to automate visual building inspections for building management and repair work across the entire lifecycle of the structure. The potential of this tool is fascinating if we think about how it can make it easier to verify building existing conditions, without threatening human life by saving construction and maintenance workers from climbing a building façade. The services provide inspections support but rapidly evolved to remediation management, supporting repairing contractors and engineers aggregating them in a single platform.
How the system works : The system was conceived to scale up human ability to assess the condition of a building. A concrete example comes from high-rise buildings in Singapore that are strongly impacted by humidity, which accelerate the aging process of a building. In extreme humidity conditions, the materials degrade faster than they would in ordinary atmospheric conditions. This makes it necessary to perform condition assessment of the status of materials, especially concerning the façade, as falling parts can create a huge safety concern in the city. The system, which uses AI to define a sample of structure of buildings and defect types, can screen the condition of a building façade and understand the defect types in a faster way than it would be with the only human eye. The data collected by the scan performed by the drone can be uploaded into the platform and be tracked over time.
The need for such a system finds its rationale for different reasons: first of all, a safety concerns that address not only the technical experts that would need to perform this analysis in place of technology but also the need to perform it as the impact on people is tangible (more than 90 accidents happened in a 3-years’ time span in Singapore). Secondly, the difficulty of climbing a tall building façade is evident if we think of the infrastructure that is needed to perform it. Finally, and for all the reasons above, it represents an expensive task for the owner of the building. That said, it is indeed a necessary task which cannot be postponed or avoided, especially in certain conditions like the ones that we are facing with buildings aging faster.
A potential improvement of this technology works on emissions mitigation. H3 Dynamics is currently investing in its R&D department on developing a technology that would assess the energy loss of buildings. Using a thermal scan, it would be easier to locate the inefficiency of insulation in buildings and identify where action is needed.
While this service is used for the usual operational management of buildings today, and it seems especially fit for the context where it was born (tall skyscraper in Asian metropolis), it is important to assess the potential of this tool in verifying the status of the European old building stock whether it satisfies the current changed climate conditions and if it will satisfy the climate change conditions.
Furthermore, the rationale behind the existence of such a tool tells us that the adaptation of buildings to climate change is not only a structural and sectoral issue, rather it represents a societal problem. Using this type of technology would address one of the main problems that European society is facing today: the aging of the population. An important, perhaps underestimated issue in the current construction sector, is that while the European population is aging, it is legit to think that the pool of people that could perform a risky job like climbing a façade to check its status will decrease in the coming years.
We know we can do this, but the opportunity of scaling it down through technology could actually help having a better overview of the status quo of buildings. This will help in understanding how solutions can be scaled up by property type, not only focusing for instance commercial real estate, but also heritage buildings, which populate European cities, in the various urban landscapes like the European one.
Indeed, this could allow for the evaluation of the adaptation measures, their feasibility and their value in the future of the building. If implemented as a procedure in Europe, which has one of the oldest building stock that does not resemble at all the one in Singapore where H3 Dynamics operates, this can be a crucial step forward to adaptation of buildings, understanding how to reuse buildings without necessarily tearing them down.
Virgin Land and New Construction
Conscious construction is a crucial aspect of the adaptation process in the real estate sector. Addressing building vulnerability aspects and including considerations of building adaptation since the early design stages is a must. Exposure analytics plays an important role and supports the sector in identifying the most at-risk areas, helping the sector highlight high-risk areas and serves as a vital tool for assessing physical risks.
Today, numerous tools provide such services, supporting corporations and financial institutions in shaping their investment strategies for new developments. These solutions offer robust location analytics services, mapping the physical impact of climate change on both land and portfolios while offering resilience solutions. These tools empower companies to direct investments towards future-proofed endeavors.
This should in the long term avoid buildings at risk but also help the understanding of the exposure of the current building stock to be identified based on its location. Location analytics technology offers clear benefits from an investment standpoint in the real estate sector. However, its long-term impacts on the availability of safe land for development are uncertain and could be heavily influenced by socioeconomic factors, potentially exacerbating disparities based on income class
Conclusions: Venturing into Adaptation
While it is clear that the lack of resilience features at the concept stage of building could lead to the premature stranding of the building, a robust assessment of the climate resilience of existing buildings is equally needed in Europe. Overlooking the issue of building adaptation can lead to serious environmental and societal impacts if these structures are not available to use and require substantial investment for their survival. This can jeopardize the urban fabric as we know it.
Resilience is a complex exercise, and it requires complex but assertive solutions. These solutions include the participation of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) as part of a collective action that is needed and required for resilience.
The role of AI would be the one to collaborate with all the stakeholders playing a role in this: occupiers and owners, local authorities and insurers, banks, and other investors. Scaling up solutions means being able to respond effectively to rapidly changing and verifying events that we have proven not to be able to control in several cases, as happened in the impactful storm of May 2023 in Italy, which created a 12-month state of emergency in the Emilia Romagna region. Together with technological solutions, a consolidated approach to policies at the local level can support a prompt reaction to disruptive climate hazards.
What is needed in the sector is undoubtedly a mind switch where we let go of short-term profits for long-term resilience and survival of the sector.
Together with the nature and ecosystem services we so depend on for our survival, our collective action can be turned into resilient actions that will make us ready to face climate change.
