SPOTLIGHT ON: NLA's Resilient London Report
One of the Greenway Associates Directors lives in the Maida Vale area in central London. While visiting a site in the Lake District, his neighbour sent him the below video of nearby Portobello Road and asked whether his property was being affected by the flash flooding. Thankfully his property was fine, but sadly, many of his surrounding neighbours had been completely flooded, with basement flats and many retail premises experiencing severe flooding. With hardly any mention of it in the news, it quickly got us into gear when it comes resilience planning and benchmarking data for London’s built environment.
According to climate predictions, London’s summer temperatures are predicted to resemble those of Barcelona by 2050! However much we love a summer holiday in Barcelona, that is a sobering thought for those of us building assets that will be expected to perform for many decades to come.
This year, Greenway Associates have made a concerted effort to gather as much benchmarking cost data as possible on sustainable materials and building approaches, so that we can be more responsive to this need.
We really appreciated the NLA’s report on this topic, called “Resilient London”, which you can download here.
The report reviews the status of climate resilience plans across the London, the ability and skills of our industry to adapt, and very importantly, the barriers we face in implementing these approaches.
One of the main barriers we constantly hear about is a lack of clarity on cost, which is why Greenway Associates are aiming to increase the agility and accuracy of our response in this area.
With temperatures in the city as much as 10° higher than in the surrounding countryside, and more frequent extreme events like flash flooding, we must ask ourselves whether we are doing all we can to champion climate resilience when designing, building or improving built assets.
If you haven’t yet read this NLA report yet, we thoroughly recommend finding 15 minutes in your day to download it and give it some thought.
Can you help us gather more cost data on resilience planning? Whether you’re a supplier, designer or otherwise, we would love to hear from you.