Building resilience, one development at a time

Evidence continues to mount that extreme weather events do not affect all neighborhoods equally. Some populations are more at risk of negative health outcomes than others because of the social, economic, demographic, and/or environmental characteristics of the neighborhoods where they live, work, and play. While zoning regulations and master plans can build resilience at the community or regional scale, developers and their project teams ultimately decide whether or not to incorporate design strategies that could reduce the localized vulnerability of a project site to the health and environmental effects of climatic events. It is therefore essential to provide design and construction professionals with decision support tools that are informed by evidence of the links between specific building strategies and positive health outcomes following exposure to climatic events. This presentation will share just such a tool, the results of the literature review that underpinned its development, and examples of how the tool can be used to provide real-time decision support to project teams during the design process.