As part of London Climate Action Week 2025, the CIBSE Resilient Cities Group (RCG) hosted a dynamic online session in collaboration with WSP UK, bringing together leading voices in climate adaptation and the built environment.
This session focused on the urgent need on embedding climate resilience into the way we design, retrofit, and operate our buildings and cities, and featured insights from two WSP UK experts:
· Christine Wissink, Technical Director for Climate Resilience and Adaptation, WSP
· Michael Trousdell, Head of Sustainability, Property and Buildings, WSP
The event, chaired by Dr Bahareh Salehi as Vice Chair of the group and Senior Energy and Sustainability Engineer at WSP, provided an invaluable opportunity to explore how we can move from climate risk awareness to tangible, integrated resilience strategies.
The session was joined by Professor Darren Woolf, Chair of CIBSE RCG, whose ongoing leadership continues to shape the group’s mission – to champion resilient, adaptive, and sustainable urban environments at every scale.
Why This Matters
Our urban landscapes are being shaped less by deliberate design and more by the mounting impacts of extreme weather. With climate events like Storm Frank, the 2022 heatwave, and more recently Storm Isha (2024) becoming increasingly frequent, our cities and infrastructure are under pressure like never before. The climate crisis is no longer a future concern. It’s here, now, and disproportionately impacting our most vulnerable systems – ageing buildings, outdated infrastructure, and underprepared communities.
At the same time, we are seeing tightening budgets and growing retrofit needs. Critical facilities like hospitals, schools, and housing stock are straining under today’s pressures, with limited capacity to adapt to tomorrow’s climate.
Key Themes and Highlights
A key theme that emerged from the session was the urgent need to shift from assessing climate risks to embedding measurable resilience into the way we plan, design, and operate our buildings and infrastructure. While climate-related financial disclosures and evolving legislation—such as the EU taxonomy and the UK Companies Act—have encouraged organisations to consider climate risks more seriously, true resilience remains difficult to define, quantify, and benchmark. It goes beyond mitigation to include preparedness, responsiveness, and recovery—elements that are inherently complex yet essential to long-term sustainability.
The conversation also highlighted how financial and insurance mechanisms are becoming unexpected but powerful drivers of climate adaptation. As extreme weather events make some areas increasingly uninsurable, risk becomes a concrete financial constraint rather than a theoretical future concern. This growing economic pressure, coupled with tightening regulations, is encouraging more strategic and integrated approaches to resilience. The session closed with a strong call for interdisciplinary collaboration, reflecting the understanding that the challenges we face are multi-dimensional—and only by working across sectors can we deliver truly adaptive, future-ready solutions.
As climate impacts intensify and resilience becomes a defining challenge of our time, the session served as a timely reminder that the built environment must evolve rapidly and collaboratively. Participants were encouraged to continue pushing for innovation, share lessons learned, and contribute to shaping a more adaptive and inclusive future—where resilience is not just an aspiration, but a practical, measurable outcome.
Questions & Answers
The session concluded with strong audience engagement, including insightful questions and reflections from participants across sectors. While many valuable points were raised, a few selected questions and answers are shared below to highlight key areas of interest and discussion:
Q1: How can we move beyond climate risk assessments toward meaningful adaptation in practice?
A: Risk assessments are essential for understanding exposure and vulnerability, but they must lead to actionable outcomes. The next step is integrating resilience into early design stages, setting clear performance goals for adaptability, and ensuring these goals are embedded into procurement, delivery, and operations strategies.
Q2: Are there concrete benchmarks for what counts as a 'successful' resilience measure?
A: This remains a challenge. While carbon has become easier to quantify, resilience is more context-specific. Small wins—like improved thermal comfort during heatwaves or reduced flood downtime—are critical, but industry-wide benchmarks are still evolving. More collaboration is needed to define and standardise measurable indicators.
Q3: How is legislation influencing climate adaptation efforts in the built environment?
A: Regulations such as the UK Companies Act and the EU taxonomy are increasing the pressure on organisations to disclose climate risks and plan accordingly. However, legislation alone is not enough—translating policy into on-the-ground action requires clearer guidance, stronger incentives, and alignment across financial and planning systems.
Q4: What role does insurance play in accelerating climate resilience?
A: Insurance is becoming a key economic driver. When areas become uninsurable due to flood or fire risk, the financial implications prompt faster adaptation responses. This shift makes resilience not just an environmental issue, but a commercial necessity—changing how developments are evaluated and approved.
These discussions reflected the growing appetite for meaningful adaptation strategies and the complexity of turning resilience from concept into reality.
This session was a testament to the growing appetite for concrete action in the climate resilience space, and the role that engineers, designers, and policymakers must play in shaping future-ready cities.
A recording of the session and the presentation file are available for anyone who missed the session. If you would like to learn more about the CIBSE Resilient Cities Group or explore collaboration opportunities with WSP UK, feel free to get in touch.