Adaptation Hub

About the GlobalABC Adaptation Hub

The GlobalABC Adaptation Hub stands as a pivotal initiative dedicated to rallying stakeholders from both the public and private sectors across the buildings and construction value chain. With a primary focus on bolstering resilience and adaptation strategies, this collaborative endeavour seeks to unify expertise and resources to tackle the existing and increasingly urgent challenge posed by climate change-driven hazard events. Aligned with loss and damage and just transition efforts, the Adaptation Hub aims to foster innovative policy solutions that are tailored specifically to enhance resilience within the buildings and construction sector.

Data collected over the last decades shows that the climate is currently changing at an unprecedented pace due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, droughts, heavy precipitation and floods, and high-wind events, and particularly their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since 2007.

Despite ongoing decarbonization efforts, climate change is progressing and will have particularly severe consequences globally for built environments designed for stable conditions, as well as for the communities that inhabit them. Adapting our built environment to this evolving climate is crucial for the health and well-being of all, and for the continuity of economic activities worldwide. The Adaptation Hub fosters a deeper understanding of the necessity for resilience in the built environment, advocates for a shift from a historical perspective of natural risks to a projections-based model, and serves as a catalyst for concrete action worldwide. The hub is engaged in the Buildings Breakthrough Priority Action Area(s) - B1 Standards and Certification.

Activities

The Adaptation Hub, has been operational since 2018, bringing together members with a shared goal of advocating for a more resilient built environment through science-based and future-driven adaptation strategies. The Hub began its journey by emphasising the importance and numerous challenges of adaptation in the built environment in its foundational white paper, "Buildings and Climate Change Adaptation: A Call for Action," which was presented at COP26. Following this, the Adaptation Hub published its "10 Principles for Effective Actions" manifesto.

In 2022, the Hub concentrated on promoting these principles through case studies and began cataloguing and promoting existing frameworks and methodologies to assess and implement adaptive actions. These efforts culminated in a presentation at a COP27 side event.

Despite the well-documented consequences of climate change and the identification of effective adaptation levers by stakeholders across the buildings and construction value chain, the pace of adaptation has remained insufficient. To address this, the group published the "Why Are We Still Not Adapting?" white paper in 2024, following thorough research, interviews, and surveys, to identify the many intertwined causes for inaction. This critical work led to multiple events at COP28 and was introduced at the inaugural Buildings and Climate Global Forum, where the Hub played a significant role from the outset.

Currently, the Adaptation Hub is transitioning from a period of declarations and commitments to an era of concrete and tangible action. Our primary focus will be on developing comprehensive guidance for pursuing adaptation in the buildings and construction sector. This guidance will be structured as step-by-step pathways tailored for each stakeholder within the buildings and construction value chain. Emphasis will be placed on identifying and addressing cross-sectoral barriers, ensuring that the entire value chain progresses cohesively towards a more resilient built environment. Through these efforts, the Adaptation Hub intends to drive meaningful and unified progress in climate adaptation across the industry.

Adaptation Pathways

We are currently focused on developing comprehensive adaptation pathways that cover the entire buildings and construction value chain. Our objective is to provide actionable short, medium, and long-term strategies tailored for each of the 10 key stakeholder groups. These pathways are designed to enable every stakeholder to make impactful progress while facilitating further actions by others, ensuring a coordinated and seamless transition toward resilience.

Each pathway is carefully crafted to unlock progress throughout the value chain and to align with existing agreements like the Buildings Breakthrough and the Déclaration de Chaillot, and sectorial guidance like WBCSD's Market Transformation Agenda. The outcome will be a set of clear, actionable, and collaborative roadmaps for each stakeholder group, promoting sector-wide adaptation and resilience. By creating this unified framework, we aim to drive progress at both national and subnational levels, ensuring that all efforts contribute to a shared vision of a resilient future for buildings and construction.

Throughout 2024, we organized a series of sector-specific workshops involving all 10 stakeholder groups. These workshops have been instrumental in identifying key actions, recognizing barriers, and highlighting opportunities for synergies across the value chain. Our process involves pinpointing the necessary tasks for each stakeholder to advance their adaptation strategies and to enable other groups to take subsequent steps. This collaborative approach ensures that our pathways are grounded in the realities of the industry while fostering sector-wide progress.

In the lead-up to COP29 in 2024, the GlobalABC Adaptation Hub developed the first four draft adaptation pathways, each tailored to a key stakeholder group in the buildings and construction value chain. These early drafts laid the foundation for a broader, more inclusive process. Watch the presentation of the first four draft pathways from the COP29 Buildings and Cooling Pavilion : Adaptation is Everyone’s Business: Unlocking Key Initiatives Among Buildings & Construction Stakeholders: a hybrid working session to introduce our adaptation pathway framework, showcase progress on four pathways, and engage attendees in hands-on workshops to drive future initiatives, hosted by Adaptation Hub, ICC, USGBC, GCCA, and Velux.

Following a series of multi-stakeholder workshops held in spring 2025, all 10 stakeholder draft pathways were completed, paving the way for a broad consultation process over the summer, open to all practitioners, experts, and stakeholders, with the goal of presenting a comprehensive, actionable, and stakeholder-validated framework at COP30.

In time for COP30, we are pleased to announce that the Adaptation Pathways for the Buildings and Construction Sector are finalized and available for consultation. The report presents practical, forward-looking roadmaps for 10 stakeholder groups across the value chain, outlining short, medium, and long-term actions to accelerate climate resilience. Each pathway is supported by a curated selection of resources, tools, and case studies to facilitate implementation, as well as key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor progress and guide adaptive management over time. This living document is a tool to foster coordinated action and shared ambition across the sector.

Access the full Adaptation Pathways Framework (download), or read any individual section:

These pathways are not intended as a one-size-fits-all solution to every challenge of resilience in the built environment. Rather, they are meant to be a shared foundation and resource that can be adapted, challenged, expanded, and improved. We invite all stakeholders to provide feedback, share use cases, and contribute real-world experiences to help evolve the pathways into a collective and actionable knowledge base.

Let’s work together to equip the buildings and construction sector with the tools it needs to adapt and thrive in a changing climate.

Upcoming events

Watch our COP30 launch of the Adaptation Pathways at the Buildings and Cooling Pavilion with partners and champions from the Ministry of Lands, Public Works, Housing, and Urban Development of Kenya, the city of Chefchaouen, JLL, ENERGIES 2050, the World Bank and C40 Cities.

Adaptation Working Group Members

Co-chairs:

ADEME (French Agency for Ecological Transition)

Technical secretariat:

Members:

ALMEE (Association Libanaise pour la Maitrise de l'Energie et pour l'Environnement)

FIDIC (International Federation of Consulting Engineers)

ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR)

Canada NRC-CNRC (National Research Council Canada)

Publications

Buildings and Climate Change Adaptation - A Call for Action

Adaptation of the Building Sector to Climate Change: 10 Principles for Effective Action

Why are we still not adapting? Instigating adaptation in the built environment

Initiative Notices Library

This library contains case studies on innovative initiatives that fully embody the core values of the “10 principles for effective climate change adaptation action”. The selected projects in 2023 range from hail-resistant roofs in Calgary, Canada to efforts to help a community rebound after devastating floods in Nabeul, Tunisia.

GlobalABC - Initiative Notice - ICC - Adaptation to hurricane and extreme winds

Resilience to Hurricane and Extreme Wind Events: New York City

GlobalABC - Initiative Notice - Commune of Nabeul - Flood resilience

Protection of the City Against Floods: City of Nabeul

GlobalABC - Initiative Notice - ICLR - Resilience to Wildfire

Resilience to Wildfires: Lytton

GlobalABC - Initiative Notice - ICC - Building resilience to tornadoes

Building Resilience to Tornadoes: City of Moore

GlobalABC - Initiative Notice - IFC - BRI

Building Resilience Index: The Philippines

RESILIENCE ASSESSMENT TOOL

Recent dynamics emerging from the European Union towards a comprehensive review of resilience assessment were the starting point of the Adaptation Working Group’s will to provide actors along the value chain of the buildings and construction sector with a wide-ranging and detailed overview of resilience assessment methodologies developed all around the world. Highlighting the strengths and limitations of each methodology will offer greater transparency and favour the emergence of more robust and concerted assessment methodologies for the buildings sector actors and will accelerate the transition of our cities and territories.

The Working Group has the ambition to develop an analysis of resilience assessment methodologies of the built environment that will give actors the tools they need to facilitate adaptation in the face of climate change. The creation of an actionable database of methodologies serves two main objectives:

On the one hand, offering a clear and comparable analysis of well-known existing references around the world so that actors along the value chain, whatever their own expertise may be, can find the methodology best suited for their needs;
On the other hand, increasing knowledge and transparency to foster emulation, pinpoint expertise gaps, and help the emergence of new and more comprehensive assessment methodologies for all hazards, locations, and stakeholders.

Submit a methodology

Title

Approach type

Type of methodology

Audiences

Hazard covered

Klimasken

Klimasken is a web-based tool for assessing cities, municipalities and buildings’ contribution to climate change and adaptation to it. The user is asked to fill in information for a list of indicators, divided in five areas (descriptive, exposure, sensitivity, emission, readiness balance). Based on the information entered by the user, the tool provides a "Climate Label". The climate label is a fiche containing a summary representation of the overall rating in the form of several concentric circles divided into four quadrants, which are sub-divided into smaller slices that represent each of the indicators. Five colours (red, orange, yellow, light green and dark green) are used throughout the label to indicate the negative (red) or positive (dark green) status or development of the system described by the indicators used. The "Climate Label" fiche also provides a rating on a scale from 0 to 100% (in addition to the colour scale). The labels of different cities/buildings can be compared with the tool.

Building Resilience Index

Building Resilience Index is a web-based hazard mapping and resilience assessment framework for the building sector. It is designed to facilitate access to location-specific hazard information, provide resilience measures to mitigate applicable risks, and improve transparency for disclosing a building’s resilience information between sector stakeholders.

Building Resilience Index has two processes:

1. Self-Assessment: The user creates a project in the App by entering project information and its location. The App presents all applicable hazards specific to that location along with a list of mitigation measures for each hazard category (wind, water, fire, and geoseismic). The user responds to the mitigation measures based on whether that measure is implemented in the building or not, which results in a letter grade system. The lowest grade of the four hazard categories is taken as the project rating, based on the weakest link principle. Achieving the highest rating level "A+" requires an A-rated building also to incorporate at least 3 operational continuity measures, which include having power, water, and telecom backups, and additional access routes to the site, as well as having green building certifications.
2. Verification: Each mitigation measure response from Self-Assessment is reviewed and approved by two licensed code-responsible engineers or parties.

Bat-ADAPT

The tool allows the user to perform an assessment of climate vulnerability of a building based on the assessment of exposure and sensitivity factors.

It consists of 3 phases:

Phase 1 - Assessment of exposure
Phase 2 - Sensitivity assessment
Phase 3 - Vulnerability analysis Based on all the specifications provided by the user, the tool provides a synthesis of the results in a fiche.

The fiche presents an assessment of: exposure of the location; sensitivity of the building and each of the building elements (for each of the hazards identified); vulnerability of the building for each of the hazards identified, with a grading (over 5).

The fiche also includes a list of proposed adaptation measures for each of the hazards.

REDi

Describes design and planning criteria to enable owners to resume business operations and provide liveable conditions quickly after a disaster, according to their desired resilience objectives. It also presents a loss evaluation methodology for assessing the success of the adopted design and planning measures in meeting the resilience objectives.

Environmental Impact Assessment Guide to: Climate Change Resilience & Adaptation

Environmental Impact Assessment Climate Change Resilience

This guide provides a framework for the effective consideration of climate change resilience and adaptation in the EIA process, through a 7-step approach. Steps 2 to 5 of this approach, deal with CVRA:

Step 2 – Defining the future (climate) baseline
Step 3 – Identifying and determining sensitivity of receptors
Step 4 – Reviewing and determining magnitude of the effect
Step 5 – Determination of significance

Alternatively, the guidance informs that if done before the EIA, building climate resilience can be integrated into the project by carrying out a “ex -ante” Climate Change is Assessment. The guide includes a Climate change risk assessment methodology (Steps):

Identifying potential climate change risks to a scheme or project;
Assessing these risks (potentially prioritising to identify the most severe);
Formulating mitigation actions to reduce the impact of the identified risks.

The methodology you are searching for is not listed here? Do you know about a resilience assessment methodology of interest? Suggest an addition to our database by filling out the short form and we will publish it here once approved internally.

Contact & how to join

Joining the Adaptation Hub offers a unique opportunity to collaborate with leaders in adaptation and resilience within the buildings and construction sector. As a member, you can learn from the best practices and innovative strategies of industry pioneers while bringing your freshest ideas and recent challenges to the forefront. The platform provides a space to connect with stakeholders from across the entire value chain and around the globe, fostering a diverse and comprehensive approach to building a more resilient built environment.

Members of the Adaptation Hub are expected to attend and actively participate in plenary sessions held every 2 to 3 months. Members should also promote the Hub's work and contribute to the review processes of our various publications. Additionally, members are invited to join thematic working sessions and workshops based on their interests and expertise. Those who are highly committed and motivated are welcome to take on more significant roles in our activities, depending on their skills and availability.

To join the Adaptation Hub, please contact the Hub Secretariat directly: [email protected] and [email protected]