How will climate change affect a property portfolio of 2100 properties across the state?

It’s the billion-dollar problem that the planning and housing industries are grappling with.

We recently worked with a community housing not-for-profit organisation (alongside Loci Environment and Place and Morphum) to take the latest climate change projections and link them with current climate data at individual properties to determine climate risk ratings across their entire portfolio.

Climate change isn’t a problem for the future, but the present

We know from our last few summers that climate adaptation is critical, and something every organisation that manages assets should be thinking of right now. 

What we liked about this project was the process of linking together several issues: 

• responsibility

• organisational strategic directions

• climate frameworks

• climate projections data

• individual housing locations and building types. 

Fair to say that there isn’t enough publicly available data to this work properly, but we do our best to assess the risks. We work with clients to integrate a series of climate factors into a weighted score. We included summer and winter temperatures, proximity to green spaces to create cool streets, flood risk, bushfire risk, and extreme rainfall.

One startling fact was that near the end of the century only 1.5% of properties will have an average maximum outdoor summer temperate of below 26 degrees, whereas today 85% of properties do.

Why something should be done and how to do it

This project gives the client not just an answer as to why something should be done but included 20+ building retrofit options that can be done today. Plus a property checklist to gather data on climate resilience into the future.

We think this is pretty important in coping with extreme events like the one shown in Image 1.