Creating Value Through Resilience

Creating buildings that are resilient in their design and operation has emerged as a best practice in an ever-more challenging world. But trying to sell resiliency strategies only on the fact that they're the right thing to do in order to prepare for a future event that is probable but not predictable...well, good luck with that.

Luckily, strategies for resilience pair well with or do double duty in other strategies, such as sustainability, security, and tenant recruitment, to name a few. But nothing sells like a dollar savings figure, so the Urban Land Institute's (ULI) Center for Sustainability set about finding the real cost savings tied to resilience in commercial buildings. In a recently released report, Returns on Resilience: The Business Case, ULI profiles ten commercial and mixed-use facilities exposed to different forms of threats and designed specifically to mitigate those threats. The report aims to "identify real estate projects designed to perform well in the face of climate-related threats and to illuminate ways in which investments in resilience strategies provide financial and other returns."

Some of the resilience strategies employed by the facilities in the report include:

• Locating the electrical room well above the flood plain.

• Constructing a curtain wall with glass that can withstand a Category 5 hurricane.

• Constructing a 10-foot tall flood wall around the property.

• Using building mass to minimize the impacts of summer heat.

The full ULI report is available here.

And in this Building Operating Management article, you can find more resiliency strategies, particularly selected with existing buildings in mind.

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