Resilience of the Built Environment to Climate Change

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About this Research Topic

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Background

Climate change is considered a matter of concern as it significantly affects various aspects of built environment. Climate change imposes direct and indirect impacts, making urban systems, infrastructure, and green spaces highly vulnerable.

As Climate change is found to have a significant impact on the built environment, it is one of the biggest environmental challenges currently witnessed. Rainfall patterns are shifting, there are frequent instances of heavy rain, sea level is rising, temperature is increasing, and land drought is expanding. In addition, glaciers are melting, wildfires are growing, windstorms are raging, heatwaves are rampant, droughts are common, and floods are projected to increase. These changes occur on lands, seas, and oceans due to increased CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, which is unfortunately not easily recoverable. Extreme weather events due to climate change cause significant disruption and damage to the urban built environment and its components, such as buildings, energy and water distribution systems, roads, bridges, and transportation. In consequence, there are considerable effects that impose risks to life and threaten the national economy.

This Research Topic will discuss the most known human and natural climate change drivers and provide investigation into the resilience of the built environment and the process of strengthening the built environment, including resilience factors and elements. Resilience generally refers to how a system responds to a disaster and springs back to normal conditions. Measured by the ability of a system to absorb shock and stress and continue functioning, it is one of the essential means that characterize the ability of communities, organizations, and individuals to recover after being faced with a natural or climatic disaster.

The concept of this Research Topic, Resilience of Built Environment to Climate Change, refers to the ability of urban-built systems to maintain or recover quickly from a disruptive event, adapt to change, and transform into systems that have better adaptive capacity. This Research Topic seeks to investigate, derive, and explore the factors and drivers that make the built environment resilient to Climate Change to prevent and avoid its devastating impacts.

We invite research that studies the ways and means of making the built environment resilient to Climate Change to prevent and avoid its devastating impacts. Submitted articles may seek to follow themes such as:

- Broad use of renewable energy

- Innovative building design to enable use of solar and wind technology

- Smart design of houses and buildings

- Special design for factories to be energy efficient and zero emission

- Spread of education and knowledge on how a properly built environment can minimize climate change magnitude

- Sustainable built design and environment

- Green economy of built design

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Keywords: climate change, resilience, built environment, renewable energy, environment, urban sustainability, solar, wind, energy efficiency, green economy, smart design

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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