Climate Change Risk and Decision-Making – Buildings and Cities – CALL FOR PAPERS: special issue
Guest Editors: Simon Foxell and Ian Cooper
Deadline for abstracts: 09 June 2025 (noon GMT)
What understandings and processes do built environment actors need to address mitigation and adaptation risks in the built environment?
How should built environment actors (individually and collectively) respond to the increasing risks resulting from the changes to the global and local climates? How can the sector improve its understanding of risk factors and potential responses? What obligations do decision-makers have to act and explain their actions relating to avoidance and mitigation of risk? What processes and shared understandings are needed for identifying, communicating and responding to climate risks? What are the appropriate approaches to thinking about and acting on built environment risk (across a spectrum from ‘probability times consequences’ to ‘how far is safe enough’ that locate risk in a larger cultural context?
The Special Issue will examine who owns (or should own) responsibility and accountability for making and recommending decisions about the production and management of the built environment in relation to climate risk. What are the qualities of the risks involved? Who will be impacted by them? And who is responsible/accountable for managing them throughout a building’s/built environment’s life cycle? What are the particular circumstances surrounding the longevity and interdependencies of the built environment and these responsibilities?
The Special Issue will explore the nature of risk assessment, examine case study responses to climate risk to and arising from the built environment at different scales (buildings, places, neighbourhoods, building stocks, cities, infrastructures etc), and address practical, educational and policy responses to that risk.
The aim will be to examine and discuss built environment decision-making in response to perceived climate risk, to propose a consistent language to describe it and to understand and test the validity of communication and decision-making processes that deal with climate risk in the built environment.
Suggested topics must be specific to the built environment and might include:
- Understanding risk
- Risk ownership and responsibilities
- Risk ethics
- Modelling risk and risk outcomes
- Risk management
- Decision-making
- Information management and communication
Full details: https://www.buildingsandcities.org/calls-for-papers/climate-change-risk-decision-making.html
