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Having recently begun preparing the second edition of the Elsevier book Adapting the Built Environment for Climate Change: Design Principles for Climate Emergencies, I approached Arup and Saint-Gobain's new 92 page report expecting a genuinely comprehensive assessment of how the built environment should respond to a changing climate. https://www.arup.com/globalassets/downloads/insights/a/adapting-buildings-to-climate-change/adapting-buildings-to-climate-change.pdf
Instead, I found a document that is most interesting as a review of current engineering practice but distinctly unconvincing as a serious vision for climate adaptation. Its central problem is baked into the framing rather than hidden in the details: co-authored by one of the world’s largest building materials manufacturers, it reduces adaptation to something you largely buy, specify and install on the building envelope at considerable financial cost.
Its five solution families map almost perfectly onto the co-author’s business units, insulation, glazing, renders and ETICS, coatings, and protective systems, while measures that adaptation science usually places first are relegated to the margins. Building orientation, massing and passive ventilation receive about three pages, against thirty-five for the product taxonomy. Urban morphology appears only in passing, while behavioural adaptation, adaptive comfort, occupant practices and the wider thermal tolerance of heat-acclimatised populations are ignored. Many of the most effective measures demand better design, not another layer of products. A report that reverses that hierarchy begins to look less like independent analysis than a corporate catalogue conveniently dressed in climate credentials.
Even within its own product-centred logic, the report remains strikingly conventional. Bio-based and circular materials appear only in passing, mostly as generic aspirations such as recycled or bio-based content, repairability and design for disassembly. There is no substantive examination of timber, cork, hemp, cellulose, straw, bamboo or mycelium, and almost nothing on reused components, material passports, urban mining or closed-loop construction. A report that presents product innovation as a principal route to adaptation thus largely overlooks the material pathways most capable of simultaneously connecting resilience with lower embodied carbon, resource efficiency and end-of-life recovery in practice.
The rigour is applied selectively: quantitative where it supports the product case, qualitative where it might complicate it. On the carbon side, the claim that material-intensive solutions, thicker insulation, reinforced envelopes, triple glazing and more durable assemblies, repay their higher embodied carbon through longer service life is repeated three times without even basic service-life assumptions, replacement-cycle data or life-cycle evidence of any kind or sensitivity analysis. Nor is there any credible basis for prioritising between options: no €/m² costs, avoided-damage estimates, payback periods or cost-effectiveness rankings.
Buildings, meanwhile, are treated as engineering systems rather than socio-technical ones, and the constraints that dominate adaptation decisions are largely absent. The report rightly says that retrofitting the existing stock is the challenge of the century, yet says almost nothing about why retrofits fail in practice: fragmented condominium ownership alongside skilled-labour shortages, tenant disruption, financing obstacles and political resistance. The social dimension is equally thin. Energy poverty and the affordability of cooling are absent, while the finance chapter speaks to investors rather than households. The three study regions also exclude tropical Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, where much of the building stock of 2050 has yet to be constructed, as well as regions facing qualitatively different threats such as permafrost failure or existential coastal exposure, systematically ignored.
Finally, maladaptation, the greatest practical danger in any product-led adaptation agenda, is addressed at the wrong scale. The report deserves credit for specific warnings about moisture trapped behind airtight insulation, triple glazing underperforming in hot climates and reflective surfaces creating glare or winter heating penalties. But these remain scattered cautions about product misuse, not a systemic framework.Air-conditioning growth is treated as a demand forecast rather than a feedback loop in which cooling increases emissions and urban heat, driving still more cooling. Flood protection shifting risk downstream or onto unprotected neighbours is ignored. So are the carbon and vulnerability lock-ins created by long-lived envelope decisions: an ETICS façade installed in 2026 can fix a wall’s embodied carbon and restrict adaptation options for decades. That silence is not incidental; it reveals the report’s governing logic. It is rigorous where quantification legitimises products, evasive where uncertainty, carbon lock-in or social failure might weaken the sales case. Climate-resilient housing should be judged by whole-life carbon, field performance, end-of-life recovery, affordability and social reach, against the best available alternatives, not against the conveniently undemanding benchmark of doing nothing. By those standards, the portfolio presented here does not reimagine adaptation in any substantively meaningful sense. It dresses the incumbent product model in climate language, turns incremental upgrades into strategic ambition and mistakes a corporate catalogue for a roadmap to resilience.
