This guidance note has been prepared because the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recognizes the key role buildings can play in enhancing climate change adaptation, improving resilience and addressing and mitigating risk. Furthermore, there is a recognized need for additional resources addressing good practice for buildings in communities and towns that face risk from disasters but may suffer from a deficit of professionally trained architects, engineers, contractors, manufacturers and other practitioners.
Therefore, this note is written for a broad audience, including those with little experience in the building and construction industries.
The term “built environment” encompasses all areas of development, including infrastructure (roads, utilities and major transportation hubs) as well as buildings, parks and other urban features. While this note will provide an overview of important infrastructure and community-scale considerations, it is principally focused on building structures and their immediate surroundings.
The guidance note sets out to provide an overview of the fundamental types of interventions at the building scale. It specifically offers concepts and approaches for the building envelope, roof, structure, orientation and materials. The approaches and technologies presented in this document are tailored toward a developing country context and a built environment that is largely self-constructed. However, the majority of the techniques identified in this guidance note can be upscaled and applied to buildings of any type,
including apartment complexes, hospitals and schools.
Furthermore, given the broad geographic scope, this note will identify and explore scalable interventions that are applicable to key climatic types, with special focus on technical approaches in those regions that are expected to see the highest rates of population growth and urbanization in the coming years. For example, this includes design approaches to minimize heat gain, which could
be applied to single family homes in hot and arid and hot and humid regions but also upscaled for larger commercial or governmental buildings. Many of these countries can also have regions that experience cold or temperate weather; therefore, the report also includes some design ideas for cold and temperate climates.