The Need for a climate database for facilities managers to mitigate the climate change implications on buildings

Abstract

This study focuses on climate change impacts on built-environment categories, including buildings, built infrastructure, and land use. A facility manager is a key person who oversees the built-environment and faces challenges in recognising climate impacts and preparing mitigation strategies to ensure the organisation’s operations continue. Climate change directly and significantly affects facilities management. Thus, in climate change mitigation data-driven decision-making in facility management is important. Climate data, such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed, solar gain, and CO2 level are already used in the decision-making in facilities management. However, there is less availability and complex accessibility of the existing climate data sources for non-climate expert users such as facility managers. In order to address this gap this paper aims to assess the need for a climate database for facilities managers to mitigate climate change implications on buildings. This study adopts a qualitative expert survey approach to data collection. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with industrial experts and their knowledge and experience on climate change were analysed. Facility managers and built-environment experts expressed that there are many available climate data sources that facility managers are not aware of. However, it is difficult to use available climate data for decision-making due to limited knowledge of climate science and the payments and permissions involved. Further, experts highlighted the need for a climate database with freely available recent years’ climate data, visualisation tools for using climate data to make informed decisions and a user-friendly interface for non-expert users.