ULI Developing Resilience Toolkit

Report Summary: This Toolkit builds on ULI’s Developing Urban Resilience website, a library of development projects showcasing best practices in resilient design. Head there to learn more about all projects featured in this Toolkit and more.

Introduction

As the real estate industry grapples with increasing physical climate risk, understanding risk reduction strategies and their implications for portfolio and property management is critical to protecting occupants, assets, and balance sheets.

The ULI Developing Resilience Toolkit: Protecting Buildings and Sites, created by the ULI Urban Resilience program in partnership with Mill Creek Residential, aims to support real estate owners, developers, and investors with an initial, interactive search and reference tool for learning about risk reduction options, thereby enabling development, design, and sustainability teams or other stakeholders to quickly understand design and operational strategies that mitigate risks caused by natural hazards, their potential effects on costs and maintenance, and the co-benefits these strategies can bring.

The Business Case for Physically Resilient Assets

Real estate is exposed to significant and increasing risk from physical climate hazards. In the United States alone, damages from climate hazards from 1980 to 2022 totaled more than $2.5 trillion and caused 15,000 deaths, and hazard events are rising rapidly in frequency and intensity. This dollar figure is likely a significant undercount, as disasters causing under $1 billion in damages are not accounted for, nor are the more gradual impacts of climate change (e.g., increasing temperatures and precipitation) that increase operations and maintenance costs.

Without sufficient action to prepare its buildings and sites for floods, fires, droughts, and other hazards, the real estate industry faces current and future risks from

• Increased property damages, operations costs, and business disruption; and
• Decreased property value, insurability, liquidity, marketability, market stability, access to development capital, and rental/sales income.

Conversely, using design and operations strategies that increase an asset’s ability to withstand physical hazards with limited disruption to operations—in short, that boost an asset’s resilience—is an opportunity to reverse the previous loss equation, reducing harms and creating worth across the real estate value chain, extending to communities and markets. In addition, resilience features create value beyond risk reduction through co-benefits such as increasing energy efficiency, creating amenities, improving health and wellbeing, and more.

Real estate leaders are increasingly acting to capture this resilience dividend. For example, an informal survey by the ULI Urban Resilience program of developers, owners, and investors across all real estate asset types and global regions found that over 80 percent of respondents are either already using design and operations strategies to mitigate risk or will do so in the next one to three years.

Among respondents that had already begun implementation (43 percent), the following were the most common reasons for adopting risk reduction strategies:

• Anticipation that assets would experience hazard events;
• Investor demand for resilient assets;
• Anticipation that resilient assets would create financial gains;
• and Experience with hazard events that caused damage or disruption to assets.

Among those who planned to start implementation in the next one to three years, investor demand rose to the top as the most common driver for action to reduce risk. Many aspects of the business case for resilient development are documented through project profiles on ULI’s Developing Urban Resilience website and Risk Reduction Matrix (Part Two of this toolkit) and are covered briefly below.

Enhanced value, marketability, and access to capital. Resilient buildings stand out, creating a competitive advantage that can be seen through faster leasing and sale, ability to attract tenants and customers, higher resale values, and better financing. Indeed, enhanced access to capital is a critical value-add, as investors increasingly expect owners to disclose and address climate risk, for example, through reporting systems like GRESB or the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

Reduced insurance premiums. As losses from climate events mount, insurance providers are offering discounts to customers that take proactive action to harden their properties. For example, the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has long discounted premiums to owners for various flood mitigation measures. In 2022, FM Global began offering a 5 percent “resilience credit” to owners who apply risk reduction strategies to their assets, and California became the first state to require insurers to reduce premiums for wildfire-hardened properties.

Avoided losses from damage and disruption. Climate impacts cause property damages, raise maintenance expenses, and disrupt continuity for commercial and residential buildings. However, proactive risk reduction investments can often cost far less than the damages that would have been incurred to an unprepared building. Although cost/benefit analyses vary significantly by hazard type and likelihood, risk reduction measure, and building type, FM Global found that “for every $1 a company spends to protect structures from hurricane, wind, and flood damage, estimated loss exposures decrease by an average $105 due to reduction in risk of property loss and business disruption.” Analyses completed by the National Institute of Building Sciences also find benefits of certain risk reduction strategies consistently outweigh costs, by ratios of up to 13:1.

Lower costs of compliance with regulation. Resilience-related requirements are accelerating, whether from increased support in the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission for adopting the recommendations of the TCFD or through local legislation. For example, some localities such as Boston have implemented resilience requirements for buildings in high-risk areas, while cities like Oakland are passing new seismic retrofit ordinances in earthquake-prone regions in the western United States. Because a risk reduction and resilience strategy program should begin with risk and vulnerability assessments (see Part One: Risk Assessment and Resilient Design Process of this toolkit), owners and companies that take this step early to understand their risk profile will be able to integrate needed upgrades into their planned capital expenditures and be better positioned for compliance.

Returns for multiple stakeholders. A broad view of return on investment, like that recommended in the National Institute of Building Science’s Roadmap to Resilience Incentivization, also includes the returns that accrue to tenants, who want safe and reliable places to live and work that create less stress and disruption and who may pay a premium for them; lenders, investors, and insurers, who want to ensure that their capital is protected; and governments and the wider public, who bear increased costs of climate impacts.

How to Use This Toolkit

This toolkit is divided into two parts:

Part One: Risk Assessment and Resilient Design Process(downloadable PDF) provides guidance on understanding the exposure of a portfolio to physical climate hazards and outlines principles on incorporating resilience thinking into asset design and operations.

Part Two: Risk Reduction Matrix (downloadable spreadsheet) provides a filterable screening tool of over 140 risk reduction strategies, including information regarding the following:

• Nine hazards and associated strategies:
  • Extreme heat;
  • Drought;
  • Flooding – coastal (including storm surge,wave action, sea-level rise, high tide);
  • Flooding – heavy rain;
  • Flooding – riverine;
  • Seismic activity/earthquakes;
  • Wildfire (includes smoke impacts);
  • Windstorms (includes hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, other storms);
  • and Winter storms (includes extreme cold, heavy snow, ice, freezing rain);
• Strategy type (design or operations and maintenance);
• Applicable project types (new construction, existing buildings, and/or sites/landscapes);
• Asset type–specific considerations (e.g., considerations for multifamily vs. office buildings);
• Operations and maintenance considerations;
• Co-benefits (added amenity space, potentially reduced insurance premiums, energy/carbon emissions reductions, health and wellness, biodiversity, etc.);
• Applicable examples;
• and Further references and technical guidance.

Part Two is intended for use by real estate development, design, and sustainability teams, property and asset management teams, investment committees, or other stakeholders seeking information on what strategies are available to reduce risk from specific or multiple hazards and their implications.

The filters can help surface example strategies fitting various criteria highlighted in the preceding list, after which companies may conduct further investigation into feasibility and implementation for their specific portfolios or assets.

This tool is intended to provide an overview of the strategies real estate may use to reduce risk. It is not intended to provide an exhaustive list of risk reduction strategies, recommend any specific strategy, or replace the expertise of architects, engineers, construction (AEC) or other professionals who specialize in hazard risk reduction. The aim is to assist investigation and assessment of risk reduction strategies for various hazards and foster enhanced collaboration between real estate owners, developers, and investors and design teams when implementing risk reduction strategies.