Overview
ISO 4931-1:2024 - Buildings and civil engineering works - Principles, framework and guidance for resilience design - Part 1: Adaptation to climate change - provides a standardized design approach for resilience design adaptive to climate change (RDACC). The standard sets out principles, a framework and practical guidance for adapting buildings and civil engineering works to changing climatic conditions over their service life. RDACC is applicable to both new construction and retrofit projects but explicitly excludes adaptation in material production/procurement, construction processes, climate-change mitigation measures, and emergency management.
Key topics and technical requirements
- Principles: change‑oriented perspective; preparing for uncertainty with certainty; synergy with mitigation and community/urban resilience; equity and sustainability considerations.
- Framework: a structured RDACC process to assess future climate impacts and design appropriate responses across an asset’s service life.
- Climatic Impact‑Drivers (CIDs): identification of physical climate conditions (means, events, extremes) that affect assets.
- Projected Climatic Design Parameters (PCDPs): use of climate projections to derive meteorological design parameters for buildings and infrastructure.
- Resilience limits and decision making:
- assessing the gap between existing and required resilience,
- developing adaptation strategies,
- identifying resilience limits (the CID magnitude beyond which no feasible strategy exists),
- making informed strategy decisions.
- Monitoring and optimization: ongoing performance monitoring to refine adaptation measures over time.
- Decommissioning: guidance on end-of-life planning for climate-impacted assets.
- Informative annexes: global guidelines, example PCDPs, case studies (e.g., Thames Estuary plan, Spaulding Hospital, Qinghai–Tibet Railway) and typical adaptation strategies.
Practical applications
ISO 4931-1:2024 is intended to be used as an engineering-level method to:
- inform climate‑resilient building and civil works design,
- guide retrofit decisions to extend service life under future climates,
- derive design parameters from climate projections for heat, flood, sea-level rise, permafrost thaw, etc.,
- integrate building-level adaptation with community and urban resilience planning,
- establish monitoring programs and decommissioning criteria tied to climate exposure.
Who should use this standard
- Asset owners and managers
- Design professionals (engineers, architects)
- Urban planners and authorities
- Investors and developers
- Standards developers and meteorologists
- Manufacturers, builders and contractors
Related standards and references
ISO 4931-1 references terminology and concepts consistent with standards such as ISO 14090:2019, ISO 15686-5:2017, and ISO 31073:2022, and aligns with IPCC guidance on climate projections. Use ISO 4931-1 to align resilience design and procurement decisions with recognized international best practice for adaptation to climate change.
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