Business resilience themes: Processes, Products and Services
Climate ready construction
On their work to construct a new, flagship building at Dunfermline Learning Campus for Fife College, Balfour Beatty and the design team, including Reiach and Hall Architects, Woolgar Hunter, and Atelier Ten, worked with the Adaptation Scotland programme to consider the current and potential future climate hazards facing the campus and its users, and how to deliver a campus that will be more resilient to the long-term impacts of climate change.
The College campus spans over 20,000m², and is an innovative venture from Fife College, it is part of a state of the art, sustainable shared learning campus for Dunfermline (Dunfermline College Campus, St Columba’s RC High School, and Woodmill High School).
Dunfermline Learning Campus is also the largest pathfinder project for the Scottish Government’s Net Zero Public Sector Buildings Standard in Scotland, which has established to drive net zero outcomes for new buildings and major refurbishments within the public sector. Fife College is the first project to explicitly include adaptation planning as part of the Standard in its design and delivery.
Resilience to climate change was identified as an important but equally new, and complex consideration for Fife College and Balfour Beatty, given the campus would need to withstand the increasing frequency and intensity of climate hazards such as heat, increased rainfall and windstorms over its long lifetime.
“It was great to have the support of the Adaptation Scotland programme to run these workshops for the first time. Although an important topic, this is something relatively new for us to consider however the tools available on the Adaptation Scotland website and really useful. We look forward to working with Sniffer to make sure these tools are more widely known and used within the construction industry and with our designers.”
Angela Pllu, Environmental Sustainability Manager, Balfour Beatty
Climate risk assessment and adaptation planning
To best consider climate adaptation, Fife College and Balfour Beatty worked with the Adaptation Scotland programme, using the A Changing Climate for Development tool kit to assess the climate resilience of the new campus, and explored the climate-driven hazards during the construction phase, using the Adaptation Scotland programme’s Climate Hazards in the Workplace tool kit.
The workshop explored the recent and projected changes to the climate in the Fife area, and how these climate-driven hazards would likely impact the structure and use of the new campus. The Adaptation Scotland programme team also supported participants to jointly identify potential adaptation actions, illustrated by case studies, and to prioritise those that could be implemented at this stage of construction.
From this work Balfour Beatty and its partners were able to identify actions to improve resilience including:
- Considering landscape design with climate resilient planting in mind – for instance, drought resistant plants, and more green space to provide cool areas during heat extremes.
- Consider prevailing wind directions and storm directions when designing rotating/automatic doors.
- Strategies for working during extreme weather, at the college, in design offices and on a construction site. When would people not be expected to travel into the facility and when could offices offer more comfortable alternatives to homes.
- Positioning of critical infrastructure such as IT servers away from areas potentially more at risk from extreme weather conditions such as flooding.
- Considering where internal drainage downpipes are located and leak detection to prevent damage to buildings/IT equipment etc. in extreme wet weather.
Image from the workshop
Assessing climate risks and potential adaptation options is best done at an early stage of project development. The Adaptation Scotland programme team supported Balfour Beatty and partners to identify opportunities in the project development process to undertake a similar assessment in future work to ensure climate risks and adaptation options are identified earlier.
With the advice and support of the Adaptation Scotland programme, Balfour Beatty, its partners and Fife College have been able to identify and implement practical measures that will be critical to ensuring a safe learning environment at the new Dunfermline Campus as the climate evolves.
Lessons from this projected have provided the basis for Balfour Beatty and Fife College to integrate considerations of key climate risks across future infrastructure and construction projects, including a planned College-wide climate risk assessment of the whole Fife College estate, and at least two further climate risk and adaptation workshops for existing projects being delivered by Balfour Beatty.
“Fife College is taking action on the climate emergency, and we have ambitions to do more and more. Our new Dunfermline campus is a low carbon beacon project and part of the Net Zero Public Sector Building Standard. We want to provide inspirational learning spaces for our future students, and we know we have to adapt and be resilient to the effects of climate change.”
Jim Metcalfe, Fife College Principal
