Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies to Combat Climate Change in the Built Environment

The built environment with its high energy consumption and carbon emissions during the building life cycle has played a significant role in environmental degradation and global warming. Today the built environment accounts for more than half of global energy use and more than one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in the developed and developing world. New concepts of multidisciplinary design must be generated to develop a climate-responsive and energy-efficient built environment which adapts to the changing environmental conditions and mitigates the causes of the rapid change. By doing so, the building sector can drastically reduce its GHG emissions. Moreover, buildings can also adapt to the constant changes in the environment using emerging technologies such as the use of dynamic climate adaptive building envelopes. This paper presents an overview of climate change theory and its relationship to the built environment and novel methods of mitigation and adaptation.