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This paper describes methodologies for assessing risk at conurbation and neighbourhood scales that have been developed in order to provide urban planners with a toolkit for the assessment of risk due to climatic hazards. The methodologies treat risk as a function of hazard, vulnerability and exposure, all three of which elements are influenced by climate change. These three elements are represented as geospatial data layers in a geographical information system (GIS), in order to provide a logical framework to assist planning and management for communities that are safer, more sustainable and more resilient in the face of climate change. The risk assessment methodologies have initially been developed and applied at two different scales: a conurbation scale, using a screening process to locate areas of high risk to assist with land use planning tasks, and a neighbourhood scale, focusing on the influence of the vulnerability of the building stock on this risk. However, using the two methodologies in tandem can refine the assessment further, so the potential development and application of a combined methodology is explored.

Contexts`M any commentators seem to assume that the language of the environment and the market are mutually opposed. However, green buildings can offer many potential commercial benefits .... Much depends upon how the`market' is constructed by the changing priorities of real estate actors. Critically here, market assessment is often a retrospective affair .... Real estate agents are central to this process of market reconstruction.'' Guy (2002, pages 256^257)`I n this way research into energy efficiency finds itself on what Callon has termed a new terrain: that of society in the making' (1987, page 83). This refocuses analysis away from pure energy questions to a wider set of debates about design conventions, investment analysis, development costs, space utilisation, and market value.'' Guy (2006, page 651) In this paper we explore the role and practices of property agents in the commercial property market and in particular the way agency articulates with the low-carbon buildings agenda. We use agency as a window on a larger process which we refer to as the social production of (un)sustainable buildings, a phrase that is intended to capture the fact that a large number of different actors together produce the built environment and the carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions associated with its use. There can be no doubt about the importance of building-related energy consumption in the context of climate change mitigation. According to recent research for the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report, the building sector represents the largest cost-effective potential among all the sectors reported by the IPCC (U ë rge-Vorsatz and Novikova, 2008). However as efforts made