Editorial

Abstract

Climate change is projected to have a significant impact upon buildings, infrastructure and utilities. Therefore, effective sustainable development must accommodate these impacts as well as attempting to reduce the causes of further climate change. The UK climate impacts programme (UKCIP) is ideally placed to assist in this process, UKCIP's aims being to improve knowledge and understanding of the impacts of climate change among stakeholders and to help stakeholders to be better equipped to undertake adaptation to climate change. UKCIP provides guidance and resources, including making available climate information (see below) that supports stakeholder efforts to assess vulnerabilities, impacts, risks and adaptation options.This issue of Engineering Sustainability is a special issue devoted to the outcomes of the UK biological and engineering impacts of climate change on slopes (Bionics) programme, one of the core projects of a government-funded initiative entitled Building knowledge for a changing climate (BKCC). The initiative was a collaboration between the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and UKCIP, and concerns research into the impacts of climate change on the built environment, transport and utilities. The suite of integrated research projects covered areas ranging from risk management to the impact of climate change on energy supplies, land use and historic buildings, their stated aims and objectives being listed below. Since this is an editorial, as opposed to a review article, it is considered most important to list what each consortium is, or rather was, about and allow readers to follow up on the specific outcomes. The UKCIP's role was to support the suite of projects including by making available scenarios that show how the climate might change and coordinating research on dealing with these future alternative climate predictions. Although the work under BKCC is now complete, the initiative was continued via Sustaining knowledge for a changing climate (SKCC) and now Adaptation and resilience to a changing climate (ARCC) within the context of the 'living with environment change' programme. SKCC was likewise funded by EPSRC and supported by UKCIP, and sought to preserve and extend the community of end users and researchers assembled through BKCC. In addition, SKCC has been instrumental in synthesising and disseminating the results from BKCC with the aim of maximising their impact on the end user and research community. This has been done via publication of the BKCC results, the holding of a workshop during which the results were presented and discussed, and offering visits to sites where adaptation solutions have been undertaken. Such activity complements well the formal publication of research results provided by this themed issue of Engineering Sustainability as these research programmes seek to make the impact necessary if we are to bring about a change in the way we operate. ARCC is the current focus of the EPSRC-UKCIP collaboration within the built environment, including r...