Decision support for sustainable building modifications to mitigate climate risk

Purpose – This study aims to develop a decision-making approach that supports sustainable building upgrades or modifications where choices include a set of climate change risk mitigation options. The approach places all costs and benefits, both direct and intangible, onto a common monetary scale that includes ripple effects of potential climate-induced disruptions. Design/methodology/approach – Current approaches do not include rigorous methodologies that can be implemented by practitioners, and they do not monetize disruption ripple effects. Practitioner approaches often misrepresent actual conditions because they tend to rely on ordinal transformations that have been shown to be inaccurate and abstract to decision makers. The methodology employs pairwise comparisons and willingness to pay to quantify the direct and ripple impacts of a specified climate event, with uncertainty expressed using color-coded visualizations. Findings – A prototype decision support system was created using R-Shiny. It was applied to a building under consideration for upgrades that may be affected by future climate change impacts. Operating the decision support tool requires a stakeholder team to compare pairs of risk response options based on their financial consequences that account for their costs and effectiveness, including the ripple effects of climate-induced disruptions. Research limitations/implications – A prototype decision support system was created using R-Shiny, and applied to a building under consideration for climate-related upgrades. A stakeholder team used the decision support tool to compare pairs of risk response options based on their effectiveness and monetary consequences, including the ripple effects of climate-induced disruptions. Results showed the method to be robust in the presence of moderate judgment inconsistencies. Originality/value – The proposed methodology addresses research gaps by presenting an intuitive approach for stakeholder teams to rank risk response options while explicitly accounting for ripple effects by translating them into monetary terms. It can be used by public sector managers to prioritize building upgrade projects and by policy makers to create building regulations for facilities embedded in interconnected systems.