Webinar: Resilient Buildings
This event is taking place virtually, over Zoom. Click here to read the Zoom user guidance notes.
The recording of the webinar is available to watch on actuview, here.
Summary of the 'Resilient Buildings' project by Dr. Julie Clarke and Dr Paul Nolan, which they will be presenting: "Extreme weather events, which are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, may cause significant damage to housing, commercial property and critical infrastructure, resulting in substantial costs, as well as health and well-being impacts. Some of the main risks to buildings in Ireland and their occupants include flood damage, heat stress, structural damage due to wind and driving rain, as well as coastal erosion. However, these risks are currently not well understood in terms of the spatial variation (i.e. where they are), as well as the temporal variation (i.e. how they change over time). The proposed research will support Ireland's goal of becoming climate resilient by 2050 by quantifying the risk to buildings in Ireland as a result of climate change impacts. The project will consider various climate hazards and consider these in conjunction with building vulnerability attributes to quantify the risk. The project will develop a risk index for buildings in Ireland due to climate change impacts. This will inform stakeholders of the spatial and temporal risk for building locations due to climate-related hazards, enabling targeted and specific adaptation measures to be determined for the built environment. This index will support building owners, local authorities, insurers, banks, as well as other key stakeholders in terms of climate change adaptation, helping to deliver Ireland"s goal of becoming climate resilient by 2050."
Dr. Julie Clarke: Dr. Clarke is an Assistant Professor in Engineering in Climate Action in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Clarke's main research focus is climate change adaptation for the built environment, including infrastructure networks. She has extensive experience in risk modelling for transport infrastructure networks specifically. She is a member of Ireland's Climate Change Advisory Council Adaptation Committee. Dr. Clarke is a Chartered Engineer with Engineers Ireland.
Dr Paul Nolan: Paul has worked as a climate scientist at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) and Met Éireann since 2013. His main area of research (currently funded by EPA, Met Éireann, Marine Institute and Research Ireland) involves modelling climate change on both a global and regional scale. Paul worked with the EC-Earth Earth System Model European consortium for a decade on developing the EC-Earth climate model. Paul managed the running, data hosting and analysis of a large ensemble of global simulations on the ICHEC and European supercomputing systems. These simulations comprise Ireland’s contribution to CMIP6, and their results informed the IPCC AR6 WG1 & WG2 reports. A second main component of Paul’s climate modelling research involves simulating the future climate of Ireland on a national scale at high spatial resolution. This work involves dynamically downscaling CMIP6 global data to provide high resolution (~4km) regional climate projections for Ireland using regional climate models. The downscaled climate datasets have informed numerous governmental climate change policy reports and underpin the Met Éireann TRANSLATE national climate projections project. Paul has lectured on Climate Dynamics and Mathematics at UCD and TCD for over 14 years. He was awarded a PhD in meteorology from UCD in 2009.