Webinar: "Resilience: The Forgotten Half of Building Sustainably" (Part One)

Join Aris Papadopoulos and Ipek Bensu Manav as they discuss their efforts to assess resilience, a critical component of sustainability. They will cover the Building Resilience Index and Hub efforts to assess the impacts of hazards for homes and communities.
Part One of this video contains Aris' presentation on the BRI; Part Two contains Bensu's presentation on CSHub hazard assessment efforts as well as the Q&A for both speakers.
Abstract:
Achieving sustainability in the built environment requires simultaneously reducing environmental impacts and increasing resilience. Without greater resilience, ‘Race to Zero’ or ‘Net Zero’ initiatives will create a built environment subject to the whims of increasingly frequent disasters. To build sustainably, we need to build to a level greater than the damages hazards can inflict, not below. ‘Building above hazards’ is a lesson we take from commercial aviation, whose safety greatly improved after the 1940s. During this webinar, we will discuss the “three major excuses” and how to address them. However, if we cannot easily measure resilience in buildings, we cannot value and reward it.
The presentation will explain a robust, but easy-to-use, rating system recently launched by the World Bank’s IFC, its features, and future implications. We will connect this to critical work happening at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub on quantifying the full life cycle of economic, environmental, and social risks associated with homes in hazard-prone areas.
This work includes creating scalable methods to evaluate expected losses for individual homes in a region, mapping potential repair costs to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and further simulating demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of residents exposed to these costs and emissions. Findings highlight that hazard repairs not only lead to a significant portion of life cycle costs and emissions, but risks fall disproportionately on lower-income and minority households.