AIRAH will present its formative Resilient Building Services Strategy, a newly developed guide to making building services (especially heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration systems) more resilient to climate change and extreme events.  AIRAH has developed best practices for:

• Designing more resilient buildings and systems
• Engineering more resilient HVAC&R equipment
• Constructing buildings for enhanced resilience
• Operating and maintaining buildings for greater resilience

Recent events such as the Brisbane floods, Melbourne and Adelaide heat waves, NSW and Victoria bush fires, and such global events as Superstorm Sandy in NYC and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, have provided a wealth of lessons learnt the hard way about built environment vulnerability to extreme events and, by extension, vulnerability to climate change and its consequences.

While much work has been already done globally on resilience and climate change adaptation, there remains a significant knowledge gap and lack of specialist technical expertise available to the building services industry.   AIRAH has addressed this need by grappling with such issues as:

• Creating standard data sets and design conditions for future climate scenarios
• Refocusing engineers on architecture and landscape as critical climate control systems
• Changing property industry norms from locating critical equipment in basements and on rooftops
• Advancing building renewable energy resources as part of smarter utility grids

The presenters will interactively seek feedback from the audience throughout the presentation, and through discussion time afterward.