Climate change is killing buildings in slow motion

The Science Centre’s meltdown offered a particularly graphic illustration of the usually invisible toll that climate change can exact on buildings. It’s not just the brute impact of wind, flood and hail; there’s also the insidious, slow-motion damage triggered by weather that no longer matches the conditions for which the built environment was built.  

Longer, more severe heat waves degrade roofs and strain air conditioning and HVAC systems. Wild temperature swings bring thermal cycling that expands and contracts concrete and masonry walls, hastening cracks and water intrusion. Asphalt shingles, the most common covering on residential homes in the US, warp under unrelenting sun, while pavement buckles, steel rails kink, and siding suffers “solar distortion.” Foundations can shift in drought or high temperatures, leading to cracked walls, burst pipes and serious structural problems. 

“All of the cracks and issues that are now getting exacerbated by climate are coming to the surface,” said Lee Hoffman, cofounder and president of Runwise, a smart heating controls company in New York City. “It’s like we’re throwing Band-Aids on, instead of actually trying to bring some transparency and sunshine on what’s actually happening, and then fix the core issues.”

Buildings constructed and maintained for one climate scenario are rapidly finding themselves experiencing another one, with the expense of adaptation borne by property owners, renters and taxpayers. While annual climate damages from wildfires, hurricanes and other destructive incidents will soon reach hundreds of billions of dollars a year, according to the National Climate Assessment, it’s near impossible to estimate how much more is lost to this kind of incremental harm resulting from a changing climate. But it’s adding up, and it’s making it even harder for cities to make any progress on their housing affordability goals.

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Trepp, a real estate analysis firm, found repair and maintenance costs up 30% last year in many major US markets, including Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Houston. One study by Atlas Real Estate found the average cost of repairs in rental property — driven by material costs, inflation, and labor costs — rose from $290 (S$381) per incident in 2018 to $501 in 2024. And, unlike floods or storm damage, these problems often aren’t covered by insurance.

“Heat is the killer of everything,” said Dan Hollenkamp, CEO of Toggled, which sells building control systems. “Heat causes everything to be less efficient.” 

The Big Melt

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Christian Whitaker, global head of sustainable operations for international brokerage JLL, describes chronic exposure to extreme weather as setting off a long line of falling dominos. Systems meant to heat and cool buildings, operating on decades-old assumptions on temperature, work harder, consume more energy, and break down faster. As motors and condensers heat up and fail, strain on the grid can lead to power outages. 

“I’m paying more for the equipment, replacing it more often, paying more for water and energy, and I’m seeing decreased resiliency,” he said. “Every time you have an outage event, it costs buildings money. And letting a building go into an unconditioned state in a heat wave means even more damage.”

Heat and humidity not only demand more operational and capital expenses, but also eat into building usage revenues when events are cancelled due to extreme weather, said Lindsay Brugger, vice president of urban resilience for the Urban Land Institute. Water intrusion, in the forms of leaks, mold and discoloration, can add more and varied repairs. 

“The clearest stress that you see on these buildings is that the mechanical systems were not built to stand the heat or cold that we’re getting,” said Jose Ramirez, an energy efficiency expert at real estate brokerage and services firm Savills. “Think about roofs, which tend to get hotter than the surrounding air temperatures. Twenty or 30 years ago, they were built to withstand temperatures of 110 to 120 degrees. Now they’re hitting 140 to 150 degrees. Imagine what that does for the lifetime of the roofs.”

Road surfaces and parking lots are also experiencing more weather-driven wear and damage, as the binder used in asphalt is typically custom-mixed for each climate zone. City transportation authorities around the world are noting an increase in potholes and road degradation. Data from SITE Technologies, a firm that uses AI to assess property damage, found that a typical surface parking lot that isn’t well maintained can expect $1 per square foot in maintenance costs over a decade. In areas where severe weather is becoming the new normal — they’re tracking significant shifts in North Carolina, Washington, DC, parts of New Jersey and Tennessee — that price jumps to $5. Similar impacts have been measured in China.

“We’re seeing that line travel north, in terms of the severity of the weather,” said SITE account director Evan Emil. “Clients typically aren’t aware of how climate is reducing the lifetime of these particular outside assets.”

Adding It All Up

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One of the largest challenges is simply estimating rising costs and trying to plan for maintenance spending. “It’s very difficult to get a true all-hazards assessment on a portfolio of properties without putting down some serious coin,” said Janice Barnes, managing partner for the environmental services company Climate Adaptation Partners, which has offices in New York City and Asheville, North Carolina. “You need a full system review, including the human system side of this, to understand the extent to which the material composition and your operations are or are not ready for climate projections. That kind of capacity doesn’t exist within a lot of organizations.”

In landscape architecture, climate shifts are already forcing practitioners to change their ways, substituting plants and trees that can live in new conditions and designing flood- and drought-resistant projects. Architects need to follow suit, said Ariane Laxo, sustainability director for architecture firm HGA, as even recently completed buildings often fail to anticipate current and future conditions. 

Mechanical engineers, for instance, use design condition tables devised by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers that only factor in historical data. And to model a building’s energy needs, they rely on typical meteorological year — or TMY — figures from the US Department of Energy, which can utilize 20-year-old data. 

In Minnesota, where Laxo is based, she’s seen wild 60-degree temperature swings in recent winters — temperatures jumping from below-freezing to mid-30s in 12 hours. Such swings mean that certain wood products shouldn’t be used for exteriors because expansion and contraction will lead to cracks. She and her colleagues are working on their own TMY updates, since they’re not sure when the official ones will be modernized.

A Global Search for Solutions

North American infrastructure faces a plethora of climate risks, but even bigger challenges await across Asia, according to the Cross Dependency Initiative’s global risk analysis. The report, which ranks the physical climate risk to the built environment, finds that China’s “extensive industrial, trade, residential and commercial development” — much of it constructed in recent decades — is under the most significant strain from climate-related damage. Jiangsu and Shandong provinces are the provinces with the highest risk globally, and the nation overall faces catastrophic damage from flooding and sea level rise. 

But every corner of the world is under threat. Take Greece, which has been baked in record-breaking heat waves in recent years. The average age of the building stock is 40 years old, according to the National Bank of Greece, with more than half of residential structures erected before the 1980s. These buildings, mostly made of concrete, are seeing more wear and tear from temperature fluctuations, especially coastal hotels and rental properties that represent a huge part of the country’s tourism industry. “There’s a consensus that the need for frequent repairs and updates to maintain structural integrity increases financial strain on building owners,” said Tassos Kotzanastassis, chairman of real estate firm 8G Capital and National Council Chair of the Urban Land Council for Greece and Cyprus.

Kotzanastassis pointed out that many building materials in Greece come from northern European countries with substantially milder conditions, with roof systems often failing due to UV radiation. Almost 75% of the building stock is currently energy inefficient, he said, and more than 85% of buildings are likely to still be in use in 2050. Retrofitting older buildings with air conditioning is underway, but that process often damages their walls and strains local power grids. 

Preparing yesterday’s buildings for today’s climate crisis will demand significant spending on retrofits and technology to monitor and detect issues and leaks, as well as updated building codes and building designs. To help pay for such fixes, the European Union has implemented numerous efforts, including the European Green Deal pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and the Recovery and Resilience Facility to subsidize a green transition. In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act includes an array of grants and tax rebates for building retrofits, a big part of what the energy efficiency nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute estimates to be $50 billion in investments in buildings and clean energy technologies for homes and offices.

That’ll make a dent, but it’s far from comprehensive. And this isn’t a one-fix situation, added Barnes. Building and asset owners need to think about regular assessments as the climate continues shifting. Laxo and other architects have been lobbying the industry groups that devise codes to be more forward-thinking in their work. 

There’s also a workforce issue at play. JLL’s Whitaker said there’s not enough talent to go around; for both the technicians that can fix problems when they arise and the energy experts, engineers and advisors helping to prepare owners and operators. 

Amid the more visible devastation wrought by hurricanes and wildfires, this largely unseen damage can go unnoticed, but the two are closely connected. Natalie Maxwell, an attorney with the National Housing Law Project, points out that buildings undermined by the day-to-day toll of extreme weather are more vulnerable when outright disasters hit. “We’re not equipped, given the cost of these disasters, to be able to recover,” she said. 

There’s been a theory around the effects of climate change for years; as repeated storms and flooding batter cities in the most climate-vulnerable areas, the cost of rebuilding and carrying insurance will place certain assets beyond recovery. Whitaker says this dynamic will first be seen in older buildings that carry higher costs to operate and maintain. 

“The sustainability and maintenance side isn’t going to be the prime mover, that’ll be the market’s willingness to buy into an old space,” he said. “But it will be an exacerbating factor. It takes what’s already difficult and adds an incremental cost atop a declining rent base.”