FROM THE EDITOR

Much of the coverage and research regarding resilience in facilities has been about how to design and construct new buildings to withstand climate change-resultant disasters. While certainly design of resilient new buildings is a worthy and necessary pursuit, what about our enormous stock of existing buildings?

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How can existing buildings be made more resilient — that is, how can facilities be upgraded to withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, drought, a downed energy grid, etc.?  And how does resilience intersect the concept of high-performance?

The answer to the latter, at its base, is quite simple: A building can’t be high-performance if it ceases to exist. That means, truly, working on making buildings resilient is a non-negotiable imperative for facility managers. Whether resilience falls under the umbrella of adaptation, emergency preparedness, risk management, or all of the above, resilience is just as much a part of facility managers' jobs as answering hot and cold calls.

The answer to how existing buildings can be made resilient is a bit more nuanced. Strategies will depend on a number of factors — including location of a building, relative probability of various natural disasters, contracts with disaster recovery vendors, and, of course, budget. Resilience can include everything from installing a heavier roofing material to ensuring mass notification systems are working properly to testing emergency generators at a regular frequency.

Indeed, for existing buildings, considering resilience yields a to-do checklist that almost literally never ends. You can’t just do a bunch of stuff, decide you’re resilient, and call it a day. Like most things in facility management, resilience is a constantly moving target. But the important thing is that this idea, like high-performance itself, is always top-of-mind for facility managers.

As always, I’m interested to hear from you. What are some of your highest priority strategies for making your existing buildings resilient? Which strategies have you found have resonated most with upper management? 

 

Cheers,

Greg Zimmerman, editor  

 

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