AIA UK Sustainability Series: Upskilling for a Transforming Construction Sector with the RIBA Climate Guide

On 29th May 2024 we hosted Mina Hasman (Sustainability Director, SOM, and Founder, Climate Framework) to discuss her work on The RIBA Climate Guide which she created to help build knowledge and skills around the climate literacy mandatory competence requirements defined by the RIBA in 2021.

Mina Hasman elucidated how The RIBA Climate Guide provided both the necessary contextual background and skills required of building sector professionals to meaningfully and effectively respond to the climate emergency, replete with case studies to show the strategies and tools in action at a variety of scales.  The Guide begins by mapping out the essential background knowledge around climate science, international agreements, legislations, commitments, and roadmaps, with the aim to equip all built-environment professionals with the key information required to mitigate impacts of climate change in their day-to-day practice.  Contextualising the climate emergency and the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 within the built environment landscape, the Guide is structured around the six core themes of the ‘Climate Framework’: Human Factors, Circular Economy, Energy and Carbon, Water, Ecology and Biodiversity, Connectivity and Transport. Uniquely, the book highlights interlinkages that exist among all of these priority areas to enable stakeholders across the built environment value chain to make holistically informed decisions. Furthermore, to show the theory in practice she highlighted how The Guide presents a collection of short, building- and urban-scale case studies, to illustrate real-life applications of design strategies and industry-wide tools, as well as standards that are deployed in climate-conscious built environments all around the world.

The RIBA Climate Guide is available to purchase at all niche booksellers, or from the RIBA directly here.

The recording of the talk can be found on the AIA-UK website HERE.