Yesterday, the New London Architecture (NLA) launched its research paper Resilient London: confronting climate change. The paper reviews the status of climate resilience strategies and actions plans across the capital, the ability and skills of the built environment industry on building and designing for a changing climate, and the barriers that we are facing to implement effective resilience approaches in the capital.

Within it, as programme champions, we have three major projects featured for their sustainability innovation and credentials – Mayfield in Manchester, Better Queensway, and Climate Innovation District in Leeds.

Civic Engineers’ expertise is credited throughout the document. As resident NLA Expert Panel on Net Zero 2020, Gareth Atkinson contributed towards the preliminary discussions on the critical design and policy points for achieving Net Zero in a series of roundtables hosted by the NLA.

Furthermore, NLA listed SuDS as an emerging solution to prioritise, quoting the 2016 TfL-issued ambitious SuDS guidance prepared by Civic Engineers and J&L Gibbons. Our founding director Stephen O’Malley who authored the guidance noted, ‘We’ve come a long way in five years, but there needs to be more courage and ambition, in the application and deployment of these techniques.’ The London Plan now includes specific targets for SuDS, yet funding and enforcement rests with boroughs.

Stephen was further quoted regarding a recent GLA report done with Thames Water and the Environmental Agency. The report describes SuDS as ‘a highly scalable and adaptable strategy, applicable to the diverse and dense urban environments in London … that should be considered an engineering cornerstone to address the resilience challenge’, O’Malley continued, ‘the incorporation of SuDS is absolutely critical but they require space. We’ve got to thin out the amount of vehicles, private vehicles especially, to free up space for SuDS. There needs to be more courage and more ambition in the application and deployment of these techniques.’

To download or take a look at the report, visit https://nla.london/insights/resilient-london-confronting-climate-change