An asset management strategy to accommodate a changing climate

Climate change is a significant factor that will affect how people live and work in future. In light of this and of international initiatives on limitations of emissions, the changing climatic conditions will affect the existing building fabric, and inflict a different kind of user demand on corporate property portfolios. A comprehensive literature review has shown that there is an absence of tools and metrics for facilities managers to evaluate the impact of climate change on their organization and develop mitigation and adaptation strategies for their existing and new built corporate property portfolios. There is a little augmentation for accommodating the existing and future climate changes into management of corporate property portfolio. This paper will argue the need to construct a comprehensive strategy for management of corporate property portfolio of large organizations, which will take into consideration climate change mitigation and adaptation

Formulating an FM strategy for climate change mitigation and adaptation of commercial built assets

As per the UKCIP 09 climate change projections the United Kingdom is very likely to experience increased sea level rise, increased winter rainfall, heat waves and an increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events. Such inevitable impacts of climate change will require adaptation measures to be implemented for the management of existing commercial built assets if they are to continue to fulfil their primary function and support every organisation’s business operations. However, it is not clear as to how far adaptation solutions are effectively integrated into facilities or built-asset management planning? While seeking the answers to above questions, this thesis develops an approach for facilities and built-asset management, which will improve the resilience of existing commercial built assets to future physical climate-change impacts. The study undertakes a participatory study with a large commercial organisation and a questionnaire survey of UK facilities managers. The participatory study involved selective team of facilities management and operational (FM&O) professionals from a commercial organisation that managed around 3,400 built assets valued at £370 billion in 2003–05 in the United Kingdom. By working closely with the organisation, an approach to built-asset management was developed which integrated the existing UKCIP decision-making framework and UKCIP02 climate-change projections. In developing this approach, the strategic risk perception and managerial attitude to climate change were identified and included as important factors affecting the decision-making process. To test the wider applicability of the decision-making framework that was developed in the participatory study, a questionnaire survey of the wider facilities management community was undertaken. It was deduced from the survey results that the intent and process of decision making remains constant amongst FM professionals in commercial settings – for example: (a) The experience of a financial loss due to an existing climate-related extreme event is the initiation point for strategic stakeholders for considering future action regarding climate change; and (b) The operational adaptation measures are restricted to securing insurance deals and making renewed disaster-recovery and business-continuity plans. Additional outcomes from participatory and survey study covered logistic models describing the adaptation and mitigation approaches within a commercial setting. Taken as a whole, the findings from this study show that mitigation efforts which are supported by legislation and have well defined targets achieve a strategic importance within an organisation, while an absence of such targets and external drivers means that adaptation is viewed as an operational activity and, , as a short-term activity that has to compete for funds within annual budgets. To raise the profile of adaptation within commercial organisations requires a shift in the perception of climate change as risks amongst FM&O professionals and ability to better recognize climate change impacts on the business and built asset functions. This requires action to be initiated at both governmental and organisational level. However, such action needs to consider other constraints, such as the time span of the climate change projections. In particular, as FM&O professionals consider adaptation as an operational issue for which the planning period is normally short term (3–5 years), while the long-term projections associated with climate change are for 20–30 years as a minimum. In order to support decision making, this ‘temporal scale’ discrepancy needs to be addressed. The study has demonstrated that although decision-making frameworks and projections are useful tools to the adaptation of existing commercial built assets, they need to be synchronised with the short-term business planning and operational time line. The mitigation approach due to legislative and market-performance forces is quantified and gains a strategic importance, securing substantial financial support. In contrast to this, the adaptation agenda is taken into account only in the presence of an extreme event-related financial and functional loss. In this case, adaptation to climate change remains a reactive rather than a planned process and lacks legislative drivers. In the absence of legislative impetus and a standardised quantitative assessment method, it is difficult to derive short term or long-term targets according to which maintenance management interventions can be planned and strategic support can be achieved. In addition, the perception of built-asset managers about climate change risk is also found to be affecting the adaptation and mitigation agenda for built-asset maintenance and management

Barriers to build asset adaptation in private service sector

It is becoming increasingly acknowledged that adaptation and mitigation are equally important and often interrelated approaches to climate change. Recent adaptation initiatives in the UK include the promotion of many policies, reporting and economic support in the public sector. However, adaptation in the private sector still lacks such structured initiative and is initiated largely in response to external forces. This paper presents a review of UK-based adaptation initiatives and presents a study of the adaptation decisionmaking process for the built assets of a large private sector organisation. The study was undertaken as a part of a PhD research programme that evaluated the usefulness of the UKCIP Risk, Uncertainty and Decision-making Framework as well as the UKCIP 02 climate change projections for facilities management decision-making. The decision-making framework and projections were used by a group of facilities personnel responsible for built asset management to explore various climate risks and develop adaptation solutions. The paper reports on issues associated with implementing the first three stages of the decision-making framework, in particular the problems faced by facilities management professionals in operationalising the risks and evaluating solutions. The following findings were drawn. A) Adaptation in the private sector is initiated against an external change or signal, for example market forces or experience of a climate-related extreme event. B) For many built asset professionals the transformation of scientific climate change data into impacts on their built asset is a demanding task in terms of required knowledge and time. This process is further complicated by the long time horizon (30 years) associated with climate projections compared to the short time horizon (5-10 years) for strategic business decisions, and the uncertainty attached to climate change projections. C) As a result of (B), much of the analysis for decisionmaking remains qualitative and semi-quantitative and lacks gravitas when hard financial decisions have to be made. D) The perception and attitude of managerial and strategic decision-making personnel towards climate change shapes the decision-making process and adaptation option selection. E) Adaptive capacity, in terms of the time, finance and expertise available to organisations is important to achieving successful adaptation goals. Although, the new UKCP09 projections have been made available since the completion of the study, many of the findings are generic in nature and directly applicable to these new tools. In conclusion, by conceptualising the observed adaptation process with that of organisation learning, it is suggested that literature on organisation learning is likely to provide an effective basis for understanding and promoting the adaptation in the private sector

Achieving Low Carbon Social Housing Through Innovation

Achieving a low carbon future continues to be one of the most challenging issues facing today’s built environment professionals. While significant advances have been made in the area of new build, the same cannot be said for the existing housing stock. In the UK 70% of the housing that will exist in 2050 has already been built. If the UK is to have any chance of meeting its 2050 carbon reduction targets, effective refurbishment strategies that significantly reduce the carbon footprint of existing housing need to be developed. However, whilst it is generally acknowledged that retrofit to existing buildings is more complicated than new build, the issues that need to be addressed are not primarily technical, but organisational and managerial. The combination of attitudes towards risk and awareness of innovative solutions result in organisational barriers to the wide uptake of low/zero carbon technologies. This paper presents the findings of a research study into the level of perceived organisational sustainability and factors that influence refurbishment decision making amongst 57 UK social housing providers. It identifies a range of maturity indicators from Initiation, through Contagion and Control, to Maturity that can be used to distinguish between approaches to sustainable refurbishment. A research questionnaire was used to establish the level of maturity (in the sustainability innovation context) and decision making characteristics of the responding organisation along with their experiences of sustainable refurbishment of their housing stock. The paper identifies a range of organisational characteristics and maps these against the organisation’s position along a “general” innovation journey through an S curve maturity model. The paper identifies a shift from national level drivers and barriers to local level interpretation of the wider sustainability agenda as the key differences between Initiator and Mature organisations. The paper concludes that it is possible to profile UK social housing providers and develop management instruments to accelerate their journey along the sustainable innovation curve. This in turn will accelerate the uptake of sustainable refurbishment programmes

Examination of existing facilities management approaches to climate change and future directions

It is widely accepted that human activities have contributed to changing the world’s climate and that the pace of this change is ever increasing. Two approaches are being promoted by the international community to address the issue of climate change (1) Mitigation, seeking to reduce the amount of CO2; (2) Adaptation, which seeks to alter the way humankind live and work in response to the changing climate. Whilst facilities managers and their organisations have prioritised mitigation action, there is less evidence to suggest that they are addressing the implications that a changing climate may have on the demands being placed on their organisation’s hard and soft facilities (adaptation). This paper reports findings from a case study and questionnaire survey to ascertain the present approach taken by facilities managers to address mitigation and adaptation, their respective drivers, their view on climate change and their environmental inclination. It concludes that the facilities manager's approach to climate change is derived by a combination of factors; namely a) Organisation approach to climate change b) Legislation and c) the facilities mangers perception of the risks posed by future climate change and of the use of risk assessment methods and climate change projection data. The study concludes that the prevailing measure for addressing climate change impacts is reactive in nature, taking the form of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning. The practical implication of the work is in the realization that mitigation, being quantifiable and legislative driven, is viewed as a strategic issue and of importance to an organisations Corporate Social Responsibility agenda which can be planned over the longer term (10-20 yrs). Adaptation on the other hand is measured through successful survival, increased resilience and adaptive capacity (absence of quantitative performance target), each of which are viewed as short term operational issues and as such adaptation struggles to find strategic importance. If organisations are to adapt to inevitable climate change then this situation needs to change

Trends of maternal mortality at a tertiary health care centre in India

Background: Maternal mortality is the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of duration and site of pregnancy from any cause, related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes.Methods: A retrospective study was conducted by reviewing the hospital records to study the maternal deaths and complication leading to maternal death over the period of one year from January 2019 to December 2019 in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, LTMMC and Sion Hospital.Results: The maternal mortality ratio in the present study 548/100000 live births and corrected MMR’s 190/live births. There were 49 deaths of 8093 live birth during the study period. The majority of deaths occurred in the 20-30 age group. Hemorrhage (22.4%) and hypertensive disorder (14.2%) are two most common direct cause of maternal deaths. 46.9% of maternal deaths occurred after 72 hours of death. Indirect cause accounts for 73.5%. Of these deaths and DIC with sepsis was the leading indirect cause of maternal deaths.Conclusions: Hemorrhage, hypertensive disorder, anemia and DIC with sepsis remain major cause of maternal deaths. Delay at primary level, by the patient and family contributed to higher maternal mortality. This requires more effort to educate, impart knowledge to recognize danger signs and seek urgent medical help and create awareness about the easy accessibility and availability of nearby health care facilities amongst the society

Facilities managers' attitudes towards adaptation and mitigation

Climate change poses a significant challenge to existing built assets and facilities managers will play an important role in addressing the mitigation and adaptation agenda for these assets. Facilities managers’ actions will in turn be informed by their attitudes to climate change uncertainties and risks and on how these are integrated in built asset management plans. This paper presents research findings from an extensive questionnaire survey of UK facilities managers’ attitudes towards climate change risk and the mitigation and adaptation solutions available to them. The paper also examines the usefulness of existing built asset management tool kits to support strategic mitigation and adaptation plans as part of a coherent built asset management strategy. The paper concludes that there is a statistically significant relationship between an individual facilities manager’s environmental inclination and their belief in anthropogenic climate change, and with their perception of climate risks, which are enhanced if they have previous experience of a climate related extreme weather event. The paper also concludes that mitigation is strategically driven through Corporate Social Responsibility strategies whilst adaptation remains reactive and occurs in response to already experienced extreme events. Finally the paper examines the ability of backcasting (as compared to forecasting) to support built asset management planning. Although a number of operational and managerial barriers were identified, including: facilities managers’ attitudes to risk and uncertainty; limited confidence in the future needs analysis; the ability to project a built asset adaptation and mitigation journey; corporate perception and attitude to environmental issues; and personal characteristics and beliefs, the results suggest that facilities managers’ demonstrate the fundamental characteristics and beliefs that would support such an approach