The climate crisis isn’t arriving quietly. In 2024, the U.S. experienced 27 billion-dollar climate and weather disasters, just behind the record-setting 28 in 2023. Over the past three years, the annual average number of billion-dollar disasters has surged to 24.3, nearly triple the long-term average of 9 per year since 1980.
Beyond reshaping how we live, these disruptions impact where capital flows, how communities recover, and what it takes for buildings to remain operational. As wildfires, floods, and extreme heat events displace residents and shutter businesses, they’re also upending insurance markets and exposing deep gaps in resilience planning. In 2023, both State Farm and Allstate stopped issuing new homeowners insurance policies in California, citing increasing wildfire risk and unsustainable financial exposure.
For commercial real estate, the question isn’t just how to protect assets, it’s how to ensure buildings can serve communities when they’re needed most.
Buildings as Response Infrastructure
Historically, real estate has been treated as the backdrop of disaster response. But a growing number of buildings — particularly those in urban or mixed-use environments — are stepping into more active roles.
In San Francisco, the Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams (NERT) train residents to use local buildings as command posts, supply hubs, and shelters. During the severe 2021 heatwave in Los Angeles, the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory opened its doors as a community cooling and resilience center. These spaces didn’t just offer shelter. They provided power, information, and human connection at a time of extreme vulnerability.
These examples reinforce a core point: buildings don’t need to be passive assets. When designed and operated with intention, they can function as lifelines before, during, and after a crisis.
But buildings alone are not enough. True resilience prioritizes the people inside them, especially renters, frontline workers, and small business owners who are often excluded from recovery funding and policy decisions. Building equity into resilience means ensuring that all residents have access to shelter, power, support, and long-term stability.
Biodiversity as a Resilience Strategy
While often viewed as a purely environmental concern, biodiversity is also a functional resilience strategy. Tree canopy, green roofs, pollinator habitats, and restored wetlands reduce flood risk, buffer heat, and improve air quality during smoke events.
But in wildfire-prone regions, not all vegetation is helpful. Nearly 1 in 3 U.S. homes now sits in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where poorly planned landscaping can turn green space into fuel. In these areas, resilience means more than just planting. It requires thoughtful species selection, defensible space, and long-term maintenance.
One model for this is Sonoma-Marin’s Fire Smart Landscaping toolbox, which offers developers and HOAs guidelines for replacing flammable landscaping with native, fire-resistant plantings. In Phoenix, the city’s Urban Heat Leadership Academy trains residents to advocate for climate-adaptive green infrastructure, such as shaded corridors and stormwater-fed tree canopies, in neighborhoods most exposed to extreme heat. And the USGBC California continues to provide wildfire guidance, most recently with its California Wildfire Rebuilding Guide, released April 2025.
Biodiversity strategies aren’t just aesthetic — they reduce utility demand, support public health, and extend building functionality during climate stress.
Mixed-Use as a Model for Connection and Continuity
Mixed-use developments are particularly well positioned to support resilience because they embed housing, retail, and civic space within a single, walkable footprint. During emergencies, these assets can pivot quickly; ground-floor retail becomes staging space, while apartments and offices offer temporary housing or cooling centers.
After the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, planners prioritized mixed-use zoning to rebuild local commerce while expanding housing options. Mixed-use neighborhoods also support faster recovery through built-in community connections. Research from the Urban Institute and others has shown that neighborhoods with strong social infrastructure are more likely to retain residents and recover faster after disasters.
We’re also seeing this type of integrated thinking in more projects seeking third-party certification through systems like BREEAM, which evaluates a building’s performance across categories like climate risk, biodiversity, energy efficiency, and occupant health. For these projects, certification serves as a meaningful tool that helps teams design and operate buildings that are resilient and built for the long term.
Ultimately, these developments offer CRE professionals both durability and relevance: a way to preserve long-term value by embedding flexibility, connectivity, and access into the heart of a project.
A Collective Opportunity
Resilience is no longer just a technical problem centered around structural integrity; it’s about readiness, inclusion, and adaptability.
After the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, community workshops helped inform new codes around fire-hardened construction and landscape design. Residents, planners, and builders worked together to develop recovery strategies that were realistic, affordable, and replicable, an example of shared learning with long-term value.
We need more of these spaces. Conferences, lunch-and-learns, and post-disaster debriefs offer the chance to move from compliance to leadership — to treat resilience as not only a metric, but as a mindset.
For commercial real estate, it means stepping into a more proactive role: designing for disruption, investing in ecological resilience, and positioning buildings to protect people, preserve value, and enable faster recovery in the face of climate risk.
At BREEAM, we believe resilience and adaptation are essential to how we define sustainability in the built environment. Our certification process is designed to help real estate teams not only prepare for disruption but contribute to broader community readiness across categories, including biodiversity, health, equity, and climate risk. To dive deeper into how BREEAM supports resilience planning and long-term value creation for CRE, we’re hosting a virtual lunch and learn webinar in partnership with USGBC California on August 19 from 12–1 p.m. PT, please register here. Join us to learn more and get involved in the conversation.
Posted 8/7/25
About the Author
Breana Wheeler has served as BRE’s U.S. Director of Operations since June 2016. BRE is a 100-year-old building science research organization dedicated to improving buildings for people and the environment. It is best known in the U.S. for developing BREEAM, the world’s first and leading science-based suite of standards for validating and certifying sustainability in the built environment.
Breana leads the deployment of BREEAM standards across the U.S. market and contributes to global technical work, with a focus on Resilience and Social Impact. Prior to joining BRE, she spent a decade advising multinational corporations on environmental and sustainability risk management. She is a Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv) through the Society for the Environment and a Member of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA).
