Climate emergency – RIBA Books selection

The selection of books from RIBA Books will help you address the climate emergency and ensure a sustainable future.

• EnerPHit: A Step by Step Guide to Low Energy Retrofit
  In order to meet UK Carbon reduction commitments for 2020 and 2050 building owners will be required to upgrade their buildings to meet an increasingly stringent set of energy performance requirements. In the absence of any clear advice from UK Government on how this can be achieved, the EnerPHit standard offers a very clear methodology. This is a practical guide that gives architects the tools to retrofit buildings to the highest EnerPHit standard.
• Retrofitting for Flood Resilience: A Guide to Building & Community Design
  Flood risk is increasing across the UK and globally. This book provides a highly visual guide to flood resilience, and the ways in which the built and natural environment can be adapted to the threat of flooding.
• Planning for Climate Change: A Reader in Green Infrastructure and Sustainable Design for Resilient Cities
  This book provides an overview of the large and interdisciplinary literature on the substance and process of urban climate change planning and design, using the most important articles from the last 15 years to engage readers in understanding problems and finding solutions to this increasingly critical issue.
• Designed to Perform: An Illustrated Guide to Providing Energy Efficient Homes
  This book is an illustrated practical design guide to delivering better energy performance in all types of new build homes. It takes the form of an annotated details book, with photos taken from live construction sites, with the content based around diagrams, drawings and photos by the author, which demonstrates valuable best practice knowledge and advice.
• Targeting Zero: Whole Life and Embodied Carbon Strategies for Design Professionals
  Embodied and Whole Life Carbon will change the way buildings are designed, yet carbon emissions associated with the construction and life of buildings are not yet wholly understood by the profession. Energy is assumed to be the province of services engineers, yet energy from materials is as big an issue. Architects have the opportunity to take the lead in redefining how buildings are designed to achieve a low carbon future.
• Design for Climate Change
  Aimed at architects, contractors, engineers and specialists in the field, this book uses real-world evidence from a Technology Strategy Board-funded research project to develop a set of tools for architects and other building designers to meet a growing need to anticipate future climate change. Built on in his seminal future climate change report for the TSB, Bill Gething (with Katie Puckett) identifies three broad categories of climate change impacts on building design – comfort and energy performance, construction, and managing water.
• Better Buildings: Learning from Buildings in Use
  This book takes as its foundation the general acceptance that architects rarely return to the buildings they design to assess their performance-in-use. This is despite the demand for energy efficient design steadily increasing.
• Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet
  How architecture and urbanism can help to care for and repair a broken planet: essays and illustrated case studies.
• The Re-Use Atlas: A Designer’s Guide Towards the Circular Economy
  This book is a highly illustrated ‘map,’ using photos, infographics and statistics, showing designers how they can successfully navigate the emerging field of resource management and the circular economy.
• Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology
  A provocative essay that imagines a truly ecological future based on political transformation rather than the superficialities of “sustainability.”
• The Environmental Design Pocketbook
  The Environmental Design Pocketbook 2nd ed places the information you need for sustainable, low energy building design at your fingertips. Packed with diagrams, tools and tips, it cuts through the complex mass of technical data and legislation that faces the designer, and distils all the key guidance into a single reference that is quick, easy to use and points to the facts, figures and performance data that are most important.
• Biomimicry in Architecture
  When searching for genuinely sustainable building design and technology – designs that go beyond conventional sustainability to be truly restorative – we often find that nature got there first.
• Climatica No. 2 : The Sustainability of Urban Form
  The contemporary debate on sustainability issues is recently focussing its attention on the climatic analysis of urbanisation models and the relationship between urban form and the city’s energy performance and livability. Often neglected, urban form bears intrinsic qualities that can determine the success or failure of energy-related, economical and social policies. This book explores this deep relation, reflecting upon the role of environmental knowledge and conscience in the design of cities: the place par excellence for human life.
• Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations
  In Climate Change and the Health of Nations, McMichael shows how the natural environment has vast direct and indirect repercussions for human health and welfare. He takes us on a tour of human history through the lens of major transformations in climate.
• Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges
  Studies warn that global warming and sea level rise will create hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. While climate change will undoubtedly affect future migration patterns and behavior, the potential outcomes are more complex than the environmental refugee scenario suggests. This book provides a comprehensive review of how physical and human processes interact to shape migration, using simple diagrams and models to guide the researcher, policy maker and advanced student through the climate-migration process.
• Livable Cities from a Global Perspective
  Livable Cities from a Global Perspective offers case studies from around the world on how cities approach livability. They address the fundamental question, what is considered “livable?” The journey each city has taken or is currently taking is unique and context specific. There is no thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to livability.
• Plastics and the Environment
  Plastic has become a ubiquitous part of modern life. A cheap, lightweight material, it is used in everything from food packaging to consumer electronics and microbeads in cosmetic products. However, we are becoming increasingly aware of the problems our reliance on plastic is causing in the environment.
• FutuREstorative: Working Towards a New Sustainability
  This book aims to further the debate on new sustainability thinking in the built environment, by bringing together a selection of short contributions from thought leaders in the UK and the rest of the world (USA, China, India, Australia, NZ, Indonesia) with an overarching narrative from Martin Brown.
• California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader
  A political history of environmental policy and regulation in California, from the Gold Rush to the present Over the course of its 150-year history, California has successfully protected its scenic wilderness areas, restricted coastal oil drilling, regulated automobile emissions, preserved coastal access, improved energy efficiency, and, most recently, addressed global climate change. How has this state, more than any other, enacted so many innovative and stringent environmental regulations over such a long period of time?
• Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies
  Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise, by infrastructure expert Stefan Al, introduces design responses to sea-level rise, drawing from examples around the globe. Going against standard engineering solutions, Al argues for approaches that are integrated with the public realm, nature-based, and sensitive to local conditions and the community. He features design responses to building resilience that creates new civic assets for cities.
• Garden City Mega City: Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming: 2016
  Tête-Bêche book – two books in one. One half depicts the mega city problems, but when the book is flipped over, the other half provides the garden city solutions. Packed with photographs, diagrams, and colourful info-graphics, Garden City Mega City presents a compelling case for re-examining and re-planning the mega cities of the 21st century.
• Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons from Desert Farmers on Adapting to Climate Uncertainty
  How to harvest water and nutrients, select drought-tolerant plants, and create natural diversity.