The RETIME project is pleased to announce the publication of a new systematic review in Urban Climate in August 2026. The study reveals that current approaches to assessing the vulnerability of European buildings to floods, landslides, storms and other natural hazards rely almost exclusively on externally visible characteristics. This leaves critical gaps that could affect how effectively buildings—and the people inside them—are protected as climate risks intensify.
Led by RETIME partners at TH Köln in Germany, together with the Technical University of Denmark, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, the University of Žilina in Slovakia, and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, the study analysed 26 peer-reviewed publications published between 2000 and 2025. It catalogued 121 distinct indicators used to assess the vulnerability of buildings to natural hazards.
The findings are particularly relevant to architects, engineers, urban planners, civil protection authorities and building owners who must decide where to prioritise limited resources for retrofitting and risk reduction. Within RETIME, we argue that a more systematic and standardised approach—one that considers interior and exterior characteristics together, makes better use of digital tools such as BIM and geographic information systems (GIS), and accounts for multiple hazards simultaneously—would make vulnerability assessments more comparable, transferable and actionable across Europe’s diverse building stock and climatic conditions.
The comprehensive list of indicators compiled through the review has been made openly available, providing a foundation upon which other researchers can build to design, test and validate future vulnerability assessment frameworks, including RETIME’s forthcoming work.
The full indicator dataset is openly available via Zenodo.
