Building For Yesterday’s Climate Is Now A Liability

The question is whether we keep designing for the climate we used to have, or for the one we are now actually building in.

Subscribe to our FREE Newsletter, or Telegram and WhatsApp channels for the latest stories and updates.

By Damian Lusty, Head of Direct Business, Sika Malaysia.

The conditions our buildings sit in have changed, and they are still changing. Malaysia recorded temperatures of up to 45°C last year, the hottest on record. Rainfall is heavier and less predictable, with projections pointing to annual increases of up to 22.8% in Peninsular Malaysia by the late 21st century. Flooding is no longer an exceptional event, with annual losses already exceeding RM1 billion and the 2021 floods alone causing RM6.1 billion in damages. None of this is a forecast, it is what we are already building in.

Construction has not really caught up. For most of the market, the baseline specification is still a version of what worked twenty years ago. Specifications get passed from project to project, generation to generation, often copied across with very little revisited. In a stable climate with stable material costs, that was acceptable. In 2026, it is starting to look like a liability.

The most telling indicator is one that gets discussed quite openly in the industry: roughly nine out of ten buildings in Malaysia experience some form of water ingress. That is a baseline problem, not an edge case. Buildings here are designed for a service life of 30 to 50 years, but many of the assumptions underpinning today’s specifications are calibrated to climate data that is now decades old. And once water does find a way in, by the time it shows up as a stain or a damp patch, the damage is usually somewhere else entirely.

Cost, speed and durability

Every project balances three things: cost, speed and durability. The unspoken industry rule is that you pick two. In practice, durability tends to be the one that gets compromised first, and the reasons are quite structural.

Cost and speed are visible at tender stage. Durability does not really show up until five, ten, sometimes fifteen years later, often after the people who made the original decisions have moved on. By then, what would have been a small adjustment at design stage becomes a much larger remediation problem on site. Slabs get pulled up and re-poured, basements re-treated, roofs reworked. The material cost is one part. The downtime, the disruption to occupants and the safety exposure for workers redoing the work are often the bigger cost.

When durability does get squeezed, it is usually quite predictable where. Waterproofing details get simplified. Concrete curing protocols get shortened to keep the programme on track. Application windows get compressed. These are decisions that look small at the time and resurface as failures later.

Cost, speed and durability still tend to be treated as three separate levers, when in practice a building that performs over its full design life is the most cost-effective one. You are not back on site every few years repairing it, and you are not interrupting the use of the asset to do so. Durability is not really a trade-off, it is the outcome of the other two being done well.

Sustainability has to be something you can verify

Sustainability is a word that has been used loosely for a long time, and the industry has rightly become more demanding about what it actually means. Clients, financiers and regulators have moved well past brochure claims. What they ask for now is documentation: Environmental Product Declarations, lifecycle assessments, emissions data that can be independently audited.

The defining feature is verification. If a sustainability claim cannot be checked by a third party, it remains a claim. If it can, it becomes something you can plan and procure against. This shift is being accelerated by the entry of large international clients into Malaysia, particularly in the data centre segment, who arrive with very specific requirements on emissions tracking and verified documentation. Those requirements then flow down the value chain to consultants, contractors and suppliers, raising the floor for everyone.

Regulation is moving in the same direction. Bursa’s adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Sustainability Disclosure Standards came into effect for reporting periods beginning 1 January 2025, pulling verified emissions data through the entire value chain. Malaysian Carbon Reduction and Environmental Sustainability Tool (MyCREST) applies lifecycle carbon assessment to public projects valued at RM50 million and above. The companies that establish documented baselines now will be in a much stronger position when carbon-related costs become a more direct part of how projects are priced.

Who needs to take the lead

Building for resilience does require higher upfront investment, which raises the fair question of who carries it.

The honest answer is that responsibility sits with whoever holds the longest commercial interest in the asset, usually the owner or the developer, because the leverage sits at the point where the specification is decided. Once the design is locked, much of the durability outcome is already determined. Financiers and insurers are increasingly part of this conversation as well, because climate-linked risk is starting to show up in their own pricing, which encourages owners towards more resilient specifications.

What is holding better decisions back is, frankly, an incentive problem. Developers are rewarded for completion. Contractors are priced on delivery cost. Neither party is structurally rewarded for how the building performs ten or fifteen years later. Until that changes, the market will keep underinvesting in durability, regardless of what the design intent on paper says.

The other factor, and this is one we come back to often, is awareness. A lot of where the industry stands in its sustainability journey comes down to education, and there is still a real gap in understanding both what good practice looks like and how to apply it on the ground. No single company can close that gap on its own, which is why working through bodies like the Real Estate and Housing Developers’ Association (REHDA), Master Builders Association Malaysia (MBAM), Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) and the Institute of Engineers Malaysia matters.

What the next decade needs

Get the baseline right, the specification discipline right, the application quality right and the awareness right, and building for a hotter, harder Malaysia becomes manageable. Get it wrong, and the cost shows up later in failures, in retrofits, in higher insurance premiums and in lost productivity from buildings that are not performing as they should.

The climate has already moved. The question is whether we keep designing for the climate we used to have, or for the one we are now actually building in.