Introduction

In April 2025, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) ushered in LEED v5, a transformative update to its green building rating system. For the first time, climate resilience is not just an optional add-on – it’s a core requirement. Every project pursuing LEED v5 certification must now complete a Climate Resilience Assessment, evaluating how today’s natural hazards and tomorrow’s climate impacts could affect a building’s safety and longevity. This new mandate reflects a growing recognition that sustainable design isn’t only about reducing a building’s impact on the environment, but also about protecting buildings from the environment’s impact on them. In an era where climate-related disasters caused $380 billion in global economic losses in 2023 alone, resilience has become a critical pillar of green building.

For architects and LEED practitioners, this shift raises the bar. LEED v5 projects must analyze a comprehensive set of hazards – from extreme heat and wildfire to sea-level rise and storms – using both historical data and forward-looking climate projections. Teams are expected to assess exposure and vulnerability for each of 12 defined hazard types, then identify at least two “high-priority” hazards and integrate targeted design strategies to mitigate those risks. In practice, that means design teams need to gather a wealth of climate data, understand complex risk models, and translate findings into actionable building measures. This is no small task. As one expert noted, conducting a rigorous resilience assessment requires “access to advanced climate datasets, expertise in robust risk assessment frameworks, and the ability to turn analysis into design adaptations” – capabilities that many architecture teams may not have in-house.

The challenge is clear: how can busy project teams efficiently perform these climate hazard assessments with the depth and accuracy LEED v5 demands? Traditionally, compiling a full risk profile for a site meant piecing together information from floodplain maps, wildfire zone reports, FEMA data, climate studies, and more – a time-intensive, multi-platform effort. This complexity could overwhelm project schedules and budgets. Fortunately, new tech-driven solutions are emerging to simplify the process. Imagine if you could simply enter your project’s address and instantly receive a complete resilience risk report for that location. That’s exactly the promise of RiskFootprint(tm)™, a cloudbased hazard and climate assessment tool. Backed by decades of scientific data and cutting-edge modeling, RiskFootprint(tm)™ allows architects and sustainability consultants to meet LEED’s climate resilience requirements with unprecedented speed, accuracy, and affordability.

In this article, we explore how the RiskFootprint(tm)™ SaaS platform – along with its Hazus-based Vulnerability and Value-at-Risk report – provides outstanding support for LEED v5 Climate Resilience Assessments. We’ll look at the tool’s key benefits, its alignment with LEED v5 criteria, and the practical advantages it offers to design teams aiming to build a more resilient future.

LEED v5: A New Imperative for Climate Resilience

LEED v5 has raised the stakes on resilience. Under the new rating system, a Climate Resilience Assessment is a prerequisite for certification on all projects. This assessment isn’t a cursory checklist – it’s a thorough evaluation of site-specific risks and adaptation strategies. Project teams must address a predefined list of 12 climate hazards, which include threats like extreme heat, flooding (coastal, riverine, and stormwater), sea-level rise, high winds (hurricanes/tornadoes), drought, wildfire, and more. For each hazard, teams need to consider historical exposure and for two selected hazards, they must also analyze future conditions (e.g., 2050 climate projections for temperature, precipitation, sea level, etc.). LEED v5 explicitly calls for analyzing a project’s exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to these threats and evaluating the potential impacts and vulnerabilities that could result to the project. The outcome of the assessment should pinpoint at least two high-priority risks – those most threatening to the project – and propose concrete, risk-reducing design measures to address them. In essence, LEED now expects project teams to “build with the future in mind,” ensuring that buildings can withstand, recover from, and adapt to the impacts of climate change over their lifespan.

This new prerequisite aligns with a broader shift in green building practice. Earlier LEED versions focused on reducing a building’s environmental footprint; LEED v5 expands the focus to also safeguard the building against environmental extremes. Resilience and sustainability now go hand-in-hand. However, fulfilling these new physical risk resilience requirements can be challenging. By design, it spans multiple disciplines – assessments of flood, natural hazards, and extreme weather, as well as climate science, engineering, urban planning. LEED v5 asks design teams to perform what is essentially a mini climate risk study for each project. Consider what a “comprehensive resilience assessment” entails: collecting diverse hazard data (flood maps, wind speeds, wildfire history, etc.), interpreting climate model projections, assessing building systems’ robustness, and finally compiling it into a coherent risk narrative and mitigation plan. It’s a time- and resource-intensive endeavor that goes well beyond standard architectural services. For many projects, especially those without a dedicated resilience consultant, this could be a daunting hurdle.

This is where technology becomes a game-changer. Recognizing the need for efficiency and consistency, USGBC itself has been investing in data-driven tools to help projects tackle climate risk. In fact, even before LEED v5’s launch, USGBC partnered with Coastal Risk Consulting – the developers of RiskFootprint(tm)™ – to integrate climate risk analysis into LEED workflows. “Data will define the future of green building,” said former USGBC CEO Mahesh Ramanujam in 2020, “which is why USGBC is working with Coastal Risk Consulting to deliver a RiskFootprint(tm)™ for buildings, communities and cities… providing a climate risk analysis”.

The vision was to give project teams a seamless way to assess vulnerabilities to hazards like flooding, storm surge, earthquakes, drought, and heat as part of the LEED process. Now, with LEED v5’s resilience prerequisite in full effect, that vision has become essential reality. RiskFootprint(tm)™ emerges as a ready solution to meet LEED’s rigorous requirements, offering a one-stop, standardized approach to Climate Resilience Assessments.