Too Much Water, Too Little Time: Designing Research Labs for Climate Resilience

2025 Lab Design Conference speaker—Joss Hurford, building performance consultant, Affiliated Engineers, Inc.

As climate change accelerates, extreme weather events pose an increasingly urgent threat to the integrity of research facilities. In recent years, catastrophic floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires have disrupted critical lab operations across the United States. During their 2025 Lab Design Conference session titled Too Much Water and Too Little—Protecting Vital Operations, industry experts from Affiliated Engineers, Inc. delivered a call to action: resilient lab design is no longer optional—it's mission-critical.

Presenters Joss Hurford, building performance consultant, and Matthew Harrison, senior project engineer, walked the audience through a series of cautionary case studies and practical guidelines rooted in both National Institutes of Health (NIH) design standards and real-world failures. Their goal: help institutions ensure that research labs can remain operational even when utilities are compromised, staff must shelter in place, or surrounding infrastructure is in crisis.

"A lot of organizations think resilience is just a facilities problem, but it's really about protecting the research mission," Harrison explained in the opening of the session. "If your vivarium or your data can't survive a flood or a power outage, you haven't just lost a building—you've lost scientific progress."

Assessing vital operations: what will break first?

One major takeaway was the need for realistic threat assessment. Hurford emphasized that hazards are often site-specific: a facility in Denver faces different risks than one in Miami or Houston. But every lab should run a structured evaluation of their “vital operations,” defined as the spaces, utilities, equipment, and protocols absolutely necessary to protect human and animal life and to preserve irreplaceable research assets.

“You have to ask: if we lost power today, if we lost water pressure, how long could we operate before it becomes catastrophic?” he noted.

This level of assessment often requires uncomfortable conversations with researchers and leadership. The presenters recommended instituting routine “resilience audits” parallel to traditional preventive maintenance, but focused specifically on climate-event survivability. That includes identifying single points of failure, dependencies between systems, and the ability to function without external utilities for up to 72 hours.

Design decisions that matter: siting, elevation, redundancy

From a design standpoint, the speakers highlighted several key priorities for future-proof lab facilities:

• Elevated placement of critical equipment such as emergency generators, electrical switchgear, and vivarium support systems.

• Redundant utility infrastructure, including dual-feed electrical systems and on-site fuel or water storage.

• Stormwater management strategies that go beyond code minimums, especially for campuses located near rivers, coastlines, or expanding floodplains.

• Structural hardening of mechanical systems against high winds and hail, particularly in tornado-prone regions.

“Individually, these are not expensive decisions,” Harrison said. “But if you don’t set the precedent during programming and design, they get stripped out for cost later—and then you pay exponentially more when the event happens.”

He shared a private-sector case study involving a biomedical facility that experienced a power loss during a storm. Even though backup generators were available, the pumps supplying chilled water were located in a flooded basement, rendering the cooling system inoperable. Vivarium spaces overheated in under four hours, leading to significant loss of animal models.

“That’s a design failure, not an operational failure," Harrison noted.

Making the case to leadership

2025 Lab Design Conference speaker—Matthew Harrison, senior project engineer, Affiliated Engineers, Inc.

One of the Lab Design Conference session’s most compelling insights was the recognition that planners and architects often struggle to secure funding for resilience upgrades, especially when budgets are tight. To counter institutional inertia, presenters recommended framing resilience in terms of mission continuity and regulatory compliance, not just capital expenses.

Hurford encouraged attendees to reframe conversations with leadership: “We talk about protecting grant dollars, protecting intellectual property, protecting years of research that can’t be recovered. When we translate climate risk into research risk, it resonates more with senior leadership.”

He also suggested leveraging external frameworks such as NIH Design Requirements Manual (DRM) guidelines and FEMA’s scoring tools to create standardized language around risk. This can help create parity in how different sites or campuses justify resilience improvements.

Engaging the research community in emergency planning

Beyond bricks and mortar, the presenters stressed the importance of involving scientists, lab managers, and animal care staff in emergency planning. Too often, emergency protocols are drafted by facilities staff without direct input from those who actually work with sensitive experiments or live animals.

“The researchers know exactly which samples they can lose and which samples are priceless,” Hurford said. “You need them at the table to decide priorities.”

Regular table-top drills and scenario-based workshops were recommended as tools to bring everyone to a shared understanding of roles and response plans during disruptions. The speakers also emphasized the need to train laboratory personnel not only on evacuation procedures, but also on shelter-in-place protocols, material storage during prolonged shutdowns, and communication chains during extended events.

Planning the next generation of resilient labs

As both public and private research institutions prepare to expand laboratory footprints, new facilities must be designed with climate resilience as a central design driver, not an afterthought. Site selection is one of the earliest and most consequential decisions in this process. High ground, access to multiple utility corridors, and transportation redundancy can prevent operational paralysis during local disasters.

Harrison addressed the Lab Design Conference architectural community directly: “As designers, we’re in a unique position to influence these decisions early. We can’t wait for the owner to raise the issue—we need to be the ones bringing resilience into the programming conversation.”

He encouraged architects and engineers to integrate resilience metrics into the basis-of-design documents from day one, ensuring that performance during disruption is part of the building’s success criteria.

Moving from awareness to action

The session concluded with a clear message: climate change is no longer a future concern. It’s actively testing the resilience of our research infrastructure today. By learning from recent failures and by using NIH standards as a baseline, institutions can proactively strengthen critical facilities against extreme weather risks.

The speakers advised attendees to start small if necessary—perhaps a single utility redundancy or a cross-campus emergency drill—but emphasized the importance of movement: “Every step toward resilience protects not just your building, but your research mission.”

For planners, architects, and lab managers, the path forward is both challenging and full of opportunity. As new lab projects move from drawing board to construction, integrating resilience into every phase will ensure that scientific discovery can continue, even when the storm hits.

Explore how to design labs that can withstand climate-driven disruptions at the 2026 Lab Design Conference, May 11–14 in Orlando, FL. Learn how to integrate resilience strategies—like redundancy, siting, and emergency preparedness—into your programming and design process to protect both people and research. Hear case studies from industry leaders, earn AIA credits, and take part in tours and workshops that turn these best practices into hands-on lessons. Visit https://www.labdesignconference.com/ for updates and registration information.