Five questions that reveal the climate risk in your building

What if you could uncover a building’s real climate-damage risk — just by answering five questions about how it’s built?

That’s the core idea behind CliVa, a research project Wenn Property leads together with SINTEF. It’s funded by the Research Council of Norway through the IPN programme, and brings together partners from across the construction and real-estate sector: SINTEF, Geodata, Nortekk, Reco Building & Damage Restoration, Construction City Cluster, Stavanger Municipality, Sykehusbygg and the Norwegian Association for Municipal Engineering (NKF).

The case study that flipped the report

We took an existing condition report on a 1962 single-family house in Sandnes — a standard assessment under NS 3600 — and ran it through the CliVa model. The result was striking: the priority order was inverted. What was flagged as the top urgent item turned out to be low risk once construction context and normative lifespan data were applied, while the item the report deprioritised was the only one that genuinely needed attention.

All told, the urgent action need dropped by 45%. The difference is what a condition report actually measures: deviations from code and standards, not necessarily real damage risk given how the building is actually built and how far through their lifespan the components are.

What we’re building

The CliVa tool layers three things on top of today’s condition data:

1. Construction filtering — five to seven questions about how the building is actually built, which strip out risks that don’t apply to this construction
2. Lifespan calibration — a direct MCP link to the SINTEF Byggforsk knowledge base, so each judgement is checked against normative lifespan tables per building part
3. Climate adjustment — local climate scenarios (wind-driven rain, wind, temperature) that modulate the risk for the specific building

In practice that means a property manager, homeowner or tradesperson can answer five questions about the construction and get an analysis that separates what’s genuinely urgent from what can be planned and what only needs an annual check — each with a justification grounded in Byggforsk references.

“If we succeed, it becomes easier to look after our buildings, save costs and avoid loss of value over time,” says Benedicte Økland, CEO of Wenn Property.

Research meets practice

Siri Hunnes Blakstad, EVP of SINTEF Community, emphasises the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration:

“By means of AI learning and climate models based on real building-damage data and scenarios, the goal is to develop new business models and at the same time strengthen Norway’s competitiveness in climate-friendly building technology,” she says.

The project is structured in work packages. Work package 4 — AP4 — is the one testing whether a small set of construction-specific questions can systematically improve maintenance prioritisation across different building types.

Next step: from one house to a municipal portfolio

We’re moving from a single case study toward scale. Together with Stavanger Municipality we’ll explore how the CliVa model performs on real municipal buildings. The municipality’s property department already uses WP Befaring in its inspection work, and the pilot will test whether the effect we saw on one house holds across a portfolio with different building types, ages and users. Scope and timeline are being shaped together with the municipality.

Watch the NKF/KS presentation

We presented the CliVa project at NKF and KS’s Green Bag Lunch series in May 2026. Watch the full presentation here (in Norwegian):

CliVa facts

• Full name: CliVa – Detect and mitigate Climate change risk damage for optimal property Value preservation
• Duration: 2025–2028
• Funding: Research Council of Norway (IPN programme)
• Partners: Wenn Property, SINTEF, Geodata, Nortekk, Reco Building & Damage Restoration, Construction City Cluster, Stavanger Municipality, Sykehusbygg, Norwegian Association for Municipal Engineering (NKF)
• Contact: Benedicte Økland, CEO Wenn Property — benedicte.okland@wennproperty.no