Physical climate change poses growing risks to the existing building stock, yet climate adaptation has progressed more slowly than mitigation in both practice and research. Institutional investors, who hold long-term real estate portfolios at significant scale, are positioned as key actors in driving adaptation. The introduction of the Framework for Climate Adaptive Buildings (FCAB) in the Netherlands has provided Dutch institutional real estate organisations with systematic portfolio-level risk information for the first time. Yet the availability of risk information does not resolve the question of how it translates into concrete decisions at the building level. This study examines how the systematic integration of portfolio-level climate adaptation strategies into asset-level decisions takes shape within institutional real estate organisations, with the Dutch Prime Retail Fund (DPRF) of a.s.r. real assets as the empirical context.

The study adopts a qualitative design organised in four empirical layers: an embedded case study of two retail redevelopment projects completed before the FCAB was in place, semi-structured interviews across governance levels within the organisation, a validation workshop with asset management practitioners, and expert follow-up interviews with the fund manager and risk manager to validate the enabling conditions from a governance perspective. The findings are structured around a five-dimensional theoretical framework covering risk authority, interpretive, temporal, financial and coordination dimensions, complemented by an inductive coding layer.

The findings reveal that climate adaptation considerations emerged opportunistically in both pre-FCAB cases, as by-products of commercially and structurally motivated decisions rather than as responses to identified climate risks. The critical determinant of whether climate considerations entered the execution chain was the specificity of upfront client requirements in the commission to the external project manager. In the current FCAB-supported governance context, five compounding structural conditions explain why translation falls short of systematic: the governance structure delegates authority without specifying the operational pathway to activate it; the gross-to-net translation from portfolio-level risk score to building-specific net risk assessment is structurally necessary but unstandardised; the organisation's long holding period can simultaneously incentivise action and enable deferral; the financial architecture makes adaptation costs visible while benefits remain invisible; and coordination absence runs across all process stages. These dimensions do not occur individually, but interact and reinforce each other, converging most visibly at whether climate requirements are specified in the commission to the external project manager before a renovation project begins.

Six enabling conditions are identified for systematic integration, organised in two interdependent sets. Three governance conditions address the transmission gap between risk identification and asset-level action: a formally documented fund-level climate adaptation policy, a process description with formally assigned role responsibilities, and central registration of climate risks and their status. Three operational conditions address the integration threshold between portfolio-level risk information and project-level execution: a knowledge document per climate risk type, a checklist as standard project starting point, and integration of climate risk flags into the project initiation process. The study concludes that systematic integration requires coordinated change across governance mandate, information infrastructure and project execution simultaneously, that the conditions enabling this shift are confirmed as institutionally feasible across all governance levels examined, and that partial implementation is likely to reproduce rather than resolve the current dependence on individual initiative. ... Read more