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The interdependence and feedback between climate impacts mitigation and adaptation to the inevitable changes in climate are the key challenges for the built environment in the coming decades. These challenges are more pronounced in the interface between science and society, in which scientific knowledge and evidence are transformed into policy actions. This editorial looks at current and growing evidence base on the impacts of climate change and the means to adapt buildings, as well as the interface between policies and evidence base while summarising the contributions to this special issue.

During his 75 years of life from the 9^th of March 1942 until the 28^th of September 2017 Nicholas Wilkinson was a very productive and hardworking individual. He grew up in the north east of England in Corbridge, a small rural town in Northumberland. He was the third child of Zara and Tom Wilkinson and grew up together with his brother Warwick, his sister Joanna. He told me that as a child he played a lot by the riverside, and in their large family house garden and that, amongst other things, his outdoor childhood promoted a deep love of nature in him. His mother Zara had artistic abilities and his father, Tom a very good sense of judgement; Nicholas inherited these talents and characteristics from them. He was educated at Corchester Preparatory School in Corbridge and then at Bryanston School in Blanford, Dorset.

Education has been there for ages. Need of education for sustainable development is stated in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 (1992) as follows:Education, including formal education, public awareness and training, should be recognized as a process by which human beings and societies can reach their fullest potential. Education is critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity of the people to address environment and development issues. While basic education provides the underpinning for any environment and development education, the latter needs to be incorporated as an essential part of learning. Both formal and non-formal education is indispensable to changing people's attitudes so that they have the capacity to assess and address their sustainable development concerns.

When discussing disaster education, the usual focus in more on the school or family or community education. Very little focus has been given so far to higher education. However, higher education (college and university) is the key to professional development in the subject. Higher education in disasters is still lacking in most countries and regions. In this context, the lessons of environment or the field of sustainable development can provide useful tips. Of equal importance to higher education is not only the curriculum, but the approach or mode of delivery. To develop an appropriate higher education, a system of educational governance is important (COE, 2005). Given the role education has for overall societal and economic development, it is necessary to ensure the responsiveness of higher education to the changing needs and expectations of society. In this respect, it is important to ensure participation of external actors in the governance of higher education and to allow the flexibility to accommodate the continually change needs and requirements over time. COE (2005) made several recommendations for higher education that can be considered as the base of disaster education in colleges and universities. These include: serving the needs and expectations of the society, having appropriate academic freedom, having a process of setting up long-terms goals and developing appropriate strategies for achieving them, providing reasonable scope of innovation and flexibility in research, promoting good educational governance through regional and international networks, and ensuring quality control of teachers and students.

Living with physical hazards is an everyday issue for the people of Bangladesh because different seasons bring different kinds of uncertainties. Sometimes traditional knowledge and practices (Alam, 2007) help them to adjust to these conditions; in some occasions, these hazards turn into catastrophic disasters causing deaths and bringing unbearable damages in different sectors. In addition to the tangible damages incurred due to hazards, in most of the cases, these hazards injure the internal social organizations at different levels (for example, household, community, and institutional) and affect their assets. Thus, the community resilience is greatly weakened, which makes people susceptible to upcoming hazards. Scientists suggest that climate change-induced threats and uncertainties in the forms of erratic rainfall patterns that result in drought conditions and sometimes floods, abnormal foggy conditions, change in the wind direction and the characteristic patterns of seasons, anomalies in the temperature regimes, and the occurrence of cyclones will bring new dimensions to existing situations. These natural hazards, temperature rises, and sea level rise–induced inundations will contribute to the breakdown of the traditional systems of living; they also bring change in topographical factors (for example, flooding), biophysical factors (changes in the crop yields, runoff, risks of the spread of infectious diseases, changes in the vegetation pattern), and socioeconomic factors (per capital income, health, education, population density) (World Bank, 2001).

The process of educating future architects and designers around the world varies dramatically. However, there is one striking similarity - the dominance of the design studio as the main forum for knowledge acquisition and assimilation, and for creative exploration and interaction. Such a setting encompasses intensive cognitive and physical activities, which ultimately result in conceptualizing meaningful environments proposed to accommodate related human activities. The design studio is the primary space where students explore their creative skills that are so prized by the profession; it is the kiln where future architects are molded. It has occupied a central position since architectural education was formalized two centuries ago in France and later in Germany, the rest of Europe, North America, and the rest of the world.