This project reflects the SFPE Foundation’s ongoing commitment to advancing the strategic research priorities of the Grand Challenges Initiative (GCI) Working Groups, specifically addressing urgent needs identified by the Resilience & Sustainability Working Group.
"Traditional post-fire metrics often focus exclusively on immediate casualties and direct property damage, which limits our ability to integrate fire safety into broader sustainability conversations," state Leslie Marshall, PhD, Interim Executive Director, SFPE Foundation. "Funding made possible through our global GCI network allows us to support this vital research, which will recast fire events through a holistic framework to capture long-term economic, social, and environmental consequences. This work is a crucial step toward embedding fire protection into globally recognized sustainable design frameworks."
The $40,000 USD grant has been awarded to a multinational, multi-institutional team of experts spanning three continents, ensuring a global approach to post-fire analysis:
- Dr. Zhuojun Nan, PhD (Lead Principal Investigator) – Assistant Professor, Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)
- Dr. Shuna Ni, PhD (Principal Investigator) – Assistant Professor, University of Maryland (United States)
- Dr. Natalia Flores Quiroz, PhD (Principal Investigator) – Senior Lecturer, Stellenbosch University (South Africa)
"Every fire event contains valuable evidence about how buildings, communities, and systems respond under stress," said Dr. Zhuojun Nan, lead PI. "We hope to turn these real-world lessons into actionable knowledge for safer, more resilient, and more sustainable buildings."
The research will establish a repeatable methodology to quantify the full life-cycle consequences of building fires. The framework evaluates impacts across the three core pillars of sustainability:
· Economic Impacts: Measuring direct structural asset loss alongside indirect burdens like business interruption, supply-chain disruption, and long-term recovery timelines.
· Social Impacts: Tracking human vulnerability, community displacement duration, and persistent disruptions to regional infrastructure and municipal services.
· Environmental Impacts: Documenting suppression runoff pathways, smoke emissions, hazardous materials, and the life-cycle environmental costs of demolition waste and structural reconstruction.
To validate the model, the team will develop comprehensive historical case studies spanning multiple continents and occupancy types, including the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture fire (2008), the Shanghai Jiaozhou Road residential fire (2010), the Arkema Chemical Plant fire (2017), and the Paarl Print industrial fire (2009).
The realization of this research is made possible through the visionary financial and advisory support of prominent fire protection organizations. The SFPE Foundation gratefully acknowledges its core project funding partners for this initiative: Johnson Controls, Inc., International Firestop Council, National Fire Sprinkler Association, and Arup, Inc.
Representatives from these organizations will join external technical experts on the project's External Advisory Panel to ensure the deliverables maintain direct practical relevance for applied engineering, insurance evaluation, and international building code development.
For a full description of the project and ongoing updates, visit sfpe.org/foundation.