Welcome.

To Gingerbread City. An exhibition and a confectionery competition built for Christmas, but the cause is the climate. These model buildings on stilt might be made out of suites, but they reflect what's needed in the real world as water levels rise.

The theme this year is around water in cities. So as climate change is affecting our cities, and obviously there's more issues around flooding, we are having to really think about ways of how we're going to be building in the future and how we can adapt our cities to better bring in water, not just necessarily push it out. So architects are coming up with all different kinds of ideas.

Ideas to inspire the next generation.

It's important because since we have climate change and it's like the water levels are rising, the houses might get... It might flood. We need to know how to be able to help the climate change. So it stops.

After a year marked by severe flooding across the UK, this is an attempt to tackle climate challenges with creativity. One gingerbread brick at a time. Here, one of those bricks in the making, YN Studio in East London, one of the competing architects, and their model is being made in the real world too.

Our proposal, very simply, is just to elevate the building.

With demand for buildings fit for the future.

The requirements that we face as architects have changed. Even the requirements for the amount of insulation in a wall seems to have tripled, and certainly it's tripled in terms of thickness because now we tend to use more sustainable types of material rather than those ones which are generated using foam and plastics. So in terms of also the awareness of the public, it's completely different.

An awareness which will matter not just at Christmas, but all year round. The environment and sustainability for every season. Molly Malone, Skye News.