{"id":15270,"date":"2013-07-30T02:06:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-30T02:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leedpoints.com\/?guid=fab82e50df12230f6818c4aacaea0d0f"},"modified":"2013-07-30T02:06:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T02:06:45","slug":"on-the-front-lines-of-climate-adaptation-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/on-the-front-lines-of-climate-adaptation-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"On the front lines of climate adaptation: Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":null,"protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n \"\"\n<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n Drought, by THEMACGIRL<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

With the business community grappling to understand how the impacts of climate change will affect their bottom line, Sustainable Industries recently interviewed two authors who literally wrote the book<\/a> on resilience to find out more on the topic. Cole Roberts and Alisdair McGregor are sustainable design gurus from Arup<\/a> who teamed up with their colleague Fiona Cousins and others to put together the most complete, informative and accessibly written compilation of resilience information to date.<\/em><\/p>\n

Following is Part 2 of Sustainable Industries’ exclusive interview. You would be ill-advised to squeak through without first reading Part 1 here<\/a>.<\/em>
 <\/p>\n

SI:<\/strong> While talking to engineers in this space, I’ve heard that a number of mitigation projects have transitioned to adaptation projects since Hurricane Sandy hit. Does this shift of focus from mitigation to adaptation represent a good or bad thing for the overall climate change movement?<\/p>\n

McGregor:<\/strong> One of the arguments we make in the book is that you have to do both; they go hand in hand. You’ve got to do your best on mitigation, but assume you’re going to have to do something on adaptation. But you shouldn’t just suddenly move everything to adaptation.<\/p>\n

Roberts:<\/strong> Oftentimes, it’s how we structure a mitigation response that tells us how much we have to do for adaptation response. You can have mitigative responses that are adaptation responses. Let’s look at passive survivability in buildings: If you’ve got a daylighted building, generally you’re going to have a daylighted building after there’s a major disaster. You’ve also lowered you’re greenhouse gas emissions from that building, plus you’ve created an environment that can still be somewhat occupy-able after some major hazard gives a shock to the system. So rather than seeing it as a linear process, it’s a maturing of the understanding that sustainability is inclusive of a mitigation structure and an adaption structure as well as many other things: public health, equity.<\/p>\n

SI:<\/strong> Designing for nature’s laws is key for building our built environment. However there is confusion about what nature’s laws will be in an uncertain climate future. I know engineers like to design when they are certain about things…<\/p>\n

Roberts:<\/strong> One of the greatest failures of engineering.<\/p>\n

SI:<\/strong> How do you move forward with that?<\/p>\n

Roberts:<\/strong> Become better engineers. We’ve said for quite a few years that if you’re giving a single answer, you’re not giving a very complete answer. So clients are starting to give more ranges in data, and are asking us about potential outcomes. We’re moving towards giving answers to likely, optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. Or even better yet, let the owners play with the variables so they get a gut understanding of where the sensitivity is. If you tweak something, how great is the response?<\/p>\n

[pagebreak]Consider sea level rise. If you’re building a barrier along the waterfront, there’s probably a point at which the cost of that barrier increases significantly. It’s not a linear curve for cost. If you make different assumptions about either how much the sea is going to rise, or how comfortable you are with some degree of flooding (the soft failure side), you have a much better way of investing your money and deciding how high that barrier wall should be.<\/p>\n

McGregor:<\/strong> In terms of how you condition buildings conventionally, you don’t design an air conditioning system to meet worse case. You design it to meet 95 percent of the worse case, because usually you’re trying to close that last 5 percent so you can say, ‘However hot it is, we’ll always be 72 degrees inside this place.’ However, closing that 5 percent is extremely expensive for just a few hours or a few days every four or five years. However, if you can live with a few days that are a little warmer than you’d like, you can save a huge amount of money. I think it’s the same with flooding. Do you build a massive sea wall? Or do you decide against putting your main electrical switchgear in the basement in preparation for an occasional flood every few years?<\/p>\n

SI:<\/strong> A successfully adapted built environment will require money to be invested proactively, rather than spent reactively. What could really drive this?<\/p>\n

Roberts:<\/strong> I would say there’s a few different ways that things drive this successfully. There’s the catastrophic response, which people are actually really good at. Something bad happens and they get really good, really fast. The Netherlands flood is a classic example. The other is that it doesn’t all have to happen at once. The one blessing of adaptation (although it’s at the same time a curse), is that it’s taking a long time. It’s a slow moving freight train that, when it hits us, is going to hurt. But it’s going to hurt gradually over decades, and it’s going to be impossible to stop the reality. So the way you invest is incrementally, by first establishing your response. This is the “Establish, Expand it, Optimize it, Maximize it” chapter [Chapter 8] of the book: It talks about if you have a need 20 years from now, start off by putting the right infrastructure in place to meet that need. Historically, we have pretty terrible building patterns. Those building patterns are going to last us 100 years or longer. Building patterns in Europe are thousands of years old. Building patterns are pipes in the ground that last for hundreds and hundreds of years. Pipes in the ground realistically last 20 to 80 years, depending on what is happening with capacity issues. The point being that you can get the system started and then grow it over time so that it’s resilient in its end form. Design and build infrastructure that can change… Build it with flexibility.<\/p>\n

SI:<\/strong> Switching gears a little bit, you bring up the point in your book that we shouldn’t try to convince everyone to make the right choice, just convince the right people to make the right choices about climate adaptation. Who are these people?<\/p>\n

McGregor:<\/strong> That’s a really difficult question. Initially, I thought that we have to influence the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], global summits and our federal government. Every single one has been a massive disappointment. However, what we are seeing is city and state governments actually starting to make significant headway. Corporate clients see the risks too, so they’re starting to change as well. It’s not just insurance companies – people at Walmart and other big companies are pushing. [pagebreak]If we can give them the right data and support them, then they have the clout to push the government to make changes.<\/p>\n

Roberts: <\/strong>That’s a good point, because Arup is a consultant to C40 Cities<\/a> – a coalition of the largest and most innovative cities around the world. Together, they represent over 500 million people (larger than the population of the United States) and 20 percent of the global GDP. The C40 have been taking actions to mitigate and adapt since 2005. And they’re ramping up more each year. There was a report on megacities<\/a> that was published a year ago on the progress of the C40 and the actions that the cities had taken, and it was a classic exponential growth. In fact, it was a classic competition growth curve. So you could say that these leading cities are competitive and synergistic. If you dissolve all of those nation-state boundaries and looked instead at the connections between cities, sister cities and that web of affiliations, there’s a lot of power there. We say there’s a lot of power in the U.S. geographic boundary, but there’s power that crosses borders every day in trade, in movement of people from one city to another, and knowledge. Cities and their connected communities are the leverage that will shape our future.<\/p>\n

SI:<\/strong> You mentioned that local communities are making significant progress. How do you feel about ecodistricts, transition towns, LEED-ND?<\/p>\n

McGregor:<\/strong> I’m a big supporter of ecodistricts. The idea is to get clusters of eco-communities within a city that will lift the whole city. People seek these places out. It goes back to the argument we use when talking to corporate clients or developers of buildings. We never make the case that they should design sustainably because it’s the only chance we have to save mankind within the next 100 years. Instead, we make it clear that people want these buildings and communities because they are better and healthier to live and work in. And by the way, [these buildings] use 80 percent less energy than a standard building or neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Roberts:<\/strong> There’s definitely been a maturing in the last decade around thinking bigger than a building. The ecodistrict and neighborhood-based approach is a response to that. The interesting question stems from what you can do at a neighborhood scale that you couldn’t do at an individual building scale. One thing we’ve made clear is that different efficiencies and synergies occur at different scales.<\/p>\n

For example, let’s consider waste treatment. If you want to recycle organics out of a city and turn it into energy and feed it back to the city, that’s pretty dumb at a building scale. But at a neighborhood scale, it starts to make sense. At a city scale, it makes a lot more sense. At a regional scale, you may see the effort to transport the organics not pay off, so the sweet spot is probably between 100,000 and 1 million people. I think there’s a corollary there to businesses, because you can say, ‘At what scale can businesses connect such that they have adequate strength to do something bigger than themselves? What is big enough, but not too big?’<\/p>\n

SI: <\/strong>How can individuals who are reading this article who are concerned with adaptation to climate change contribute to the movement?<\/p>\n

McGregor:<\/strong> Here in the Bay Area there are so many organizations to get involved with: a very active chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council<\/a>, the Bay Area Council on Climate Change<\/a>, the Bay Area Business Council<\/a>, BCDC<\/a>, SPUR<\/a>, Sustainable Silicon Valley<\/a>, just to name a few.<\/p>\n

Roberts:<\/strong> [Annie Leonard<\/a>] made a great contribution to this question last year. [pagebreak]Her “Story of Stuff<\/a>” is about more efficient synergystic systems and closing loops. I don’t know if she’d say she became disenchanted, but I understand that she recently said the best way to make a meaningful contribution is to become a better citizen. She’s made it not about any single action, but about an attitude towards responsibility to your community. The idea is if you become involved in your community, you’re more likely to make good decisions, and the people that have power are going to be more likely to be responsible to you. Basically, you have a responsibility to participate. I’d rather have someone participating who differs from my view than someone who is non-participatory and apathetic. There are some bad actors, but on average, the more people who contribute, the better the outcome will be. And you can say the same thing about companies – the more companies that allow participation and pool the skills of their employees, the better. That’s what’s amazing about Arup<\/a>. It’s employee owned. The company has fostered a supportive, emergent conversation with no top-down hierarchical attitude. We’re having such a rich conversation globally that I can’t even keep up. Wildly different opinions, but that’s better than a single statement that comes from a very small cadre of people at the top.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11929,11930,11931,11932,8609,11933,11934,3294,11935],"class_list":["post-15270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-green-building-posts","tag-arup-climate","tag-building-resiliency-task-force","tag-climate-action-plans","tag-climate-adaptation","tag-climate-resiliency","tag-industries-affected-by-climate-change","tag-resiliency-reports","tag-sustainable-buildings","tag-vulnerability-mapping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedpoints.com\/green-building-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}