Architects prepare for climate change

There's little question many architects and builders are convinced of the threat of climate change and urge clients to plan for a future of weather extremes.

Those who design and construct buildings are required to look decades into the future and are expected to provide owners with the best advice on how and where they should proceed with their projects. Those considerations include everything from what kind of materials to use to best withstand more frequent downpours to whether to build in an area that might become a flood plain in a future with rising sea levels.

But architects and builders who are among the believers the world is inexorably warming due to human activity can face sceptical clients who not only question the science but the added costs that adopting their plans can bring.

That scepticism means it's no easy task for young professionals like Ariane Laxo, a certified interior designer and active member of the US Green Building Council, to win over clients who may be resistant to the notion of constructing a more expensive building with a warmer and riskier long-term weather future in mind.

Laxo, past chairwoman of the USGBC's Emerging Professionals National Committee and its representative to the USGBC national committee, says she returned from a training session in South Africa with former Vice President Al Gore's Climate Reality Project with a message: Builders need to be advocates for "resilient" buildings, for their own professional sake and that of the world.

Laxo says science shows continued rising global temperatures, rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather events.

"If we continue along this path, we will probably share the fate of the people of Easter Island (whose isolated inhabitants committed 'ecocide' by destroying their island's tree cover)," she said.

"What I'm proposing, and what the Climate Reality Project is proposing, (is) that we need to be both optimists and realists. We need to be realists because climate change is happening right now. We're seeing these intense weather events, and we need to prepare clients for it.

"But we do have the solutions at hand. They're available, and we just need to use them," she added, suggesting that architects and designers honestly confront the climate scepticism of some clients, especially since those "solutions" directly address the source a lot of carbon emissions - commercial buildings.

Laxo asserts that building professionals have a moral and ethical - and in the future, maybe even legal - responsibility to prepare clients for the effects of climate change, including intense storms, future water shortages, rising sea levels, more frequent wildfires and power interruptions.

More:
Architects prepare for climate change