Building resiliency

Climate forum looks past prevention to adaptation

by Allen Best

Which type of extreme weather do you think causes the most deaths in the United States? Tornadoes? Floods? Lighting?

None of the above, it turns out.

“Extreme heat is responsible for more deaths in the United States than any other weather-related event,” points out a new report published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, “and its frequency and intensity is expected to increase over this century.”

A 2014 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that extremely high temperatures that currently occur once every 20 years could happen as often as every two to four years by the end of this century.

All of this is relative. A July scorcher in Durango, Whistler or some other mountain town of the West might be regarded as a pleasant spring day in Phoenix or Miami. Yet how we adapt to the changing climate is an issue for all of us.

Adaptation was the topic of daily discussion last week in St. Louis, site of this year’s National Adaptation Forum. Increased heat came up frequently.

Nicholas B. Rajkovich, an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, talked about the need to create buildings that allow occupants to survive heat waves.

Rajkovich pointed to work by the U.S. Green Building Council to formulate responses to rising temperatures. The council, which created the LEED rating system, allocates 25 percent of available points for reducing greenhouse gas emissions of building systems.

But increased heat and all that comes with it are locked into the atmosphere, even if we quit burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said.

“Green buildings should include both mitigation and adaptation strategies if we hope to shape the built environment in a way that is both responsive and resilient to future climate extremes,” notes a report issued by the Green Building Council.

Has the climate begun to shift? Obviously, as is evident from rising global temperatures. Record highs have been broken with great regularity, and the mean temperature has inched up.

“Human-caused climate change has moved into the present,” said Katharine Jacobsen, who spent 29 years in water management in Arizona and most recently assembled the third National Climate Assessment.

But heat is just one consequence. “Add more heat to the atmosphere and lots of things can happen,” added Jacobsen. Some scientists, including Jacobsen, argue that human fingerprints can now be detected in the intensity of some weather events such as hurricanes and, perhaps, droughts.

Jacobsen asked listeners to consider the impacts of just a 1 to 2 degree increase in average temperatures. “The idea of 3 to 4 degrees or even 7 to 8 degrees over the next century is frightening to me,” she said.

However, there’s no certainty in how this plays out. To adapt to something that is known is one thing. But how do you adapt to the unknown? The future is riddled with unknowns, and climate is just one of them.

Resiliency has become the new buzzword in the sustainability community, and at the conference it was used like a transferrable ski pass. The word is defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning.”

In other words, the ability to take a punch and stay on your feet and maybe even dodge the punch.

For example, consider water infrastructure. In places like Colorado, California and Washington, dams were created based on what occurred in the past. Now add the big question of climate change. Is the answer to build more dams? And where? As one water planner from Denver said, the current climate models do not provide clarity for making such decisions.

Now consider communities along the oceans. Sea levels have been rising at Miami and Fort Lauderdale, adding to the potency of storm surges. It also means the seeping of ocean water into underground aquifers that provide drinking water. It’s called sea-water intrusion and up to 40 percent of Fort Lauderdale’s aquifers have been affected.

New York City knows something about getting punched. The city has experienced nine coastal storms, six heat waves and two widespread power failures in the two decades leading up to Superstorm Sandy.

“We know that in the near future, heat waves will last longer and bring higher temperatures more often. Heavy rains and storm surges will cause flooding more frequently, and there will continue to be power failures affecting large swaths of the city,” read a 2013 report. “New York needs resilient buildings that resist damage, protect occupants and allow residents who must evacuate to quickly return to their homes.”

New York has also decided that it needs to have decentralized energy production. With smallish microgrids, energy can be harvested from solar and other sources and perhaps stored in batteries.

The rising level of the Pacific is also a concern. In California, the university town of Berkeley, population 115,000, is deciding what to do about its century-old stormwater system.

Sea level rise could have major implications for investment, but so could future rainstorm deluges. The conventional approach, explained Timothy Burroughs, Berkeley’s chief resiliency officer, is to just build bigger pipe. Instead, the city is studying more permeable pavement and other options.

“That’s an example of what resilience looks like on the ground,” he said.

For more, go to mountaintownnews.net.