by May Lin Chang, AIA, COTE Member
The built environment is the backdrop of our everyday modern life. As a central feature of human life, buildings furnish space in which to dwell, gather, work, trade, make, learn, heal, and celebrate. It is estimated globally every year 6.13 billion square meters of buildings are constructed to meet population and economic growth. To put this in perspective, 6.13 billion square meters is equivalent to 48 San Franciscos. The embodied carbon emissions of making and transporting building components such as steel and concrete account for 11% of all emissions. Add the 28% of operational carbon generated from more than 230 billion square meters of existing building space, and the building sector is responsible for 40% of global GHG emissions.
Before the pandemic 83% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. By 2050, 89% of the U.S. population and 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas. As climate change-induced disasters continue to unfold in front of our eyes, weather conditions such as extreme temperatures happen more frequently and are exacerbated by the urban heat island effect. High temperatures not only increase energy consumption, straining the electric grid, but they also raise levels of ozone, pollen, and other dangerous pollutants which make breathing difficult. The Sacramento Metro Air Quality Management District published an urban heat island study in September 2020 that found that downtown Sacramento is 7 degrees warmer than the rural areas surrounding it during extreme heat days. The heat created within Sacramento’s urban heat island gets blown into Roseville, Lincoln, and Auburn by the Delta Breeze. This causes those cities to be up to 12 degrees warmer than their rural surroundings because of the heat produced by the gas vehicles, roads, and buildings of Sacramento. This means mitigation measures implemented in the hottest neighborhoods lead to cooling for everyone in the region. The architect’s call to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public has a new and broader meaning amid challenges such as increasing climate extremes and social inequity that we are facing as a society. We must recognize that our profession can harness the power of design to contribute to solutions addressing the most significant needs of our time.
In the past 40 years architects have been aware of, but have lacked urgency in addressing the built environment’s role in causing climate change. This is why, as architects and design professionals, we contribute to the 40% piece of GHG emission pie. We have an undeniable responsibility in NOT taking action that has cost us time and opportunities to keep global warming below 1 degree. We’ve already warmed the planet by 1 degree Celsius in global average and in 2020 that translates to a price tag of $210 billion in damages due to natural disasters worldwide. Now we are going to scramble to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees at best! We can’t wait any longer. We need to advise clients to approach building and infrastructure investment for the long term by embracing life cycle thinking. Placing too much emphasis on minimizing initial costs is detrimental. If more attention is given to a building’s operation costs, this can lead to better outcomes both economically and environmentally. The stakeholders who aren’t typically involved in early planning stages, such as future homeowners, insurance agencies, surrounding communities, and taxpayers are the ones left holding the bill and bearing undesirable consequences. We are doing clients a disservice if we only focus on the first cost and don’t communicate the costs associated with operation disruption caused by events like power blackouts, water shortages, torrential downpours, etc. during the lifetime of the building.
Take green roofs as an example: even though it can be much more expensive to implement than other roof options, green roofs not only insulate the building and extend the lifespan of the roofing, but they also improve stormwater management, reduce the urban heat island effect, improve air quality, reduce noise pollution, increase solar panel efficiency and support biodiversity. It is an investment that provides returns in multiple ways. Life cycle assessment provides more comprehensive methods to evaluate design decisions and tools such as energy modeling assist in predicting building performance, optimizing building design, and reducing energy use in buildings.
The AIA Framework for Design Excellence provides inspiration and principles to expand the design process to make it more integrated, holistic, and inclusive. It prompts the team to ask different questions and bring in different perspectives such as community engagement to achieve an equitable, resilient, and healthy built environment. It challenges us to think beyond individual project boundaries because design solutions affect more than the client and current occupants. Good design positively impacts future occupants and the larger community. When we demonstrate public commitments in architecture and engineering to lower embodied and operational carbon by committing to the 2030 challenge, using the AIA Framework for Design Excellence, LEED, Living Future Challenge, and WELL standard, we meet our clients’ goals while challenging our industry. The AIA Framework said the best, “Every project can be used as a platform for addressing big problems and providing creative solutions. Every line drawn should be a source of good in the world.”
In the race against climate change, winning slowly equals losing. We cannot sit on our hands any longer. We need to ACT NOW. We need to communicate the urgency with people that are making decisions and point out that doing business as usual is assuming that climate will be stable for the next couple of decades waiting for us to come up with the perfect solution or new technology. This is a really bad assumption based on the trend of record breaking natural disasters in recent years, including the early and prolonged heatwave that we are currently experiencing in the West. The solution that works for everyone is the one that we need to work towards, not just for people that can afford or embrace it.
Solutions are going to be complex; they are going to be a melding together of different locally and regionally based opportunities, passions, ways people aspire to live and work. Architects and design professionals need to utilize our storytelling skills to merge solutions with people’s desire and move them into a broader social movement. We have to collaborate in ways probably never before imagined. Empathy and humility connecting to others, to the planet and to future people that we don’t even know and to be more humble realizing that we have an obligation to others and a lot to learn. Let’s not play the odds, let’s actually look at what’s at stake.
Project Drawdown, the seminal book by Paul Hawken, identifies 82 areas of action that can lower rising temperatures as soon as 2040 using solutions that already exist and work. 16 of them are related to the building sector. The next 9 years are critical to set the course for the future of the planet. If, globally, we can achieve a 65% reduction in total emissions by 2030, we will have the opportunity to remain below 1.5/2 degrees warming. All the architects and design professionals who are currently practicing are in the driver’s seat to influence the future climate. Every decision we make with our projects collectively can alter the fate of the human race. We need to prioritize strategies that reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) sources by bringing emissions to ZERO! Stop pollution before it gets into the atmosphere. Reduce electricity consumption and shift to renewables. We need to turn buildings into carbon sinks that remove GHG from the atmosphere.
In every challenge lies an opportunity. Climate change could be the turning point where we correct the shortcoming of many of the existing materials and standard practices in the construction and development of the buildings in which we live and work and replace them with healthy, sustainable, regenerative and equitable solutions that create spaces that are embraced by the owners, users, operators, and community members they impact. A beloved building—one so treasured it lasts for generations—is beautiful and truly sustainable.
To read more articles in the series, visit www.aiacv.org/cote