Book Review

Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change:
a 21st Century survival guide
by Sue Roaf, David Chrichton, & Fergus Nicol
Architectural Press (Elsevier), 2005. $48.95 paper

by Carol Van Strum

Thousands of years before the discovery of electricity or fossil energy, humans whose dwellings most successfully protected them from extremes of heat, cold, water, and wind survived to become our ancestors. Today, as global warming becomes ever more manifest, their long-forgotten building techniques may hold the key to survival of civilization.

Facing a daunting choice between adapting to climate change or succumbing to it, we have had tragically little guidance in adaptation. Adapting Buildings and Cities to Climate Change fills that gap, providing an indispensable manual for builders, architects, urban planners, investors, and informed citizens. This is an elegant book, its technical information well illustrated with charts, graphs, and photographs; it is definitely worth its steep price, and is a good candidate for donating to your local schools and library.

Applying their combined expertise in architecture, insurance liability, and building physics, the authors thoroughly review current and future impacts of global warming on human health, survival, economics, property values, and insurability. These impacts, they argue convincingly, are far worse than the public realizes. Even fewer realize that a major cause of global warming is our energy-intensive, carbon-dioxide-spewing modern buildings and cities.

Even very small increases in average global temperature greatly increase the incidence of extreme events such as lethal heat waves, cold spells, floods, droughts, and windstorms. Survival of these events requires buildings capable of protecting occupants comfortably without depending on fossil energy. In detailed, thorough analyses, the authors compare a variety of ancient and modern buildings for their performance in extreme conditions; without exception, modern construction fails to provide more than token protection from extreme weather.

Today's lightweight, sealed-box buildings, which rely totally on air conditioning and central heating to keep occupants alive, not only waste fuel and accelerate climate change, but also become death traps when power fails during a heat wave, cold snap, flood, windstorm, or other extreme event. Electricity, the authors emphasize, is often the first casualty of such events, and the most vulnerable of our buildings are high-rise structures and skyscrapers, which the insurance industry increasingly regards as uninsurable.

The imperative to prepare for survival of climate change requires drastic changes in our building standards. Ancient techniques such as the elegant wind-catchers of Iran or climate-control gardens of Turfan, China, have much to teach us about surviving extreme weather in comfort. Survival of our cities, however, means listening to the scientists, the authors urge. Urban and land-use planners as well as developers and investors need to consult geologists, meteorologists, hydrologists, and other experts before contemplating development in areas vulnerable to rising sea levels, floods, subsidence, avalanche, drought, wildfire, and other increasingly uninsurable climate-change hazards.

The authors emphasize throughout the book the futility of adapting to climate change if our adaptations add to the problem. Developing alternative energy sources and reducing greenhouse gases are therefore a given, but even if we could achieve total replacement of fossil fuels overnight, global changes already set in motion would continue for a century or more. Adaptation is thus our only hope for survival as a species.

Because the drastic changes needed will not happen without severe market pressure, this book, with its emphasis on liability and insurability, is a must for money managers and loan officers.

 

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