BRINGING HOME THE REALITIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
by Dr Ray Cole

Climate change has intensified political and public interest for more demanding environmental performance targets for houses.

There is clear consensus that climate change will be the single most significant and urgent societal issue this century. Climate change has global and far-reaching consequences and any rationally planned solution will require sustained international political commitment and cooperation. It will influence every human endeavour and solutions will also require individual engagement and action played out at a local scale—and in every home.

In the context of residential design, climate change will have enormous consequences:

• The housing industry, like others, will be increasingly scrutinised to ascertain the nature and extent of action that it has taken to both reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to changing climate conditions.
• In the same way that climate change is already entering business parlance in terms of managing the associated risks, homeowners will increasingly expect houses to be equipped to respond to its consequence and maintain their asset value.
• There will likely be increasingly stringent regulation introduced to more expediently address housing related factors that directly affect or are a consequence of climate change.
• Global warming—and subsequent climate change—has been triggered as a result of past greenhouse gas emissions. Given the inertia of CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, the warming and expansions of the oceans and the melting of polar ice, climate change will continue to occur well into the future irrespective of current reductions in GHG emissions. As climate change becomes increasingly evident, housing will need to adapt to its direct and indirect consequences.

The notion of "house" typically refers to technical features and is described in terms of physical features—size, shape, age, and so on—and in environmental performance terms, by measures such as energy and water use, greenhouse gas emissions per square metre per year. By contrast, "home" embraces a wealth of emotional attachments that inhabitants hold toward the places they live, reminding us that progress will be shaped equally, if not more, by shifts in human expectations and habits than by technical progress. Whereas the environmental performance of new housing has come a long way over the past 10 years, climate change will likely transform the environmental priorities and profoundly influence where, how and what kind of houses we build. The notion of a "sustainable house" is also widely used and suggestive of environmentally progressive design. Housing, however, in and of itself, cannot be "sustainable" but, when integral to the built environment, can be designed to support sustainable patterns of living. The emphasis of current green residential building relates to mitigation—reducing resource use (energy, water, materials and land) and environmental loadings (GHG emissions, ozone depleting substances, liquid effluents and solid wastes) on natural systems. These issues have been institutionalised in current best green design practices and in voluntary building environmental assessment methods. Mitigation strategies temper the extent of future climate change, the critical issue being the prevention of reaching a situation of uncontrolled change—a period now estimated in terms of a few decades. The benefits of current mitigation strategies will not be experienced by the current generation—they represent a critical commitment to intergenerational responsibility.

In his seminal book, House Form and Culture, Amos Rapoport (House Form and Culture, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969) asserts that house form is not simply the result of physical forces or any single causal factor, but is the consequence of a whole range of socio-cultural factors seen in the broadest terms, and raises the notion that building form emerges profoundly from the collective worldview held by the society. Given a certain climate, the availability of certain materials, and the constraints and capabilities of a given level of technology, Rapoport suggests that what finally decides the form of a dwelling and moulds the spaces and their relationships is the vision that these indigenous cultures had of the "ideal life". It is the contention of this paper that the far-reaching consequences of climate change will profoundly influence our collective notion of an ideal life.

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Dr Ray Cole is a Professor and Director of the University of British Columbia (UBC) School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture where he has been teaching environmental issues in building design for the past 30 years. Dr Cole is the Academic Director of the School's Design Centre for Sustainability and holds the UBC designation of Distinguished University Scholar. He is currently a Director member of the Canada Solar Buildings Research Network and past Director member of the Canadian Green Building Council.

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