In the aftermath of the disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles, city officials, Angelenos, and construction experts alike are discussing how to rebuild the parts of the city that burned down. Most importantly, stakeholders have identified that LA must be rebuilt using strategies that will allow its new structures to withstand future extreme weather events—or, with climate resilience in mind.
Climate resilience is a term used to describe preventive policies, business decisions, and technical advancements that help better prepare people, businesses, and physical structures for the damage potentially caused by the climate crisis. It can look like predictive climate data shared with local governments to help them set up hazard mitigation plans, companies decarbonizing to rely on renewable energy rather than dwindling fossil fuels, or fire retardant building materials being used in places like Los Angeles.
David Hart, a senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Tech Brew that climate resiliency boils down to risk management.
“If you’re building power plants or you’re building cars, to the extent that the climate transition really takes hold, there’s a risk,” Hart said. “Resilience is about managing that risk.”
Resilience tech
Christian Agulles, the president and CEO of sustainable engineering firm PAE, thinks about the physical risks of the climate crisis daily. He told Tech Brew that when building climate-resilient buildings, he thinks about “the Four Rs”: buildings that are robust enough to continue operating through extreme weather, resourcefulness, rapid recovery, and redundancy, or having backups.
“With a lot of these strategies, when you’re looking at on-site generation—whether it be power or water—step one is to reduce how much you use,” Agulles said. “So then what you need to build out for your infrastructure is much less.”
And there are a lot of options for on-site generation of resources. As for energy, Agulles said that climate-resilient buildings generate just as much as or more energy than is used, meaning they don’t use up local energy resources and are able to run when utilities are down, perhaps due to extreme weather. Such buildings also use lower amounts of energy than usual by using passive design strategies when possible: Think large windows to light spaces during peak daylight hours, and operable windows to ventilate rooms rather than running an air conditioner.
When it comes to water, climate-resilient buildings tend to be net-zero as well, Agulles said. This can mean using technology to collect and treat rainwater to make it potable, or collecting and treating black and gray water to make it usable for flushing toilets or watering plants.
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In addition to having their own energy and water supplies, climate-resilient buildings might have advanced air filtration systems so they can close windows and remain operating during wildfires.
Resilience policy
When it comes to climate resilience policies, Colgate University professor of environmental studies Andrew Pattison told Tech Brew that they usually work hand in hand with climate mitigation and adaptation policies, or policies that reduce emissions and respond to consequences of the climate crisis. And climate resilience is “getting ready for the shock events,” like wildfires, extreme flooding, and other natural disasters.
“It’s the anticipation and preparing for—and the recovery from—those impacts,” Pattison said, “trying to minimize damage, especially to the critical functions of a local government or to a business.”
What’s more, Pattison said that good climate resilience planning is actually just good community planning. Not surprisingly, communities that are societally disadvantaged are more likely to be “vulnerable” to the effects of the climate crisis.
“It’s taking a proactive approach to planting the trees to deal with the heat event, but also being ready for people in your community to need to access cooling centers, for instance, or when the ERs are going to get crowded,” Pattison said.
That’s why it’s also important for elected officials and business leaders to make sure that climate resilience planning is “contextually relevant” to their area, community, or company—“sea level rise is a problem for San Francisco, not for Denver,” he noted—and perform vulnerability assessments to figure out where their planning is lacking before disaster strikes.
That said, great planning is made possible by ample funding, which Pattison acknowledges not all local governments have access to, forcing elected officials to make tough choices.
“We’re good at responding to the Category 1 storm, the Category 2 storm, but when the three, four, or five hits, we don’t do as well,” Pattison said. “We know that when the five hits, it’s going to be more expensive to fix everything than it would be to invest to save us from it—yet we tend to be better at responding to low-probability, high-consequence events.”
All of which results in some governments being more reactive than proactive, which CFR’s Hart said isn’t a good thing.
“We’re going to need, probably, public institutions of some kind to backstop the private sector,” Hart told Tech Brew. “Helping people rebuild exactly as they were before, that’s not always the best thing in the long run.”