Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales

From Buildings to Cities

Nicholas B. Rajkovich, Seth H. Holmes, Nicholas B. Rajkovich, Seth H. Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000470994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales provides professionals with guidance on adapting the built environment to a changing climate. This edited volume brings together practitioners and researchers to discuss climate-related resilience from the building to the city scale. This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities. The purpose of this book is to provide a better understanding of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and resilience across scales of the built environment. Architects, urban designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers will find this a useful resource for adapting buildings and cities to a changing climate.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nicholas B. Rajkovich and Seth H. Holmes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003030720-1

This book began as two symposia hosted by the University at Buffalo and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA),: “From Sandy to Snowvember” in 2016 and “Adapting Buildings for a Changing Climate” in 2018. These symposia drew together academics and practitioners from the Northeast and Great Lakes regions to discuss the impacts climate change will have on our built environment, spanning across scales from buildings to cities.

After the conclusion of both events, and at the encouragement of our editor Kate Schell at Routledge, we expanded the circle of contributors to include researchers and designers from most of the climate zones in North America. Although the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the production and publication of the book, we are pleased with the outcome and hope that it encourages a vigorous debate on how we prepare our communities to address stressors in the future.

This book is a collection of a wide variety of perspectives and expertise on the topic of adaptation and resilience. Some of the contributors are academics, studying and developing new adaptive design methodologies; while others are practicing architects, planners, and developers working to execute new resilient strategies in the built environment.

This book is not a prescriptive approach of one discipline; the chapters that follow consider climate adaptation and resilience through lenses of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and engineering. There is a mix of technical information, academic writing, and stories, highlighting personal and professional experience.

The content of the book begins with Chapters 2 through 5 examining some of the simulation and modeling tools that are being used to understand, interpret, predict, and visualize the effects of climate change. Resilient building design must include consideration of energy and human health constraints as they relate to emergency events and long-term climate change. Whole building energy simulation techniques are used to predict energy consumption and indoor environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, mean radiant temperature, and sometimes air movement, for new and existing buildings.

Chapter 2 provides a survey of building simulation studies from the past decade that (1) utilize climate change weather projections to assess building impacts, (2) assess resilient design measures that mitigate impacts, and (3) have clear metrics for evaluating climate change-related impacts. These insights help to quantify successful metrics and best practices within resilient building simulation research, and to determine remaining research gaps.

Simulation is an informative tool to plan the design and renovation of engineering systems, but its use requires accurate inputs from its users. Current simulation practices select a small set of “representative” future climates (typical weather) and use this small sample of outputs to make decisions. The research described in Chapter 3 explores alternative simulation methods that use imprecise, long-term predictions from climate models and simulations with diverse plausible operating conditions, to inform design. Simulating energy performance for a large sample of possible future climates can enable more robust building designs.

Chapter 4 considers who these simulation tools are designed for, and how they might be improved to better engage community stakeholders in a co-design approach. There is a growing need for visualization tools that enable interactive exploration of local conditions and adaptation measures. This research develops critical capabilities not yet integrated within existing climate and energy feedback tools, and makes them more accessible to the average person. This platform has the potential to empower communities through heightened communication, shared knowledge, and design decision-making, in relation to energy management and strategies for climate adaptation.

One new design tool, called the Resilient Homes Online Design Aid (or RHOnDA), seeks to broaden that audience even further. Rather than focusing on unique, high-value, exceptional projects and an expert audience, the work described in Chapter 5 targets populations living in the existing fabric of repetitive, residential buildings. This research seeks to provide decision-making tools for homeowners and tenants by identifying a broadly applicable set of generic, probabilistic trends based on sampling, modeling, and communicating findings to the widest possible audience.

Following the initial simulation section of the book, Chapters 6 through 13 address how simulation data might be integrated with social concerns at the scale of buildings, communities, and entire cities. These next series of chapters provide insight about which areas and populations are most vulnerable, and how designers and policy makers might prioritize the needs of communities facing the greatest hardships due to climate change.

Climate change will disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and low-income individuals who are on the frontline of climate impacts. Community resilience must be rooted in neighborhoods, in respectful ways that shift power to communities, to increase self-determination and improve adaptive capacity. Chapter 6 discusses how Resilience Hubs provide an actionable project grounded in community needs and capacity, with the intention of helping residents thrive year-round, while enhancing quality of life and connectivity. These community spaces focus on (re)development in five foundational areas: services and programming, buildings and landscape, power systems, communications, and operations. They are designed to meet community needs in multiple operational modes, including everyday, disruption, and recovery.

Long-term, multidisciplinary planning that takes a holistic approach can lead to a more resilient social safety net, which reinforces equity and improves health outcomes. Chapter 7 addresses how design considerations, such as energy efficiency and materials, affect public health and equity. Adapting buildings to be more resilient to the effects of climate change includes planning for more frequent heat waves and associated greater demand for cooling, for more frequent extreme rains and flooding events, which can damage homes and businesses, and compromise indoor air quality and health. Resilience includes promotion of affordable housing, and infrastructure that is responsive to community needs.

Chapter 8 outlines the role of inclusive design in resiliency. Climate change also disproportionately affects older adults and people with disabilities, making them among the most vulnerable during both climate-related emergencies and slow-onset disasters. Functional limitations and reduced mobility are often compounded by other characteristics, such as lower incomes, race, and age. This is further complicated by their greater dependence on physical, social, and economic networks and support systems, which are often disrupted during weather-related events. There is an urgent need to identify, implement, and promote more inclusive design, communication, and policy strategies, in order to enhance climate change resiliency and build adaptive capacity for these populations.

A secondary impact of extreme weather conditions due to climate change is the growing risk of power outages. Buildings should be designed and built to ensure that they will passively maintain habitable temperatures in the event of lost power—this is the concept of “passive survivability.” Such measures could eventually be incorporated into building codes as important life-safety measures. Chapter 9 explores new methodologies and metrics for quantifying and assessing the passive survivability of buildings, and provides recommendations for further research needed to advance this agenda.

Coastal cities face flood-related hazards exacerbated by climate change and sea level rise, including erosion, storm surge, high wave events, and increased flood frequencies. Nature-based infrastructure and living shorelines can provide habitat, dissipate wave energy, and maintain people’s connection to the water, in order to minimize flood damage and prolong the use of coastal lands. Chapter 10 investigates the living shoreline approach in two case studies on the Island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. The research highlights principles, tools, and techniques for planners, designers, and practitioners; interactive visualization methods for site-specific restoration; and future research needs.

In the northeastern US, many municipalities are reckoning with keeping residents of floodplain housing safe, while struggling with population loss and economic decline. At the same time, climate models predict increasing frequency of flooding, due to larger and more intense storms. The current National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), created to dissuade floodplain development, leaves homeowners “blind to dangers,” or trapped in flood-prone homes. Chapter 11 speculates that, just as disasters create policy windows, socio-economic and environmental disturbances, and uncertainty can be drivers for experimental and adaptive design of community floodplains.

Urban resilience will be defined by those cities whose populations will be displaced en masse, or by the cities that receive those displaced populations from around the globe. Forced migration, managed retreat, and strategic location are among the terms used to reference the current crisis. Chapter 12 examines current resilient design and risk management strategies in New York City and Japan.

Sustainability and resilience are two design paradigms that have attempted to frame relationships between the built environment and its ecological and social context. Both address complexity, design for the long-term, and suggest an ethical framework for action. However, the two suggest different emphases and modes of operation, which are at times compatible and at times in conflict, and usually conflated. Chapter 13 uses a subject-object-mechanism framework to assess the extent to which each of these terms is manifested through the primary sustainability and resilience planning document for New York City.

To round out this discussion of resilience and adaptation to climate change, this book concludes with interviews of professionals in Chapter 14. These perspectives from practice are from both the public and private sectors in architecture, planning, policy, and real estate development. The interviewees work in locations across North America, from Florida to Alaska, and New York to Arizona. These conversations provide a glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of working on climate and resilience issues, in the field, every day. What makes these resilience pioneers so passionate about their work? What are they working on and how did they get to where they are? What advice do they have for others? And what do they see as some of the most important challenges that lie ahead?

We hope that this book will kickstart interdisciplinary dialogue and collaborative action among policy, planning, design, and construction disciplines by introducing a range of adaptation and resilient design approaches. In this way, this book is a handheld symposium, and we hope that it will serve as the foundation for future discussions of adaptation and resilience in the built environment.

We would like to acknowledge a number of people for supporting us during the development of this book. First, we thank the contributors for both their scholarship and their patience as the publication of this book was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, we would like to recognize Tom Phillips, and Amanda Stevens of NYSERDA, for their ongoing support of our research. Third, a number of graduate students at the University of Hartford and the University at Buffalo assisted with research and editing include Fahed Baker, Ashley Chiffy, Hope Forgus, Elizabeth Gilman, Gwyneth Harris, Nathaniel Heckman, Yasmein Okour, Krista Macy, Thomas Mulligan, Brenna Reilly, Kelley Mosher St. John, Harlee Tanner, and Michael Tuzzo. Finally, we would like to show gratitude to our families for their unwavering support: Julie Chen, Hudson Holmes, Stacey Kartub, and Nikola (Cole) Rajkovich.

2 RESILIENT DESIGN MODELING Where Are We and Where Can We Go?

Seth H. Holmes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003030720-2

Introduction

Contemporary building increasingly rely on advancements in building performance simulations and their resulting estimations of building energy use, indoor environmental conditions, carbon emissions, etc. As the climate continues to change, building performance simulations allow architects, engineers, builders, and policy makers to better predict climatic vulnerability and risk to buildings and their occupants.

Building codes and standards worldwide more frequently include building performance requirements to help produce more energy-efficient buildings (Young, 2014). These codes often rely on building energy and thermal performance standards created by organizations such as the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in the US, the Chartered Institute of Building Service Engineers (CIBSE) and British Standards Institute (BSI) in the UK. Standards such as ASHRAE 55 and BS EN 15251 regulate performance criteria for adaptive comfort criteria in naturally ventilated buildings (ASHRAE 2013) (BSI 2007). To satisfy many of these codes and/or standards, designers conduct building performance simulations to estimate building energy and/or comfort performance.

Numerous building performance simulation tools exist including simple excel-based BIN calculation models, advanced hygrothermal envelope mod...