Adaptation: a path to reduced carbon emissions

The two key themes for the COP negotiations (of which number 17 is soon to commence in South Africa) are securing international agreement and commitment on the mitigation of climate change through reduced GHG emissions and adaptation to the inevitable effects of the currently locked-in temperature rise.

To date much of the focus within the built environment has been for the mitigation potential of green buildings. It has formed the basis of the NABERS rating system in Australia and is the rack on which Green Star largely hangs its hat. However the complex nature of the built environment does not match the certainty of emissions reduction required by current international and national policy instruments such as the clean develoment mechanism (CDM). The complexity of the built environment is largely why CDM has not been widely adopted in financing energy efficiency in the built environment.

It is important here to note that complex systems are different from complicated systems. Complex systems display a degree of chaotic behaviour, where the multiple cross-linked relationships mean that small changes can produce large and unexpected effects. Complicated, but simple systems often have many interconnected steps, but the relationship of input and output is well understood and predictable (such as the accelerator on a motor car).

One of the requirements for rewarding mitigation actions is that the potential emissions reduction must be verified before finance can be made available. This direct link of investment to predicted emissions reduction works well for straightforward (simple) industrial processes and renewable energy generation, but has proved a poor fit for investment in alternative urban systems. It is also clear that industrial and RE processes are primarily related to energy production/consumption (which is core to broad emissions reduction globally), but not to less tangible effects like place-making, livability, social cohesion or relationships which should be priorities in our built environment.

With advanced modelling systems, we have developed our ability to design buildings for a pre-determined level of energy consumption, given certain restrictions on tenant behaviour. This has driven a wave of lobbying to provide climate finance to the built environment for mitigation. However this call has largely been unsuccessful. The design solutions we are coming up with are seldom a step change from the status quo, and our predicted emissions reductions are still too reliant unreliable factors. These advanced tools have allowed us to deal with some of the complexities of climate, but not of human behavior and not to the degree required by international mitigation agreements.

That being said, there is broad agreement that the built environment has a large role to play in driving emissions reduction. The key challenge is how to provide incentives for more climate-effective design in the face on complex urban systems.

One option is to recognise that the design responses to climate change adaptation have potential to reward initiatives for their resilience. Resilience is a characteristic of complex systems and thus does not have tightly defined parameters in the sense that mitigation does. The emerging thinking on decentralised systems is also pointing towards resilience as having a large mitigation potential, as well as allowing our cities to adapt to a changing cimate.

When considering adaptation, it is far less important to verify emissions reduction than to demonstrate system resilience under a range of potential scenarios. Designing for adaptation will necessarily take a wide range of factors into account; energy security, water scarcity, food security, waste stream utilisation, social fabric, civil society and ecological system health among others. It shouldn't surprise us that in addressing adaptation, we start to look to the very systems that are emerging at the cutting edge of broad sustainability.

Furthermore, through current funding instruments such as the Least Developed Nations Fund, Climate Adaptation Fund and much of the bilateral funding available to African nations, we may have a direct source of international preferential finance for broad sustainability on the basis of adaptation.

The secret to successful mitigation action in the developing world built environment, as well as a renewed focus on much broader sustainability might well require the prioritising of design for adaptation to climate change. And a renewed focus on adaptation may well be the secret to unlocking climate finance in the built environment.

In light of this opportunity, I believe there are some key questions which need consideration, and I would welcome input from any readers:

•  What are the characteristics of resilient systems in the built environment?

•  What are the key urban systems at risk due to climate change?

•  Which urban systems are intrinsic to adaptation, but also have mitigation potential?

•  What are the key weak points of current city morphology in terms of climate resilience?

Tribute

This last weekend the world lost a visionary leader, sustainability guru and an incredible woman. I have no doubt that the tributes to Wangari Maathai will be numerous, heartfelt and from far greater people than I. But still, I want to offer up my voice and my thanks to an astounding woman.

Since the end of last year, I have had the great fortune of assisting with the sustainability-related design elements of the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi. The project is still in its earliest stages, but at the kick-off meeting I had the privilege of working through our approach to sustainability with Wangari herself.

The intent of the project is to institutionalise the work of Professor Maathai and the Green Belt Movement (GBM) in an experiential learning environment; allowing those with more conventional development training to engage with the on-the-ground reality of sustainable development. The effect the project has had on me is to bring a new perspective to design, born of the real-life impact of her work for the GBM. For those who are not familiar with the GBM, please go and read about it (and then support them any way you can); tackling conservation, gender empowerment, rural development and food security through as simple an action as planting trees is a work of inspired genius.

My standard (and now tired) joke when speaking in public is to stand up as if at an AA meeting and claim “My name is Richard, and I am an engineer”. A corny joke for sure, but I think there is a kernel of truth in there – our approach to engineering design (as explored in previous posts) is not unlike the behaviour of an addict; addicted to manipulating nature, addicted to cheap energy, addicted to building up our own egos through ever grander monuments to consumerism. And even from within the field of sustainable design, the pursuit of ego is seldom far from the surface and never more so than in the field of green building design.

But seeing the honesty and humility of the GBM first hand and the actual results of her legacy was a humbling experience for me. Her description of resource efficiency, peace and governance as the legs upon which sustainable development must stand, made my own opinions on sustainability seem trite and skin deep and engagement with her ideas changed my approach to design. It challenged me to address less tangible concepts such as peace and governance from a design perspective.

This project led me to engage seriously with questions of eco-feminism, permaculture and broader peace studies from the perspective of an engineer. My inspiration from her work was not so much to open my eyes to new design, but rather to open my ears to the much wider discourse that exists on the margins of sustainability. And through that, to see my own field as though in focus for the first time.

There are moments in life when one’s perspective shifts fundamentally. Something changes the terrain and things aren’t the same afterwards. In terms of my understanding of sustainability in the deeper sense of the word, being exposed to Wangari Maathai was one of those moments.

So my deepest condolences to her family and her country and my heartfelt thanks for the chance of a lifetime to work with such a woman.

On the Topic of Avoided Power Stations

In sustainable design circles, we have become hugely focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy generation as the panacea to our climate change woes. And while there is huge merit in this, it doesn't tell the whole story. Here in sunny SA, the degree to which we are either locked into a high-carbon future or not depends hugely on how many new coal-fired power stations we build. Once built, these huge (4.8GW) power stations will operate at a relatively constant level, with variance in the national demand being taken up by more flexible generation (such as gas turbines or hydro, which are also typically lower in carbon emissions). Carbon emissions from electricity in SA come in of power stations, not kWh.

The current integrated resources plan provides the planned mix of energy in SA for the next 20-40 years. Right now that mix includes the construction of Medupi and Kusile power stations (as well as an increase in our nuclear power provision with its associated issues). From a carbon reduction point of view, we have missed the boat on Medupi - it is nearly complete and commissioning will begin in 2012. However, we still have an opportunity to address Kusile, and in terms of our long term carbon mitigation, avoiding the construction of Kusile must be the highest priority for any party claiming to strive for a low-carbon future.

The economic growth model currently pursued requires new generation capacity to come online faster than currently planned, so the political pressure to get large generation projects across the line is huge. The IRP includes an allowance for renewable energy, and one option appears to be an increase in the RE allocation. However the current debacle on the renewable energy feed-in tariff (REFIT) is likely to slow that process quite significantly.

So one of the only ways Kusile can be avoided in the time frames which are a reality, and our low-carbon path can be secured is if our urban spaces become significant decentralised generators of low-carbon or renewable electricity; not just for their own operations, but as distributed power networks able to power our cities. We need restorative buildings which will be both sources of wealth and sources of clean energy.

Our modern approach to rewarding sustainable design in the built environment is on a project by project basis. Boundaries of influence are drawn around each site and projects are rewarded on that basis. This can exclude restorative buildings as they seldom fit the neat boxes of project boundaries which would be a great shame.

The Secret of Villages

One of the sustainability axioms that I don't believe has been thoroughly unpacked is the question of densification. In every conversation about sustainable cities, the need to densify our cities is an early point of discussion. On the surface it seems to have merit but there are some fundamental concerns with a vision of densification as the silver bullet. And especially so in Africa.

The stat that is often trotted out to support densification is that people living in Manhattan have a lower carbon footprint than those living in Brooklyn. The high rentals lead to smaller dwellings and the good public transport, proximity to work and play and exorbitant cost of parking all play a role in reducing transport emissions. However, this highlights my first concern - that dense urban settlements are typically compared to urban sprawl. Because this supposes a false polarity - we are not faced with just two options. Human settlements have come in a variety of sizes and shapes and some have been more functional than others. We could be interrogating the strengths and weaknesses of many more models than just the dominant two in our search for solution to how we structure our cities.

It also supposes that carbon intensity is the only measure of environmental impact - another common position, if not an accurate one. Some of the critical sustainability considerations in modern cities relate to ecological function within cities - forests, parks, green belts and rivers connected to each other and the wider surrounding areas.

With respect to resource efficiency, there are many arguments for densification: smaller properties and shorter commutes being chief amongst them. However as a whole, they fly in the face of one key principle: denser urban spaces result in concentrated environmental impacts, and nowhere in my engineering career have I come across a point load that has a lower impact than a distributed load.

The environmental footprint of dense spaces extends far beyond their physical boundaries, and the feedback loops from these much wider systems being impacted are often difficult to isolate and pick up. It is said that the environmental footprint of London is larger than the whole United Kingdom. In a globalised world, such astounding concentrations of consumption are possible. But they mean that often the externalities associated with consumption are experienced by faceless, nameless communities in far-off places the residents will never see. Until we have an agreed, and accurate mechanism for assessing the true costs of dense urban spaces on those natural and societal systems that support them, to claim the resource-efficiency of densified areas is shortsighted.

Another concern I have with the Manhattan-Brooklyn comparison is how idealised the comparison is. But most dense urban spaces are not Manhattan; Central Park is often absent from urban densification models. And not many people want to live in the cities of Judge Dredd without a blade of grass or green leaf for miles regardless of how modern, hip or cool it may be shown to be in the adverts.

The urban dream is great at building self-esteem through achievement; the shiny apartment, new tv, smart car, access to the newest, coolest restaurants and bars. But it is only through deep human interaction, not just the transient collitions at the coffee shop, that our sense of community and attendant empathy is realised . While these things are not exclusive to less dense areas, they seem to me to be far more prevalent in neighbourhoods than apartment blocks. Density works best when one's raison d'etre is work and the trappings of wealth but when the rest of real life rears it's head, suddenly that shiny apartment isn't quite so appealing.

However the productivity of cities is evident. So how do we get the benefits of high-intensity interaction that comes with densification (and has driven successful cities) without compromising livability, ecology and resource efficiency. How do we have resist both the temptation of high density high impact centres and that of McMansions and strip malls? Well, I think a part of the answer might lie in one form of urban settlement that predates most others: the village.

Villages are remarkable from a sustainability perspective. They are typically quite self-sufficient; i.e. their ecological footprint does not extend too far beyond the boundaries of the community. Approaching cities and urban density as groups of villages side-by-side might offer us some potential to address densification in a manner that results in neither urban sprawl or packed apartment buildings.

The advances of telecoms tech have allowed us to work in a more distributed manner, so moving people to a central location can be mitigated. Satellite centres could replace the modern CBD and be linked together primarily by public transport and rely on pedestrian movement within their "villages". Many decentralized infrastructure approaches would be optimal in a village context as opposed to our current city thinking; including distributed electrical and thermal energy distribution and village scale water management (with nutrient recovery and water re-use).

And while it would be terribly naive to believe that villages would cure all society's ills, at least at a social level they may realise greater participation of business with that messy, frustrating and absolutely essential mish-mash called community. And participation of civil society and community in the function of business is one of the massive missing elements of current cities on the front of sustainability.

And so why is this so particularly relevant in Africa? Well, firstly, Africa is one of the regions where mega-cities are becoming dominant; Cairo, Lagos and Johannesburg; immense cities which pull people from vast areas into tightly packed centres, cities often typified by huge disparities between rich and poor and often surrounded and permeated by slums. Secondly, Africa is culturally still much closer to village living than many more developed regions. The potential to unlock the benefits of smaller scale design in the context of cities is still very much an option here. And finally, because the face of Africa's cities are still to be shaped. The opportunities for re-imagining planning, infrastructure, transport, communications and our preconceptions of success are abundant here precisely because we are less developed. And this opportunity for applying new thinking to cities might just give Africa the edge as we move into a resource-constrained future.