When it rains heavily these days, architects all over the place sit nervously by the phone hoping their clients won’t ring to complain their lovely new homes are leaking. It’s a serious concern.
“Every architect knows to expect calls; more so now,” says Sydney architect Shaun Carter.
With the weather becoming more intense there’s a rising number of complaints about building envelopes becoming less fit for purpose.
“I’ve seen wind push water up 100 mm,” Carter says. Right past the flashing.
It’s the capillary action. A bit like when you suck water up a tube (or petrol in the old days). Water has tension, and once you establish a line of water flow, it can move upwards quite easily.
But leaky roofs are just part of the problem, there’s also heat waves, outright floods, fire and hailstorms pummelling our equanimity when the climate turns extreme.
Insurers are running a mile.
The Economist ran a charming front page a few weeks back. It showed a house navigating a wild ocean. The headline left no doubt as to its meaning: The next housing crisis – global warming is coming for your home.
The story, from what we could glean from the mean peek these elite publishers allow without signing up for the extravagant fees, foretold 10 per cent of the world’s housing stock is uninsured and uninsurable. And not just on the coast.
The way The Economist sees it is that governments will have to step in.
But as insurers bail out of the worst hit places in the world like California and big parts of Australia, and as the call grows ever louder for smaller government and lower taxes, we need to ask, what government?
If even the top end of town is getting worried, shouldn’t the rest of us?
In the end all the talk about emissions and the kind of energy we need and don’t need to get us to our net zero target of 2050 is, literally, the air around us.
When it comes down to it, this story is all about buildings. Will they or won’t they do the job of protecting us?
If we’re planning new or retrofitted buildings shouldn’t they be as resilient as possible?
Gary Rake who is chief executive of the Australian Building Codes Board is at the pointy end of figuring out what this looks like. He works with other industry leaders such as Richard Choy, CEO of NATSPEC an industry and government collaboration to provide improved specifications for buildings to figure out what our national standards in construction ought to be. In fact when we called Rake on Wednesday he was in a meeting with Choy who is a member of the board and chairs its steering committee.
Rake and Choy, like us, had just seen the communique from the nation’s building ministers who have agreed that climate projections should form the basis of our building standards going forward.
Rake told us he often talks about the eight editions of the Australian Building Code that needs to be progressively ramped up to meet resiliency needs by 2050.
But it was a conversation with a young staff member that gave him pause.
“She told me she expects to be alive in 2100; it blew my mind”.
We hear a lot about intergenerational inequity, he says, but a lot of it comes across as theoretical. This young woman’s comment gave shape and meaning to the work he and Choy were planning to bring to the next intergovernmental assembly.
But changing up resilience is far from said and done. There are multiple stakeholders in agreement for uplift in quality or standards but a powerful rump of that group is pulling in the opposite direction, much like that capillary action of water; in fact more like Niagara Falls running backwards. The communique from the Building Ministers’ Meeting, however, has set a path:
Building ministers have agreed to add climate resilience as an objective of the Australian Building Codes Board.
This responds to a recommendation from the 2020 National Natural Disaster Arrangements Royal Commission and paves the way for the Australian Building Codes Board to consider future standards which ensure buildings can better withstand more extreme weather.
This will mean fewer Australians and communities displaced by natural disasters, lower rebuilding costs, quicker recovery and more builders and tradespeople available to build the new homes Australia needs.
Changes would need to have all the usual parameters to be “cost effective, practical and fit-for-purpose”. Other issues included consideration of embodied carbon in materials and their quality and safety.
This would give Aussie families “a better chance at reducing the impact of natural disasters” said Ed Husic, Minister for Industry and Science.
Murray Watt, Minister for Emergency Management said the work would complement the $1 billion Disaster Ready Fund and work by planning ministers to better land use planning.
“We know that the severity and frequency of natural disasters are on the rise due to climate change, so ensuring future homes are better able to withstand disasters is key.
A media statement made it clear that the ministers were providing “direction to industry but not regulatory requirements”.
But it’s the very first item about cost that causes all the problems. It’s the age old cry from “Hanrahan” that
“we’ll all be rooned” if any improvements at all are foisted on the industry.
It’s a well trodden path for anyone trying to lift the quality of Australian housing up a notch from its origin story of the old slab hut (which some houses barely outperform today).
The optimists say there’s progress, with one of the most visible recalcitrant Master Builders Association. We know. We met some of the more forward thinkers within this huge and influential group at the at last year’s Building 4.0 CRC in Melbourne: keen enthusiastic types hoping the turn the Titanic around.
Alison Scotland who is executive director of the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council points to promising work coming from a collaboration between the Insurance Council, the Planning Institute of Australia and the MBA.
This is the kind of sandpit we need. Those who do the damage need to fix the damage. Insurers except it to a large extent. This is the dark horse of the industry and we need to make sure it doesn’t pick up its Tonka trucks and stomp off for good.
Because if the insurance industry goes, who is going to protect us?
Scotland says broad agreement on a national urban policy that factors in climate change is progressing well in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT; not so good in South Australian and Queensland.
But the “devil is in the detail” she says.
“How do we get those goals applied into decision making and at all the points in all the different levels of government? It requires a lot of planning and foresight to show what the impacts of climate change will be and how to prepare for it.
The best architects know what they have to do
Shaun Carter who is a principal architect of Carter Williamson and a former president of the New South Wales chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects, says leading architects – the top 20 per cent – are already working on solutions.
“For every degree the climate warms the atmosphere can hold an additional 7 per cent of water; it’s billions of litres”.
“Good architects should be thinking about how their building is fit for purpose. The thing about climate change is the unpredictability and intensity – whether cold, heat or rain.”
The specifications in buildings therefore need to be higher.
And key is the quality of the external shell. “How do you design a building that takes more water and more heat?”
Then there’s the possibility of cyclones moving down from the north of Australia along the east coast.
“Are we prepared for 100 kilometre winds? Probably not.”
Outcomes have a lot to do with what clients permit and how well an architect can push them to go further.
Regulations are clearly important but for a minimum standard, Carter says.
But this is sometimes tricky and other times outright contradictory. He points to the Australian Standards that mandates good cross flow ventilation and the Australian National Construction Code that allows windows to open no more than 100 millimetres, for safety reasons.
He believes these conflicts are under review. And he’s got his own list of issues he’d like to see resolved. For instance, windows would be better to always open outwards to minimise the changes of heavy rain penetration.
“Anything that opens inwards is fallible,” Carter says.
“I think the government is bang on that they have to think about climate resilience and the quality of our buildings. It’s not just user experience but the ability to be resilient.”
So far Australia has left a lot of solutions to the market, but as Carter says, the market is really a “cost thing”.
Not everything is very expensive
Gary Rake says a lot of change can be made at low cost. For instance swapping plasterboard for waterproof lining boards.
This means that if the place floods you can avoid the mould, the cost and difficulty of finding tradespeople to replace the boards when everyone around you wants the same thing, not to mention weeks or months of disruption if you have to switch camp.
Another idea, he says, is designing power outlets further up the wall and including elements such as wider verandas and battery powered ceiling fans in case the power grid fails in a heatwave.
These inclusions might cost a bit more initially but are also likely to fall in price as market supply ramps up.
Rake says field officers working in areas already devastated by climate impact are invaluable for the practical insights they can lend to future planning.
A great step forward in the ABCB’s approach, Rake says, has been the board’s view that it should pay attention to projected climate impacts rather than historical records.