Building Bridges: The End of the Climate Debate

Do you believe in climate change? A simple question, though many people have had trouble nailing down their answer. Research has shown that Americans hop the fence depending on economic and political climates—and not always toward the greener side.

But let’s pretend for a moment, that we do agree with the vast majority of scientists (approximately 96 percent) who believe global warming is occurring.

Then the questions get harder.

Do you believe we can prevent climate change?                   
In the beginning—back when the First World Climate Conference was held in 1979, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988, when the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997—the answer among many researchers and scientists was “yes.”

But as the Kyoto Protocol became riddled with exemptions, the Copenhagen Accord eroded to non-binding agreements, U.S. climate legislation stalled, and political punditry drowned out the voice of reason, the “yes” fizzled down to a “maybe.”

Still, many climate change advocates at the time were only interested in mitigation strategies (despite their ineffectiveness). Adapting to a damaged world was admitting defeat, they said, and diluting the conversation on climate change mitigation altogether.

Today, those scientists, activists, and policy-makers have answered the same old question with a new answer. Can we prevent climate change? “Absolutely not.”

On March 31, Working Group II of the IPCC published “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability,” detailing current impacts, future risks, and opportunities for action to reduce the effects of climate change. It is the culmination of years of work by hundreds of authors from 70 countries, and over 1,700 expert and government reviewers. Together, they have confirmed “the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents,” and we are “ill-prepared for the risks from a changing climate.” (See the sidebar on pg. 78 for the seven key risk areas identified in the report’s Summary for Policymakers.)

Scary as they sound, these claims represent a new and exciting framework for the climate conversation, because Working Group II is focused strictly on adaptation—what we do when mitigation falls short.

“By dismissing adaptation we’re kind of saying we don’t need to do a better job preparing for climate and weather, and that just doesn’t make sense,” said Ben Preston, drafting author of IPCC Working Group II’s most recent report, and deputy director of the Climate Change Science Institute at Oakridge National Laboratory. “People have started realizing, ‘Oh yeah, we do actually experience extreme weather events right now, and we can probably do a better job preparing for those.”

Thus we face a harder question still:

Can we adapt to climate change fast enough to protect our infrastructures, economies, and human lives?

There are no more “yes” and “no” answers, but an overwhelming system of variables and uncertainties to wade through. The future, as we will hear from the voices that follow, can still be bright, if we choose to work together and build smarter.

If any doubt remained about our need to prepare for climate change, Hurricane Sandy blew it right out of the water in October and November of 2012.

“It did of course demonstrate that we’re not particularly well prepared around the coastline,” said Guy Nordenson, partner at Guy Nordenson and Associates and professor of architecture and structural engineering at Princeton University. “Over time it’s not going to take a storm the size of Sandy to cause that kind of flooding if you already have a couple feet of sea level rise to start from. But part of the problem is we’re not well prepared for even the kind of storms that we can see today.”

When Sandy reached Manhattan on the night of October 29, it hit Battery Park with a record-breaking 13.88-foot surge level. (The prior record of 10.02 feet was set in 1960 by Hurricane Donna.) Infrastructure came to a standstill. Train stations looked like aqueduct pipes, highways like riverbeds. Millions lost power. Emergency teams evacuated some 6,500 patients from hospitals and nursing homes as six of Brooklyn and Manhattan’s biggest hospitals were forced to close—drowning under water and the influx of patients until the generators ran dry. In Breezy Point, a 6-alarm electric fire took 135 homes, while FDNY trucks were caught in tragic irony along streets flooded with up to 12 feet of water.

By November 1, more than 72 hours after the hurricane’s landing, 650,000 people were still in the dark. By November 2, 67 percent of gas stations in metropolitan New York had run out of gas. When schools were set to reopen on November 8, more than 80 percent stayed closed because of severe damage.

After 12 days, some 35,000 tenants in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) projects in Lower Manhattan, Coney Island, and Far Rockaway had no heat or hot water. Of those, 13,000 were also without power, trapped inside by blacked out elevators.

Ultimately, 43 people in the city died as a result of the storm and its aftermath.

While it is difficult to find a silver lining in such circumstances, the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy were a wake-up call that sparked a renaissance in city planning.

“Getting to the table, I think, has started to happen very much because of Sandy, because we’re crisis-driven,” said Lance Jay Brown, AIANY president, and co-chair of the chapter’s Design for Risk and Reconstruction (DfRR) Committee. “I think we have to give enormous credit to the previous mayor.”

He is referring, of course, to Michael Bloomberg, whose administration was marked by a particular focus on design-based initiatives. He created programs like PlaNYC as far back as 2007, aimed at preparing the city for population increases as well as climate change. But the massive proliferation of projects and initiatives that have emerged in the year and a half since the storm is unlike anything seen before it, and represents a turning point in the way the city addresses issues of climate change and natural disaster.

In December 2012, the mayor announced the formation of the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR), a sub-set of PlaNYC focused specifically on “producing a plan to provide additional protection for New York’s infrastructure, buildings, and communities from the impacts of climate change.” Their subsequent report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York,” is a must-read for anyone interested in the big-picture agenda, and includes 257 initiatives—many of which are currently underway.

Bloomberg also created the Office of Recovery & Resiliency (ORR), with Director of Resiliency Daniel Zarrilli at the helm. Now that Bill de Blasio has taken over as mayor, Zarrilli is still in place, working alongside Senior Advisor to the Mayor for Recovery, Resiliency, and Infrastructure Bill Goldstein and Director of the Housing Recovery Office Amy Peterson to oversee the city’s climate resiliency programs.

Meanwhile, on December 7, 2012, President Barack Obama signed an executive order creating the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, and appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Shaun Donovan as chair. Here, again, task force initiatives were given the support to proliferate.

“There are a lot of different projects and initiatives that I think can be brought together, some of which could get done fairly soon,” said Nordenson, who sits on the jury of the Rebuild by Design competition, one of the many emergent programs created by HUD and the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force where post-Sandy initiatives can coalesce. “There is a lot of money coming to New York City and New York State as a result of Sandy, and good ideas on how to spend it.”

This overwhelming convergence of support and resources has made NYC a model for other municipalities around the country—but only if those insights have a means of dissemination.

“The question I have is how much of that actually gets implemented? And then how much of that gets transferred to other communities?” asked Preston, referencing the significantly smaller resource pool available in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn. where a two-person sustainability office often looks to New York for guidance. “How do you share knowledge? That’s a big part of it.”

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fixing the system
Without a sweeping purview, climate change adaptation strategies are dead in the water. Solutions providers need to cast a wide, redundant net to catch all the possible vulnerabilities set to emerge as conditions rapidly evolve. As such, large-scale initiatives bring together an enormously complex web of stakeholders: public-sector organizations from the federal, state, and city level; community groups, non-profits, private developers, contractors, technicians—and, of course, designers.

“It’s tricky,” admits Preston from his IPCC perch above the execution hurdles. “It’s one of those things that I think is very easy for researchers to say, but when you actually work within municipal government and big government, and your development is dependent upon federal funds and guidelines about how the money can be spent, and so on, it’s not that easy to do in practice.”

It is here in the middle that architects and designers are poised to carve out a new leadership position for our field, and embrace it as an opportunity to advocate for not only the kinds of solutions we are able to provide, but also our overarching way of doing business.

“You have to collaborate between the people that build it, the people that fund it, the people that take care of it; the design has to incorporate all of those things,” said Claire Weisz, FAIA, founding principle of WXY Architecture + Urban Design, one of the firms participating in the Rebuild by Design program. “In a sense, that is actually the way you need to work to make something resilient.”

Organizations like the AIANY DfRR Committee and programs like Rebuild by Design have provided a critical platform for multidisciplinary exploration, but perhaps the clearest connection comes from the Urban Green Council, who created the Building Resiliency Task Force in 2013 at Bloomberg’s direct request.

Since the release of the task force’s June 2013 report, 16 out of 33 recommendations have been passed into law, strengthening requirements for both new and existing buildings in New York. It is an astounding feat, considering the hurdles that stand between idea and execution.

“It’s a very long and kind of torturous road,” said Russell Unger, executive director of the Urban Green Council. “There are lots of great ideas out there, but there are lots of reasons why they can’t happen. That’s a little bit where the art comes from when you have large groups. …You need the right group of people managing the process, and I think that’s one of the things that we’ve been able to bring to the table given our experience in policy-making and understanding different parts of the industry.”

As more groups are coming together to collaborate on these solutions, there has been a marked push for creating clear hierarchies to help manage the system.

“There’s a flood of information, and it has to be somehow digested and filtered and acted upon,” said Brown. “I think that’s why there are those who are asking for a resiliency department at the federal level that would begin perhaps to do the kinds of work that the Rebuild by Design competition is doing in the northeast, because there is a recognition growing at the federal level that this country is not prepared for certainly the climate-related risks that are coming at us.”

In the push for greater recognition, designers should also focus more attention on policy-making and legislation in general. As it stands, the bark of our industry is considerably smaller than its bite. Unger refers to designers as the “core foot soldiers” of the green building movement, “driving most of the ideas” and providing more pro bono time and effort than any other industry (except, perhaps, legal teams). Designers are the critical link between thought and action, but we are rarely at the table when determining what to do.

“There are far, far too few designers involved in policy-making. If you look at government, if you look across other non-profits, it’s pretty unusual to find a staff member who has technical building experience, whether it’s architecture, engineering, planning, or construction,” said Unger. “You need someone who knows what the requirements are today, who can think about what else they should be, and who is not too hindered by what already exists. And that may seem straight forward, but it’s actually really challenging,”

Brown sees specific opportunity for the A+D community to improve their legal protections by supporting so-called “Good Samaritan” legislation that would allow architectural and other design professionals “to jump in when there’s a serious disaster and not be sued for trying to help.” Here again, that kind of state-level acknowledgement solidifies the understanding that the government is not equipped to respond to climate change risks without the input of our community.

Currently, 27 states have enacted legal protections for architects and designers doing disaster response work, and New York is poised to become the 28th if new legislation passes.

“I take that as a bit of a barometer of awareness, because not every one of those places, or not all the places in those states, have been harmed, but at the state level there’s a recognition,” Brown said.

fixing the building
Meanwhile, there is plenty of work to be done within the current system—and plenty to learn from projects already underway.

In 2013 the Key City Council passed new legislation for NYC that increases requirements for flood-resistant construction in healthcare facilities; mandates electrical, fire protection, and other critical building systems be moved above flood elevations; and requires all new and renovated buildings to install special “quick-connect” mobile generator hook-ups by 2033.

These laws represent a critical step forward for the city, with plenty more changes in the pipeline. (See the graphic on pg. 82 for a detailed list of recommendations Urban Green Council presented for commercial buildings.)

What can we learn from them so far? Here are some takeaways with the highest degree of consensus, from the global thinkers at the IPCC, down to community activists on the ground in New York:

1. They are not overly proscriptive.
There is great danger in treating adaption solutions like an emergency checklist.

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“Overall standards I’m not convinced will work in places like cities that have so many existing conditions” said Weisz. “You basically want to have a really vibrant, robust tool kit. Some of the tools will only be used by some people in certain circumstances, but you have stuff that people don’t have to invent themselves every time. That’s what’s important.”

In the case of the Urban Green Council, that meant avoiding specific retrofit recommendations, focusing instead on “removing the many barriers to resiliency improvements, sharing information, and giving owners options,” according to the Building Resiliency Task Force report.

“We need to make sure as we’re advancing, we’re not held back by requirements that existed for a different purpose that no longer serve any benefit and just hold things back. We try to be very conscious of that,” said Unger.

2. We can address intrinsic uncertainties by designing in flexible layers.
“Design a berm like a car,” said Nordenson. “You’re not designing it for a particular kind of crash, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re designing it to be safe.”

The key is building in layered solutions, with ample redundancies, based on multiple future scenarios—yes, designing for the hundred-year flood, but also having a contingency plan for the five-hundred year, levee-breaking superstorm.

“It’s adaptation in part also because it’s adaptable,” said Nordenson. “Part of the shift has been from building hard infrastructure that tries to solve the problem once and for all to designing things that you can modify over time as you learn what’s actually going to happen.”

3. Legislation determines the minimum requirement; strategic policy incentivizes going above and beyond.
Once again, the threats of climate change do present a silver lining, if we choose to approach the issues with a dedication to high-value design, as opposed to a mandated adherence to new rules.

“There will always be people who will go above and beyond, and there will always be people who just do the minimum, and you’ve got to be thinking about both when you’re setting policy,” said Unger.

The Rebuild by Design competition was one such framework that pushed design teams to think about larger-scale benefits. When Claire Weisz and her team worked on their Blue Dunes submission (Shown on pg. 74-75.), they started by asking themselves, “What does ‘Will it work?’ actually mean?.” The answer led the team to analyze costs in terms of the value it would create for both local communities and the larger region.

“In general, I think all of the teams were really in a dialogue about how resiliency adaptation is all about adding value when you look at risk reduction, so you get a double win for both our financial economy and also for our social economy,” Weisz said. “I think that’s the next stage.”

Which gets to another critical component: proving that climate change adaptation strategies can be profitable investments, particularly when it comes to commercial development.

business-minded
Yes, investing in additional resilient design elements—and performing the due diligence required to select them—is expensive, and renovation often even more so. Historically, selling clients on the value of these investments has been a challenge, particularly in commercial environments. What’s more, even after events like Sandy paint a clear picture of the potential risks and costs, it can still be a tough sell.

“What normally happens with these things is unless they get institutionalized as part of the building regulations, people forget,” said Nordenson. “And that’s true after any national disaster.“

With a precedence set for communities waiting to act until after a disaster like Sandy, how can we advocate for more preemptive action?

In general, the onus falls largely on architects and designers to make the case for long-term investment. Building and infrastructure projects are, after all, meant for the long-term. Can we convince clients that investing now is actually cheaper than paying later? Clear optimism in that regard can be pretty hard to come by, but there are some signs that we are getting better at creating compelling arguments and communicating our message.

The Urban Green Council emphasizes, for example, that its Building Resiliency Task Force recommendations, “are intended to minimize interruptions to building functionality while allowing the market to dictate the need to implement resiliency measures.”

“Still,” the report urges, “the city has an overall interest in maintaining a viable economy by reducing large-scale business disruption.”

That focus on business disruption as a vulnerability to be avoided is a critical tool for resilient design advocates all the way up to the international level.

“People want to see economic development, they want to see new buildings being built, they want to see populations growing in urban areas, new infrastructure—but as you build these things, if you do so without any consideration for the risk that’s there right now or the risk that’s there and might be exacerbated in the future, then you’re kind of building vulnerability into your system,” said Preston at the IPCC. “How do we find other ways of enjoying the amenities of landscapes and environments in coastal areas without necessarily putting assets and infrastructure at risk? That’s the kind of long-term thinking we’d like to see.”

Ultimately, our argument should be not “invest in this because of the environment,” he added, but “invest in this because it is simply better—for the environment, for city culture, for economic development.”

In the case of New York City and the Blue Dunes project, Weisz brings up an important point: cities often change faster than even the climate. Once again it’s about being flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions—in this case not environmental but cultural. “You look at what neighborhoods are hot and what are not for different purposes—you know, look at 25 years ago, what were the most popular neighborhoods in what cities? You’ll find they’re very different today,” she said.

With a project like Blue Dunes, which presents a plan for protecting coastal New York and New Jersey from the worst of the storm surge without the need for sea gates, the protection is not offered only to those perched on high property values. “The problem, of course, with the gates is that even though on an economic level you may be protecting higher value properties, you’re still not protecting properties and people outside of the gates,” said Weisz. “And you never know with such a dynamic economy.”

the art of advocacy
That leaves us with a final question: What should we do now, or where can we do more?

It is first important to note, if it hasn’t been made clear already, that what we say really does matter. Designers are uniquely poised to present solutions in a world largely fraught with fears—and that power alone gives us a psychological advantage, according to researchers like Connie Roser-Renouf at the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

“We know from a lot of research that when people are confronted with threats that they feel there’s nothing they can do about, they just think about something else,” she said. “When you’re talking about the issue you want to try to always, always balance risk, the threat, with talk about the solution, and for designers, you guys are really well-equipped to do that.”

Design practitioners are often the missing link between high-level research groups and policy think tanks, and can help turn ideas into a reality.

“Those guys are always looking for good ideas about things that the government should be doing, things the private sector already is doing,” said Preston. “Putting those ideas out there and sharing them is sort of like feeding people bullets they can then use to shoot their targets with.”

According to Brown and his perspectives through the AIA, we are well enough over the hump of proving the facts about climate change, and can now focus on action. “I think we’re over the threshold of awareness, and we’re into the realm of strategy and figuring out how to respond. That’s what I would be looking for and that’s what I would encourage people to be involved with,” he said.

Even among those groups who are engaged on the issues, there is an art to getting what you want. A lot of it boils down to a simple fact of life: People don’t like being told what to do.

“Most people when they come to someone for advice the truth is they’re really looking for a sounding board,” said Unger. “It’s very difficult for a group of people to put together recommendations for the government or some other body and then have those particularly well received. … If you haven’t gotten buy-in, and the people who are receiving the information haven’t been brought into that process, it’s going to be a little hard for a lot of action to happen afterwards.”

So get involved! And more importantly, get involved alongside as many of your peers as possible. For starters, here are some organizations to join, as recommended by the sources from this story:

Association of Climate Change Officers ICLEI
 
Center for Climate and Energy Solutions Institute for Market Transformation

Urban Sustainability Directors Network