This summer has been hard. Too hard for too many.
Wildfires are consuming thousands of hectares across Canada and around the world. Too many Canadians have watched the sky turn orange. Thousands have been evacuated. Smoke has travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres, turning air quality itself into a health risk.
And the science is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
World Weather Attribution recently concluded that human-caused climate change roughly doubled the likelihood of the fire-prone weather conditions behind this year’s severe Canadian fires.
Meanwhile, record heat and drought are reinforcing one another around the world. European rivers have fallen to levels that are disrupting transportation and electricity generation. Global sea-surface temperatures reached a record high for July. Elsewhere, communities are dealing with devastating floods.
It’s not good. Okay, it’s terrible. But do not despair.
Despair Is Not a Strategy
The climate conversation can sometimes make the problem feel simply too enormous. What difference can one architect make? One builder? One policymaker? One homeowner? One building?
Quite a lot, actually.
Earlier this year, the Canadian Climate Institute released Prepare or Repair: How Climate-Proofing Public Infrastructure Pays Off. Its updated analysis estimates that investing about $4.1 billion annually to adapt Canadian public infrastructure to rising heat and heavier rainfall could save governments as much as $8.6 billion every year in maintenance and replacement costs.
In other words, resilience doesn’t simply cost money. Resilience saves money.
If that is true for roads, bridges, sewers and water systems, think about the opportunity represented by the buildings where we spend most of our lives.
A high-performance building cannot stop a wildfire. But excellent airtightness and filtered ventilation can help keep smoke outside. It cannot stop a heat wave. But dramatically reduced cooling demand and stable indoor temperatures can protect occupants when temperatures soar, particularly if the power goes out.
And no single building will solve climate change. But millions of better buildings absolutely matter.
Keep Building Better
So how do we convince, encourage, sway, or occasionally compel, people to build better?
We don’t stop. We keep making the case.
Better building performance matters because of energy use and operating costs. Because of comfort and health. Because of durability and asset value. Because of insurance and lending risk. And increasingly, because buildings need to protect people when conditions outside become dangerous.
I believe there is a tipping point coming. Whether we arrive there through persuasion, economics, policy or necessity, the case for building better is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
And sometimes evidence of that change turns up in unexpected places.
Like a Bruce Springsteen museum. The new Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music isn’t Passive House. But it is LEED Gold certified, all-electric and net-zero ready. The artist who gave us I’m on Fire now has a museum designed to use considerably less energy.
Let’s take the win.
More important, think about who will walk through that 30,000-square-foot building: homeowners, builders, developers, policymakers and thousands of people who may never have given building performance a moment’s thought. Maybe the building itself will sing to them.
People will come to better buildings for different reasons. Some because they understand the climate science. Some because the economics become impossible to ignore. Some because they’ve experienced the comfort and filtered air of a high-performance building. Others because they’ve experienced what happens when a building fails them.
Our job is to keep creating opportunities for people to see and experience the difference.
So yes, read the headlines. Be concerned. Be impatient. Even be angry.
But do not despair!
Keep talking. Keep designing. Keep advocating. Keep financing. Keep building.
Every better building is another piece of evidence. Every person who experiences one is another potential advocate. And every project moves us closer to the tipping point. We will get there.
We have to.
