While there are already warnings being issued for bushfire risk and extreme heat this coming summer, if we look ahead to 2040 and beyond, the current climate change trajectory could see parts of Australia experiencing up to 100 days a year of temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.

Clearly, building as usual is not going to be adequate to protect our communities in this hotter future. Adaptation is now just as vital as rapidly scaling-up emissions reductions to reduce the rate of global heating.

A recent panel discussion at World Green Building Week 2023 brought together experts from engineering, disaster resilience, property development, local government and ESG strategy to discuss how we design and deliver new buildings and retrofit existing ones to improve resilience and protect lives and livelihoods as climate impacts escalate.

Hosted by Cundall Associate Director, Hannah Morton, the panel included Jamie Nelson, Head of Development, Office at The GPT Group; Professor Cheryl Desha, Professor in Resilient Communities and Resilient Infrastructure at Griffith University; Phill Raso, Sustainability Lead for City of Perth; Madlen Jannaschk, Cundall ESG lead (APAC); and Cundall Partner (Building Services) Julian Sutherland.

The wide-ranging and robust discussion examined urban resilience at both the building level and at the wider scale of enabling frameworks including industry supply chains, policy, finance and the governance mindsets of those responsible for planning, delivering and managing property.

The over-arching message was that every part of the property sector ecosystem needs to evolve its thinking and approach to ensure lives and livelihoods are protected, so communities can navigate shocks and disruptions caused by climate impacts.

We need to rethink how we design and develop

Jamie Nelson said that from the perspective of GPT as a developer, owner and manager of community places, resilience is critical to ensure what is built remains “usable, viable and sustainable long term”.

“Market leaders, especially the property industry, need to lead,” he said. “We need to create assets that are sustainable and unbreakable, ideally that address both chronic and acute shocks and create built environments that are able to be continually used and adaptable for our society.”

Designers, builders and developers need to look at the criteria being used to develop a brief, and recognise that what was suitable in the past, may not be at all suitable for the present and the emerging future, according to Julian Sutherland.

Briefs need to be questioned as to whether they will deliver a masterplan, precinct or an individual building that will be fit for purpose in the coming years.

“We clearly need to change (the criteria) for a whole host of different things…temperature is the obvious one, but I think there’s a lot of other parameters and things that we need to think about.”

These include designing and specifying for all-electric building systems and services, optimising passive performance of the building fabric and opportunities for natural light and natural ventilation.

Mechanical equipment that run building services such as lifts are often located in basements – but in the era of more frequent flash-flooding, this is not a sound decision. There needs to be planning for back-up power systems and safe zones. GPT is already incorporating this into some of its developments such as 32 Smith Street in Parramatta, which has a public climate event refuge.

Ensuring resilience is an ethical responsibility for built environment professionals, according to Professor Cheryl Desha.

“I hold the badge of being an academic chartered engineer with pride, but that carries with it some pretty significant responsibility in designing well and not in harm’s way for communities going forward.

“Our responsibilities there…I think will come under the spotlight as we go forward, because there will be inquiries and commissions about the impacts and consequences of decisions in this space.”

We need to rethink where we develop

Despite seeing repeated disasters, some Australian developers are still creating communities on floodplains. There is also a lack of commitment within the urban domain to ensuring spaces are accessible, protected from extreme heat, inclusive and environmentally responsible.

“We have an overwhelming amount of choice in our public space at the moment and unfortunately the choice is often about bad, less bad or really bad with not much opportunity to choose into things that are actually improving quality of life for communities around the country,” Professor Desha said.

She said that a recent event hosted by Natural Hazards Research Australia and Suncorp on assisted relocations highlighted the substantial risks that exist for the insurance sector. There are also implications for the whole economy in enabling humans to move out of harm’s way – preferably in advance of that harm.

While right now reducing emissions and transitioning to net zero is a major item on the property agenda, Professor Desha said the next agenda will be around a commitment by public sector corporations and the public sector around designing in better places.

She sees there will be a time where organisations are “actually refusing contracts, refusing development applications when they are obviously in harm’s way of sea level rise, cyclones, bushfires and heat waves.”

Hannah Morton asked, where do we need to draw the line in terms of acceptable development?

“The design responsibility is significant and that’s why it’s across many different levels,” Jamie Nelson said.

He noted that the conventional one in 100-year flood map is no longer relevant – and has not been for some time. Resilience in the face of floods has two dimensions – the technical and the community aspect.

“There’s certainly the systems and protection measures the buildings need to have for dealing with flood, but equally there is the community refuge requirements,” Nelson said.

“I think from a design point of view, getting your cities right and thinking about the planning, even having substations and switchboards and those sort of things above ground.”

For GPT that has meant looking at new developments from the perspective of robustness, adaptability and ensuring new buildings are designed as all-electric assets, or where the local circumstance makes that unfeasible, designing to enable retrofit of electrification.

Demand-side flexibility and the ability to manage energy at the building level is also part of this equation. GPT is rolling out a demand-side flexibility program at many of its assets to support the transition and improve its resilience to a low carbon electricity grid by “very proactively” managing electricity loads throughout the day.

“So, when demand is going to peak for the community broadly, we will look to lower our demand and impact and therefore we can actually manage that to serve the broader community better at times of peak load,” Jamie Nelson said.

Professor Desha explained that one of the buildings she works in at Griffith University is taking an extremely detailed approach to understanding the building and how it functions, to ensure it can operate effectively when it is activated as a disaster response operations centre for Queensland.

She needs to know floor-by-floor what the energy usage needs are for critical infrastructure including refrigeration, communications, WiFi and lights.

A recent event when the Red Cross occupied the premises during flooding also flagged the issue that because the building’s solar is grid-connected, the solar cannot be accessed if the grid goes down, so the building currently relies on generators for backup power. This is a resilience issue many Australian buildings will share unless they have battery storage and the technology installed to switch to island mode.

Another aspect of the ‘where we develop’ conversation is putting greater emphasis on developing near public transport infrastructure and urban infill. This also increases resilience, Madlen Jannaschk said.

“We need to we have that discussion already, especially here in Perth and I know in other places in Australia, (for me) coming from Europe it’s shocking how much space there is in the inner city.”

Building more density such as townhouses into the cite helps households with financial costs also, she explained, as people spend less money on cars and spend less money on transport. It also creates better community connection so people can engage better with their neighbours, which also improves resilience.

Finding the balance with efficiency

In conversations around improving existing buildings, efficiency is often a major focus. But Phill Raso queried whether this inevitably increases resilience.

“We’ve still got so far to go with efficiency of buildings, but in the in the frame of this discussion, efficiency is actually the enemy of resilience – when you make something more efficient, you (might) take away the functions,” he said.

He explained that generally efficiency means having a building doing just the functions that are required as well as possible, whereas in resilience we are aiming for diversity and multiple users and redundancies and all the things that we need in case something should go wrong.”

The next stage of efficiency is working out what the balance point will be in terms of functions, adaptability and redundancy, he explains. By building in resilience, over time the nuanced approach to efficiency becomes more of a benefit.

“We know that about 80% of the building stock that exists today is still going to be there in 2050, and it all needs to be net zero, but it also needs to be capable of withstanding what we know is coming in terms of climate shocks and also the social change that’s going to come with climate change.”

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