For all our protests, policies and projects, seeking to reduce fossil fuels and outgassing to zero, we’ve been unable to limit global warming to safe levels. No matter how many wind turbines and solar panels we install, it’s just not happening fast enough.

The designed world can’t cope with that much climate change, already wreaking havoc. Despite that bleak outlook, we must not give up on climate action for reduction in fossil fuels, as much as our One Nation and Trump’s MAGA maddies want us to.

Whilst we must continue to try to tame the climate, we must also deal with its worst excesses. Sustainability has now become survival. We need to design for a changed climate if we can’t prevent climate change. Renewables and resilience.

Australia is wide open to the big five climate-driven disasters: hotter temperatures; rising sea levels; storms and floods; cyclones; and bushfires. Most of our cities are temperate and coastal, more vulnerable than most to the vagaries of the increased weather-borne catastrophes.

Our littoral development is poorly planned for resilience: flimsy buildings, poorly designed for the existing climate, let alone a hotter one, built too close to the ocean, in flood plains, in steep bushland and the tropics.

Our buildings and urban planning will be massively impacted, and Australia could suffer more than many other countries. Maybe our quick and lazy urban design has made Australia the most vulnerable nation on earth.

Which also gives us a chance to show a way out – by being leaders in resilient design.

Despite a relatively benign, temperate climate in the Big Five cities, we have the least climate-adapted houses in the world. Some irony. We think we live in a garden of Eden, and we designed buildings not much better than tents. Now it’s becoming a garden of evil; what will we do?

We need a huge retrofit program of our dwellings, one that makes the ‘pink batts’ farago look like an amuse-bouche. Better insulation, particularly reflective insulation for radiant heat. Double glazing in every window. Weather-sealing to limit air leakage in and out.

Some have suggested (at the 2024 Sustainability Summit) that the best approach is to think about turning every dwelling into a ‘Passivhaus’. How to pay for that massive cost? Swap negative gearing from investments to owner homes, and make every sustainable / resilient initiative tax deductible.

Dark roofs on houses drive air conditioning energy use with increased heat, as temperate areas become warm and humid and warm and humid areas become tropical. What if inland villages and towns above the Tropic of Capricorn become uninhabitable, too hot to live or work in? And once thriving food bowls shrivel, creating shortages and famines. Do we adopt the Tim Winton ‘Juice’ solution and work at night? Or abandon them? Or have a design solution?

We need a hard conversation about building in disaster areas. Houses close to sea level, being washed away by vicious wave action in coastal erosion? Hello Collaroy. Towns built in wok-shaped basins prone to mass flooding during downpours? Lismore, come on down. Whole suburbs deep into explosive bush? Blue Mountains in a blue. Whole cities built on regularly flooding rivers? Brisbane, can you hear us? Can they be made resilient? Or do we withdraw? Or do we allow insurance to dictate urban design?

And the infrastructure that binds the city together? The talk of ‘poles and wires’ in the energy transition may be misplaced, given their tendency to start bushfires or fall over in high winds, plunging towns into darkness and despair. We see you blacked out Broken Hill. Maybe we need more underground cabling for safety and resilience.

Our cities are ‘property markets’, driven up by individual monetary value, rather than valuing the community-owned assets. To what extent, then, should the community bear the cost of propping up those buildings in the face of ever greater threats? We have a traditional unwillingness to address urban design issues like these, which belies the communal basis on which cities can be improved or made more resilient.

I'm asking a lot of design questions on behalf of a Friend. Of the Earth.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans, professionals draw sections; never at cross purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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