Resilient Redevelopment

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Disasters linked to climate change such as the flooding in Houston are likely to reoccur and may even occur at a greater magnitude. This must be understood when recovery programs are put in place. There is the temptation to recreate existing urban patterns and rebuild houses and roads much as they were before. This, however, will only result in the same impacts being experienced again.

To avoid this, redevelopment must be different and there must be learning from the climate change event. An example of this approach is provided in guidance developed for Hurricane Harvey and Houston. Here the guidance can be summarised in the following steps:

  1. Identify areas that did not flood. This should be the backbone of new development.
  2. Identify areas that have flooded multiple times and are likely to continue to be flooded. Work with homeowners in these areas to move to safer areas and do not redevelop these areas for housing.
  3. Identify areas that may experience limited flooding. These can be transitional areas which act as buffers and help reduce the impact of flooding.
  4. Model the extreme climate change events that may occur and incorporate these into planning, policy, and regulations to make sure that all new development is planned, designed, constructed and managed to be resilient to these events. Ensure guidance is reflected in practical measures related to issues such as location, foundation design, levels, drainage, and materials. Ensure measures are adopted and that no ‘shortcuts’ are taken.
  5. Provide clear information that ensures that stakeholders in new developments fully understand the potential impacts of future climate change events. This may include physical markers and maps indicating possible future flooding levels.

This type of approach is valuable as it ensures that redevelopment is resilient to future climate change events and avoids the situation where communities re-experience devasting impacts.

 

Is your environment obesogenic?

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Environments can be designed to promote particular behaviors. Neighbourhoods with pleasant walking and cycling routes, local social events, and nearby schools, shops, and workplaces encourage walking and cycling. Local, easily accessible shops, with affordable fresh fruit, vegetables, and healthy food increase the likelihood that people will have good diets.

Neighbourhoods divided by busy roads filled with noisy, polluting vehicles which feel dangerous and uncomfortable discourage walking and cycling. Cheap local fast food and grocery shops that only sell carbonated sugary drinks and highly processed foods are likely to result in people having poor diets.

Health, therefore, is often directly influenced by surroundings.  Obesogenic environments refer to environments that discourage exercise and encourage poor diets leading to obesity.  Obesity has become a modern epidemic with conventional cures related to education, awareness, and medicine only achieving limited success.

Reducing obesity, therefore, requires proactive environmental strategies that influence behavior. This must include achieving minimum requirements that ensure walking and cycling is pleasant and safe. It must also include standards on the retailing of food to ensure healthy food is easy to access and is affordable. These standards have been developed in criteria used to measure the sustainability of neighborhoods in the Built Environment Sustainability Tool (BEST).

Sustainable City Strategies

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How do cities achieve strategic sustainability goals and change?

Cities are complex and involve many stakeholders so achieving change can be difficult, slow and require a wide range of mechanisms. It is not sufficient to have a high-level strategy; real change requires strategic targets to be integrated and driven by policies and programs and publicity and incentives to change behavior are often also required.

However, how do we know required change is being achieved? For this, effective monitoring and evaluation are required to understand what works, and what does not. This should track indicators that are linked to strategic targets and ideally be available in databases that are publically available and easy to access.

Interesting work in this area is the public open database developed by Charlottesville in the USA. This has 72 datasets which can be used to track performance in relation to strategic goals. This can be accessed here.

Sustainable Building Assessment Tool

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The Sustainable Building Assessment Tool (SBAT) supports an integrated and responsive approach to achieving high sustainability performance in buildings. The tool is based on a holistic approach to addressing sustainability and includes social, economic and environmental criteria. It is easy and cost effective to use and is particularly relevant to developing country contexts. More information on the tool and courses can be found here.   If you would like Gauge to use the SBAT on a project please contact us

Built Environment Sustainability Tool

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The Built Environment Sustainability Tool is being updated. BEST provides a way of assessing the sustainability of neighborhoods. It can also be used to identify, test and compare interventions which can be used to improve the sustainability performance. The tool is now being updated and includes some minor changes to criteria and provides for more detailed assessments. The BEST 2013 version is available for download from here. If you would like to use the BEST 2013 or BEST 2016 (new version) please contact us.

Can-do Cities

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The complexity of cities and the wide range of stakeholders make it difficult for cities to change rapidly. However, climate change means that cities need to adopt approaches that provide results quicker. A key to this is ensuring that city stakeholders understand strategic sustainability goals and

A key to this is ensuring that city stakeholders understand strategic sustainability goals and support their achievement. An interesting approach is being developed in the UK by the Can-do Cities initiative which provides detailed information on energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction for UK cities. This is provided for most larger cities in the UK enabling residents to find out what is happening in their cities and why it is important. Messages are delivered in a punchy, highly direct way, for example:

  • Liverpool spent a total of £656 million last year on all of its energy and fuel bills
  • That means that 5.5% of everything that is earned leaves the area to pay the energy bill
  • If it invested in all of the profitable energy efficiency and low carbon options, total energy bills would be cut by £132 million a year

The campaign can be accessed here.

 

Zambian Pilot Housing

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Earthworks has just published an article on Zambian pilot sustainable housing projects that Gauge provided sustainability technical guidance and evaluation support. The pilot housing aims to identify appropriate construction methodologies and designs that can be used as models for large-scale affordable housing projects in Zambia. Projects were undertaken by Lafarge, People’s Housing Process, ILO and UNEP and were constructed on a range of sites throughout Zambia. Gauge provided technical input which aimed to ensure that housing maximized local content, were affordable, could be easily maintained and were highly energy and water efficient. Gauge also used the Sustainable Building Assessment Tool (SBAT) as a standardized assessment methodology to evaluate pilots and provide detailed technical recommendations for improvements. The article can be downloaded here.

How do you reduce water consumption to under 100 litres/person/day?

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One of the best ways of doing this is to model current water use and then test options to reduce water use in the model to decide on the best option(s) to implement to achieve required reductions. This enables non-cost interventions related to behavior (such as shorter showers) to be implemented before incurring the significant expense and disruption associated with major water system upgrading.
The Water Use Modelling (WUM) tool and course developed by Gauge support rapid modeling of water systems in buildings in order to inform water use reduction strategies.The course provides insight into how water use in buildings can be modeled. It includes a simple water modeling tool in Excel which can be populated with information from an existing building or a proposed building to produce reports of predicted water use in relation to targets.

 

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