The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 is an invitation for architects from around the world to meet in Copenhagen July 2 – 6 to explore and communicate how architecture influences all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For more than two years, the Science Track and its international Scientific Committee have been analyzing the various ways in which architecture responds to the SDGs. The work has resulted in the formulation of six science panels: design for Climate Adaptation, design for Rethinking Resources, design for Resilient Communities, design for Health, design for Inclusivity, and design for Partnerships for Change. An international call for papers was sent out in 2022 and 296 of more than 750 submissions from 77 countries have been invited to present at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 in Copenhagen. ArchDaily is collaborating with the UIA to share articles pertaining to the six themes to prepare for the opening of the Congress.
In this second feature, to learn more about the science panel on design for Climate Adaptation we met with Billie Faircloth, Partner and Research Director at KieranTimberlake, Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Maibritt Pedersen Zari, Associate Professor at the School of Future Environments, Auckland University of Technology.
Read on to discover the conversation.
You are co-chairing Panel 1: Design for Climate Adaptation of the UIA 2023 CPH Science Track. What are the most urgent considerations to address for architecture and the built environment when developing practice and research on design for climate adaptation, and how has this been reflected in your work with the panel?
Maibritt Pedersen Zari: Climate change will affect human life in urban settings acutely. It is crucial that professionals in the built environment thoroughly understand the role that the built environment plays in the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises and then urgently take action. Equitable climate adaptation is important because not all peoples have contributed to the causes of climate change at equal rates and are impacted by climate and ecological changes in disproportionate ways both within the same nations, and in different parts of the world.
Billie Faircloth: The Design for Climate Adaptation panel at UIA 2023 CPH convenes experts to share adaptation projects, studies, and stories documenting the progress, challenges, and limitations worldwide. We prioritize conversations on knowledge, actions, and outcomes, beginning with Adaptation with Indigenous Knowledges, a subpanel recognizing the role of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that Indigenous peoples have cultivated for millennia and how their insights shape approaches to adaptation planning. We explore policies, methods, models, feedback loops, and technologies in two subpanels, Adaptation Through Frameworks and Feedback, and Adaptation Through Architectural Technologies. Adaptation Through Nature-Based Solutions discusses the possibilities of integrating nature and the built environment to solve local and global problems, including biodiversity loss, extreme weather events, and human health and well-being concerns. Our subpanel Adaptation Through Behavior Change and Action addresses the importance of architecture in enhancing effective human behavioral change to continue to adapt to a changing environment.
We already see the effects of climate change and witness urgent needs for the implementation of design for climate adaptation, but what about climate change mitigation? In your view, how can architectural practice and research contribute to mitigating climate change? What are your thoughts on how the built environment can take on the responsibility of being part of practices that are currently exacerbating rather than mitigating climate change?
BF: The design and construction of the built environment play a large role in reducing carbon emissions. Architects who choose low-embodied carbon or carbon-absorbing materials and integrate carbon modeling into their designs work to reduce carbon emissions and practice climate change mitigation. Landscape architects who work to design carbon-sequestering landscapes practice climate mitigation. The need for rapid and transformative climate mitigation cannot be overstated, and we will fully represent it in our conversation at UIA 2023 CPH. However, our focus on mitigation technologies alone could overlook who is adapting now, why, how, and where. If we are to “leave no one behind,” as the UIA 2023 theme challenges, we must better understand and learn from the immediacy of adaptation and its realities.
MPZ: Climate mitigation and adaptation must go hand in hand. Without intense and rapid work to decarbonize the built environment, the impacts of climate change will be more extreme and adaptation more difficult to adapt to. To date, most discourse about climate change and buildings has tended to focus on mitigation efforts. It is clear however that climate change is happening, and impacts are already keenly felt. In the context of just change, we must collectively focus on how to adapt to climate change alongside continued efforts to reduce GHG and/or sequester carbon in built environments. This is important for people who are bearing the brunt of climate change impacts right now but have not contributed significantly to the causes of climate change.
Through your research and professional practices, you have both worked with sustainability and the built environment for many years. In which ways do you find that engaging with the 17 UN SDGs can contribute to architectural research and practices? How do we grow and support a continued understanding of and commitment to architecture’s active role in creating the urgently needed sustainable transformation of our societies?
BF: The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) essentialize the aim of buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure, enormously expanding their boundary and, therefore, the consequences of design. Ultimately, architecture is only successful if it enhances human health, provides spaces for education and employment, promotes equity and inclusivity, improves water and air quality, and reduces carbon emissions. The SDGs make the slippery slope of our actions present and global.
MPZ: The SDGs are a useful framework to encourage more holistic thinking and ambitious performance goals for design professionals. The SDGs usefully link social, ecological, and climate issues into one framework. Architecture can support these change agendas by: 1/ overhauling traditional architecture education to center ecological and social outcomes of design alongside aesthetics; 2/ encouraging continued professional engagement and learning about these issues by the practitioner community; 3/ demanding that buildings themselves become active agents of creating ecological health through regenerative design rather than default to ‘business and usual’ models or sustainably frameworks that reduce damage rather than create health; 4/ encouraging policy change at national levels; and 5/ creating more transformative goals set in building rating system tools such as LEED, BREAM, Greenstar, and the Living Building Challenge.
What are the most exciting developments and promising movements you have identified in the papers submitted to Panel 1: Design for Climate Adaptation?
BF: The global design research community responded to each subtheme with candor! I am excited to see researchers challenging the state of our adaptation knowledge through local, traditional, and Indigenous Knowledges. Researchers are scrutinizing the efficacy of our policies and certification programs and the potential and limits of modeling and measurement. They challenge the form, function, and life of materials, systems, and assemblies and the depth of adaptation technology. They demand space to talk about the role of human behavior, patterns of living, and activism’s role in climate adaptation.
MPZ: I have been excited to see the depth and breadth of the papers submitted that cover a wide range of issues and ways to address the themes presented. Of particular note is the growing engagement with ecosystem services and nature-based solutions in architecture, and a reframing of the architect’s role in understanding and engaging with issues of social and climate justice.
The challenges related to climate change - and the resources available to tackle these challenges – vary considerably across geographies and societies. What have your considerations been on knowledge exchange across these differences in conditions? And what reflections have you had on the significance of exchanges of practice and research knowledge across different knowledge cultures?
MPZ: This is an issue we’ve considered by including people from different parts of the world and with different backgrounds among our presenters. We have also allowed non-traditional papers, such as photo essays, and argumentative papers to enable different world views, approaches, and ways to engage to be heard.
BF: The global design community must confront a range of presumptions and views on adaptation resources, their availability, access, and distribution. Communities and their leaders are working to adapt; however, as documented by the IPCC, maladaptation, or the inability to adapt, is a threat deeply connected to systemic inequity. Knowledge exchange promotes a deeper understanding of adaptation planning, demonstrates value arguments, and informs design strategies.
What are you hoping the congress delegates will take with them from the UIA World Congress 2023 CPH and what legacy from the event would you hope to see?
BF: Ultimately, we hope this event provides a forum for representatives from more than thirty countries to gather, share their worldviews, and build knowledge on climate adaptation. We hope this congress serves not solely as a forum for gathering knowledge but also as an inspiration for transforming the professional practice of adaptation in the built environment.
MPZ: We have chosen presenters that challenge and expand the critical discourse on climate adaptation. We hope conference delegates will be inspired to challenge themselves and their local built environment professional communities to aim for more ambitious, far-reaching, just, regenerative, and holistic goals for the buildings and urban spaces they design.
Stay tuned to the collaboration with UIA World Congress of Architecture 2023 and to our coverage of Copenhagen, the UNESCO World Capital of Architecture for 2023.
