Mitigate Climate Change with Sponge Buildings

From Climate Mitigation to Climate Adaptation: From Sponge Cities to Sponge Buildings 🧽

The recent extreme weather events 🌧️ serve as a stark reminder: while climate mitigation is crucial, it's no longer enough for us working on the built environment. With expanding urban areas, we must take climate adaptation serious in our work.

I like the notion of 'Sponge Cities' 🧽 The image says it all, right? We need to do everything we can to make the water infiltrate where it appears as much as we can rather than causing detrimental run-offs from our sites and streets.

However, here's a thought: when we hear Sponge ‘Cities’, we often picture the interventions in the public realm like porous streets, public greenspaces, bioswales, stormwater projects… all responsibility of the municipalities or governments.

But a large percentage of a city is determined by the sites we as architects, developers and other stakeholders on the built environment are working on every day.

We need to embrace our responsibility and embed the idea of a 'sponge' deeply into our building designs. While it may look like a seemingly costly point on your BREEAM certification now, the long-term positive impacts are immeasurable.

My call to action is clear: Transform your buildings into sponges. Prioritize nature-based solutions and complement them with technological interventions.

In return you get immediate results such as enhanced green spaces, happier occupants, enhanced biodiversity, cooler roofs... and help our cities become more resilient on the long run...

#Resilience #climatechange #AEC #builtenvironment