Climate emergency and our built environment

Abstract

In early 2019, the Alliance of World Scientists (AWS) formally came out in favour of labelling climate change an emergency: on 28 February 2020, the number of signatories to their open letter numbered 13,422, from 156 countries. One in ten people on the planet now live in a place that has officially declared a ‘climate emergency’, and many cities and governments have started to outline the major steps that must be taken to address climate change. It is critical that we cut carbon and that we adapt to the changed future climate, with all the challenges this might bring. Last year, we saw the advent of a different global crisis as a result of human pressures related to climate change, when the world experienced the unbridling of a global pandemic. COVID-19 continues to confront populations around the world with ever changing pandemic variants. This global crisis was coupled with increasing frequency of extreme weather events and disasters due to global warming – growing heat domes that are fuelling climate fires across each continent that are consuming forests, killing wildlife, and spreading heat across the planet –with ever-increasing concerns about drought in regions running short on water resources. The questions that we continue to face are mounting as temperatures globally rise due to increasing carbon emissions. The largest emissions resulting in 2020 were from building sectors, which account for approximately 38% of all energy related C02 emission when adding building construction industry emissions. Land and ocean temperature increases, let alone melting ice caps in the polar regions, will affect all life and the built environment on this planet as we know it. The editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Conservation recently determined that it was critical to join in a dialogue to invite practitioners and other building professionals to share their learned experiences from conservation of our built heritage in an effort to confront these issues now. In response to this determination, the editors compiled the first volume in a series addressing the impact of the climate emergency on the historic built environment. In this special issue, we begin by identifying not only some of the immediate direct threats from climate change to our shared international heritage but also examine threats posed by our own actions in the mitigation and adaptation of some of these solutions. For example, is the historic built environment interfering with societies moving towards a ‘zero-carbon’ future (as is often claimed) or does the historic built environment in fact provide vital clues as to how such a future might be achieved? The JAC presented a special issue entitled ‘Renewing Modernism’ in 2017, which contained papers confronting the question of how to address and continue sharpening and formulating strategies to reinvigorate the various typologies and ‘isms’ that characterize the structures and component systems of midto late twentieth-century heritage. The 2017 publication focused on presenting conservation solutions