Editorial | Building for climate change

Jamaica’s scorching summer temperatures ought to be powerful reminders to architects, engineers and real-estate developers what their peers of long ago understood: their designs have to be relevant to the hot weather in which they exist.

And worse, the island’s recent heatwaves aren’t passing phenomena. With global warming and climate change, it means that, for Jamaica, like the rest of the world, these extreme temperatures will increasingly become the norm, affecting how people live.

These issues, of course, are not new, but have drawn, and deserve, serious attention in the face of the island’s ongoing construction boom, focused primarily on mid- and high-rise apartment buildings and commercial complexes. The expanding construction of high-rises is facilitated by changes to the laws allowing more habitable rooms per square metre than previously. Builders are going higher.

The question is whether these taller, sleek and fetching buildings, often with narrow windows and significant expanses of glass, are not only appropriately designed for the tropics, but with climate change in mind.

This is an old, and constant, concern of the architect and policy activist, Dr Patricia Green. She found support this week in an important quarter – one with influence in real estate investment, which presumably extends to design and engineering.

In this newspaper on Thursday, Denroy Pusey, an assistant vice-president for real estate business at the real estate and investment company FirstRock Group, called for the “risks associated with climatic conditions” to be part of the design and construction process in real estate.

“In Jamaica, especially in recent times, we are experiencing more frequent heat events even outside of the regular summer period, and, as such, protecting the users of the space, whether residential or commercial, is of utmost importance to reduce the effects of severe heat,” Mr Pusey said. This includes not only how buildings are cooled, but whether materials used in their construction are resilient to extreme temperatures.

FOCUS

In other words, there has to be focus on the maintenance and other costs related to living in existing and new constructions, whose designs might not have sufficiently taken their environment into consideration. Some buildings may, for instance, require the extensive use of air conditioners, which might be powered by expensive fossil fuel-generated energy, which contributes to global warming.

Two years ago, Dr Green, who formerly taught in the faculty of the built environment at the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech), expressed her concern that “time-tested architecture and construction and resilience to earthquakes and hurricanes” were being displaced by approaches that were not necessarily suitable to Jamaica’s circumstances.

“Importantly, traditional buildings were designed to breathe,” Dr Green said of old Caribbean architecture. “Doors and room dividers had openings with fretwork or lattice infill for breezes to pass as a hurricane pressure-release system. Tree planting acted as hurricane windbreakers.”

Importantly, these design elements, including large and louvred windows, helped to keep the interior of buildings cool, while trees did the same to the exterior.

No doubt the concerns about which Dr Green has waged a relentless campaign, and which have now been addressed by Mr Pusey, are part of ongoing discourse and research at Dr Green’s old school at UTech.

The issues, though, require more, a full-blown dialogue and public education campaign about construction in the time of climate change that can influence policy to prevent the mistakes of the past. UTech’s Faculty of the Built Environment is the appropriate leader of this initiative.