Making Your Family Safer Through Resilience Strategies

Whether or not you believe that climate change is happening, implementing resilient design strategies will make you and your family safer—and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Our completed house and restored barn — which provides a model of resilience.Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

Using cynical tactics described in the 2008 book Doubt is Their Product, climate change deniers have convinced a large percentage of the public and the majority of legislators from a certain political party believe that the jury is still out on global climate change.

With decision-making based on science seemingly impossible and new extraction technologies enabling us to extract ever-harder-to-reach oil and gas, what should we do to slow our greenhouse gas emissions? How can we convince people to take action?

The case for resilience

As defined by the Resilient Design Institute, “Resilience is the capacity to adapt to changing conditions and to maintain or regain functionality and vitality in the face of stress or disturbance.  It is the capacity to bounce back after a disturbance or interruption of some sort.”

Designing houses and apartment buildings to achieve resilience will keep people safer in the event of a disaster of some sort—whether a hurricane that might be more intense because of a warmer ocean, an earthquake that has nothing to do with climate change, or a power outage caused by terrorists hacking into our power grid controls.

You don’t have to believe in climate change to want to create safer homes for your family. It’s not a Blue State argument or one that is owned by Democrats. Indeed, I’ve observed that Tea Party libertarians are sometimes the most receptive to the resilience argument. They want to be free from the tyranny of big government, but some of them also want to be less dependent on those systems that are controlled by government—like electricity distribution and national transportation networks.

Low-energy buildings are more resilient

Nearly nine years ago, following Hurricane Katrina, I began advancing the idea of passive survivability: ensuring that buildings will provide livable conditions in the event of extended loss of power or interruptions in heating fuel. That remains a key tenet of resilience and what I have been advancing through the Resilient Design Institute.

To create a building that will maintain livable (or habitable) temperatures if it loses power or suddenly finds itself without heating fuel requires an extremely well-insulated building envelope. The house that my wife and I recently renovated—with R-45 walls, an R-60 roof, and really good windows, along with some passive solar gain through south-facing windows—will probably not drop much below 50°F even if there’s an extended power outage in the middle of winter, and keeping a fire going in our small wood stove during a power outage will be enough to keep us fully comfortable.

In hot climates—whether or not one believes that all climates will be getting warmer—the same argument applies. Energy efficiency measures help to keep homes and apartments from getting too hot if they lose power and air conditioning can’t be used. Overheating in passively operated buildings is admittedly a bigger challenge than keeping them reasonably warm in the winter, but passive survivability in hot climates relies on such strategies as keeping direct sunlight out (especially on the east and west), reflecting sunlight off the roof, and slowing conductive heat gain through the walls and roof.

Safer buildings that mitigate climate change

The same strategies that keep us safe during power outages or interruptions in heating fuel result in dramatically lower energy consumption during normal operation. Our house in Dummerston is heated with a single 18,000 BTU/hour air-source heat pump—a small enough power draw that we can provide that electricity, on an annual basis, with a modest solar electric system (see Making Your Own Electricity: Onsite Photovoltaic Systems).

We can build or retrofit to these passive survivability or resilience standards for safety reasons and, in doing so, we’re doing a great deal to mitigate climate change—but you can disregard that last benefit if you don’t believe that climate change is happening.

Resilience makes sense whether or not climate change mitigation is a goal. I’ve often said that it will be a huge success of the Resilient Design Institute if our arguments are touted by Rush Limbaugh in his radio program—probably unlikely, but not out of the question.

Want to read more in-depth on resilient design? See Resilient Design: 7 Lessons from Early Adopters.

Alex is founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. and executive editor of Environmental Building News. In 2012 he founded the Resilient Design Institute. To keep up with Alex’s latest articles and musings, you can sign up for his Twitter feed.