Emergency Behaviour
Edward Dymock
Architect Associate Director at BDP, Certified European Passivhaus Designer
In most emergencies an alarm bell sounds, or someone cries out in distress. This alerts you that action is required. You stop what you are doing, change your priorities and give the issue your full attention until the state of emergency has receded. In an emergency you change your behaviour.
Why then, when a climate and ecological emergency has been declared, does it so often feel like business as usual? If this is a genuine emergency, why are we not changing our behaviour?
If an emergency is defined as a “dangerous situation requiring immediate action” then not changing your behaviour is surely baffling. Yet politicians continue to subsidise fossil fuels; holidaymakers continue to fly because they deserve a little heat; families struggle to drop meat from their evening meal, and; my local beach is still strewn with litter and discarded plastic toys after a sunny weekend. Why? Why is behavioural change so difficult?
Is the problem the title of this crisis? Is “climate and ecological emergency” too disconnected from our personal actions? Does the climate and ecological emergency need Don Draper to shoehorn the words “human” into the title, or “your finances”. This emergency will affect (is already affecting) us all.
Is the problem that we do not believe the emergency is real, or of humanity’s creation? The scientific evidence is irrefutable.
Is society stuck in a pattern of presentism? Are we unable to imagine the scale of the disaster looming in our future as the comfort of our present lulls us into languishing ambivalence?
Is the problem that we believe there is hee-haw we can do about it? This, and the resulting lack of action by those around us, I fear, is a paralysing reality for many. Some disasters could have been avoided if it were not for the apathy of the herd. During my fire warden training we were shown videos of people ignoring fire alarms simply because everyone else in the room ignored them too. Similarly, New Forest District Council identified that seeing litter makes us more likely to litter, and around half of people appeared to drop litter!
As fire safety experts Paul and Ron Gantt put it, even in the event of a life threatening fire...
“Fear, despite being a powerful motivator, does not necessarily lead to panic behaviours in disaster and emergency situations.”
So what should we be doing, how should we be behaving? If there was a fire, the Fire Service would take control of the scene, telling everyone what to do. Who do we look to in the climate emergency, which authority: our parents; our local government; our country's leaders? Whilst there are some great examples of leadership it is clear that this emergency requires personal (and professional) behavioural change in all of us.
Anyone that has tried to create a new gym habit (as I am now), tried to give up smoking, or tried to create new eating habits, will tell you - behavioural change is not easy. One of the best known studies that might help us understand change is the 'Stages of Change', completed in the 1970s by researchers James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente. Their study focussed on giving up smoking but can be related to other behavioural change. Prochaska and DiClemente proposed six stages:
First, we need to recognise that a climate emergency has been declared. We need to absorb that fact. Contemplate the implications. How should it affect us? It is an emergency, so our priorities need to change. No matter what we do in life the chances are we now need to do it differently. We need to think differently.
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We need to accept that it has been thinking and behaving as we have until now that has led to this point: a point of imminent catastrophe.
Then we Prepare. Professionally and personally, this began for me at the Welsh School of Architecture in the 1990s. We learnt that our current relationship with the planet was unsustainable, that society was depleting resources at a rate that would lead to eventual disaster. We were shown alternative models for living and building: sustainable architecture that promoted low energy, passive design and used renewable materials such as timber. Many of these were small scale buildings promoted by radicals, individuals mostly, that shunned societies normal metrics of success, often preferring a closer relationship to nature.
The challenge we face now, nearly 30 years later in 2022, is delivering a sustainable architecture in all sectors, at all scales. Yet, only last year a building seemingly made out of only concrete was celebrated with the UK’s top architectural prize. We still regularly see new buildings with fully glazed facades facing every point of the compass. We see the continued use of products that are going to be challenging to recycle at the end of their short lives. We have a long way to go.
But, at the same time, the recent RIBA and Scottish award lists show far more buildings using timber structures; a passivhaus home collecting awards in Scotland; M&S's plans to demolish and rebuild a property on London’s Oxford Street resulting in public outrage, and; the Scottish Government making huge commitments towards the decarbonisation of rail. This is a seed change. Signs of new priorities, new behaviours. The people driving these projects, or campaigning against them, understand that they are in an emergency. They are taking Action.
In this stage we need to constantly ask ourselves, both in our personal and professional lives, “Is this thing I’m about to do, this decision I’m about to make, part of the climate problem or the climate solution?” There is every chance that this simple question, when asked regularly and honestly, and acted upon, will lead to new behaviours.
Maintenance and Relapse are stages we can only ‘look forward to’ in the future.
Architecture, in the Action stage, perhaps above all other industries, has the power to show what change might look like. As architects, and built environment professionals, we have the ability, sometimes the choice, to make our new buildings look different: to make them overtly sustainable. It’s not always necessary or justified but I like the idea that a truly sustainable buildings should 'be allowed' to look quite different to everything that has gone before: a conscious decision by the designer to start a conversation about what a sustainable relationship with our planet might look like.
Architecture is a service industry and to some degree our designs are servants to our clients’ requirements. However the priorities, design options, enthusiasm and technical expertise that we present to our clients has a huge impact on the outcomes of a project. This might include: a rigorous initial environmental briefing at the start of the project; efforts to retain and reimagine existing structures; agreeing onerous environmental metrics by which the success of the project will be judged; maximising the use of timber in construction; setting ambitious targets (“Lets go carbon negative!”), aiming for circularity in the specification and; allowing the building’s aesthetic to be driven by passive design, rather than modernist preoccupations of solid and void, promoting new measures of beauty. If the team concludes the environmentally responsible design option has a capital cost premium then equate this to square meters and work with the client to remove that area from the brief: a smaller building (if it remains resilient, flexible and works well) is better for the planet than a big one, and will cost the client less in the long run too.
BDP's recently completed Leicester St Margaret's is the UK's first carbon negative bus station, with an EPC of -4. Retention of the existing building's frame saved more than 575 tonnes of carbon.
In this vein, BDP is locking new behaviours into our standard processes, with a rigorous (audited) environmental design process now embedded into our project QA system. As the studio's Sustainability Champion my role includes review our projects' progress. As a signatory of “UK Architects Declare Climate and Biodiversity Emergency” BDP, and other architectural practices, have accepted this emergency requires behavioural change in all of us.
None of this is easy. I cannot yet say that I always get it right in my own work or my personal life (my new gym habit has created new car journeys). But, architects love a challenge and love responding to context. The climate emergency is the context within which all decisions will be made for a long time to come.
#climateandecologicalemergency #climateemergency #archtiecture #sustainabledesign #behaviourchange #behaviouralchange
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