Complexities in Urban Climate Resilience Planning

The global climate is changing! Some change is already locked in while further climatic change depends greatly upon future carbon emissions. As a result, countries are planning a myriad of resilience strategies to both adapt to the projected changes but also to limit further climatic change. The global buildings sector is responsible for over 30% of global energy consumption and therefore is an area of intense interest when it comes to the mitigation of climate change. Reducing building related energy use however, is not a simple task, data presented by the IEA shows that global consumption grew by ~2% per annum over the 40-year period up to 2010, resulting in a near doubling of the associated carbon emissions over the same period. This is despite tightening of buildings regulations in energy reduction initiatives in many countries. Since 2000, the rate of electricity demand in buildings has increased 5 faster than improvements in the carbon intensity of the power sector. The continued growth in energy consumption is attributed to increasing populations and socioeconomic growth across the Global South. An increasing population requires greater built floor area to house it, while an increasing GDP per capita leads to greater expectations of comfort (heating and cooling energy usage) and greater expenditure on products and services (e.g. more energy consuming appliances), there is also the less expected result that as people’s income increases they are able to afford larger properties so the floor area per capita also increases. This compound growth greatly complicates the climate resilience agenda in that we cannot assess the related risks, nor adaptive capacity based upon the status quo.

By 2060 income per capita in the Global South is expected to more than quadruple and the associated global floor area will more than double, this will lead to considerable urban growth, redevelopment and land-use change. About half of the buildings that will be built between now and 2060, over 100bn m2, will be built in countries that currently have no mandatory building energy codes in place. By 2035 nearly two‐thirds of the global buildings stock to 2060 will already be standing. The challenge then is how to make this growing building stock both efficient and resilient to climate change so that it remains fit for purpose over its expected lifetime?

With a focus on Indonesia, we consider how population and socioeconomic growth coupled with climate and environmental risks affect resilience planning for these evolving communities. Conservative projections of population growth increase from ~286mil in 2025 to ~336mil by 2060. The resultant rapid urbanisation coupled with increasing floor area per capita leads to residential floor area more than doubling from ~6.3bn m2 to ~13.2bn m2 this is further compounded by associated infrastructure dramatically increasing impervious surface land cover. This together with greater expectations of comfort and increasing plug loads means that residential energy use rises from ~360TWh/year to ~950TWh/year greatly complicating planning for net-zero. Meanwhile resilience planning is confounded by larger, denser urban areas increasing flood and urban heat risks.