William Larson
Chairman – Pacific Northwest Building Resilience Coalition
Many jurisdictions are grappling with strengthening our built environment to make homes, buildings, and infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather events and other disasters.
The Pacific Northwest is no stranger to these events, with the ever-present risk of wildfires in the wildlands and wildland-urban interface (WUI), atmospheric rivers, subsequent flooding, drought, and extreme temperature.
Also, the region faces the ever-present threat of a major seismic event along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which extends from northern Vancouver Island in Canada to northern California in the United States.
Despite some slight local gains, a more comprehensive strategic planning perspective is required across the region to design and construct structures that can withstand the increased frequency and severity of climate-related events and natural disasters. Strengthening and improving our current building codes should be a top priority.
Legislators are often considered the primary targets for representations to change building codes or related regulations. But, long before substantive proposals are tabled, many other stakeholders must be engaged and committed to supporting change, including local and state officials, construction/design industry professionals, insurance providers, lenders, community and environmental organizations, and the general public.
The debate often boils down to one question – what will tougher building codes cost?
The International Chamber of Commerce said in 2024 that “over the past decade, climate-related extreme weather events created economic costs of $2 trillion.” The U.S. alone experienced more than $500 billion of damages from weather-related incidents like hurricanes and floods. In contrast, the cost of the Pacific Palisades/Alta Dena wildfires in Los Angeles, California in January 2025 is still being assessed.
In all over 18,000 buildings were destroyed and 28 lives were lost in two fires that consumed approximately 52,000 acres, a burn zone approximately twice the size of Manhattan, NY. Current estimates predict the damage of these two fires alone will exceed $300 billion.
One reason most building codes are based on minimum design and construction standards is affordability: to save lives (life/safety) from the most obvious risks of fire, flood, and seismic events.
As these weather-related disasters become more frequent, affordability suddenly morphs from what was initially intended to be what the homeowner/builder could afford to purchase/build, to include affordability of lending/insurability/re-insurability, to the affordability of public federal aid disaster relief. Long-term resiliency has not been a paramount consideration in code development in the past, perhaps it’s time to expand our considerations.
Escalating disaster recovery costs and the growing crisis of insurability have changed everything, forcing governments at all levels to scramble for solutions to protect homeowners, businesses, and devastated communities from total collapse. Resiliency in design and construction has become the new imperative. A resilient community can recover faster from disruptions, minimizing economic losses and ensuring continued prosperity.
In the past few decades, we have experienced many disasters which, unfortunately, have sent an unimaginable volume of debris to landfills to begin their end-of-life decomposition and subsequent GHG emission much earlier than imagined. Unfortunately, this debris is composed of building materials that failed due to insufficient structural design to withstand these probable aggressive weather-related impacts and should have served a much longer useful life as buildings.
Currently, none of our methods of calculating the environmental impact of the building materials and construction systems with which we construct include any consideration of the premature decomposition of the debris when an act of God determines end-of-life as compared to their calculated design life.
There is also no consideration of the subsequent rebuilding activities that must be implemented from building material remanufacture through reconstruction and operation. Neither is the instant emission from the incredible conflagration we have witnessed accounted for in any embodied carbon or life cycle assessment tools… but it happens!
With this in mind, we must pay close attention to the root cause of the failure of much of our built environment that fails these environmental challenges. Failed structures were either built before modern codes and not retrofitted to modern building code design criteria or built without the adoption of modern building codes.
We see far too often structures built to current code that lack planning and design consideration to sustain the probable impacts of progressive climate change or episodic natural disasters. It is time for more robust building codes, especially in areas where we can predict the probable impact of these progressive events.
The response to these devastating events is the growing demand for investment in resilience, to mitigate economic losses caused by extreme weather events. Improved building codes can help structures to withstand the effects of severe weather events better, and it is in the interests not only of home and building owners but also local and federal governments as well as the lenders, insurers and reinsurers that bear some of the risks, that these codes be well researched and correctly applied.
Improved building codes are essential to ensure public safety, protect against natural disasters, promote energy efficiency, and accommodate new technologies by establishing improved construction standards. These standards encompass structural integrity, fire safety, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC, safeguarding occupants from hazards and reducing damage from earthquakes, wind, fires, and floods.
Furthermore, they promote community sustainability and resilience by incorporating climate-related events and probable disaster considerations into design and construction practices.
We must also be proactive in choosing building materials suited to the probable local hazards that can be identified. We must specify essential materials for mitigating risk in new construction and retrofitting, such as non-flammable materials in high-risk fire areas and systems that offer better seismic performance.
Policies to create stronger codes based on proven scientific research. Designing and constructing buildings and infrastructure that withstand natural disasters will also provide stable insurability and reduce the burden of relief from federal government aid.
Government emergency management programs can reduce disaster recovery costs while better protecting communities against disasters by building better buildings through improved building codes and investing in resilience. Resilience and sustainability are two sides of the same coin.
Building resilience is about surviving challenges and creating a sustainable and thriving future. By embracing a proactive approach and working together, we can build communities better prepared to face the uncertainties of today and tomorrow.
Investing in the design and construction of our built environment for resilience will preserve our planet’s inhabitants from our environment while we are simultaneously preserving our planet’s environment from the inhabitants.
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The Pacific Northwest Building Resilience Coalition represents thousands of private companies committed to improving planning, development, and the construction of homes, buildings, communities, and associated infrastructure capable of surviving, recovering from, and adapting to the growing impacts of natural disasters, climate change, and an ever-evolving urban and physical environment.
