Aside from water, concrete is the most-used material in the world, with about 14 billion cubic metres being used every year. Of that, 40% of that is used to build places for people to live.
As intense heat breaks records around the world, a little-reported fact offers some hope for cooling down cities: Under even the most intense periods of extreme heat, some city blocks never experience heat wave temperatures.
Climate change will bring new weather patterns that are beyond emergency managers’ current playbooks, which are filled with protocols honed by past experience. The capacity to adapt will be essential when those playbooks can’t handle compounding disasters that few had imagined.
New research shows while we can greatly reduce embodied carbon in Australia, it will require radical changes in how we design, construct, use and reuse buildings.