While we know our actions have had a massive impact on the environment, those actions have also made climate change unpredictable—and that uncertainty includes rainfall. Because of climate change’s widespread effects on wind patterns, plants and soil, ocean currents, and sea level rise, we’re seeing both droughts and flooding in extremes.
We’ve seen this most recently affecting anything from low water levels in the Mississippi River which causes higher soybean prices to hot and dry months putting crops at risk in the Canadian Prairies. This disrupts the data we have historically used, and that’s data we’ve used to design our built environments.
To address climate change’s coming shifts in our natural and built environments, we need to use green infrastructure approaches that places stormwater management at the heart of city design. With the sustainable strategy framework of NET POSITIVE™, pathways for reinterpreting buildings and how they sustainably use and reuse water can be found, integrating them with their local climates’ water cycles and the environment as a whole.
The value of a drop of water
For the last 150 years, engineers and architects have designed cities to control the flow of stormwater with complex networks that could manage runoff as quickly and as efficiently as possible. One of the reasons for this is because water was considered intrusive or even harmful as it could cause flooding that needed to be drained, but this redirection has also caused soil erosion and sedimentation—dislodging plants, animals and insects that in turn affect food sources for fish—as well as sending pollutants into larger bodies of water.
This degradation of ecosystems calls for a radical change in our perception of water; it isn’t something that should be disposed of, it’s something that should be valued. It is a vital resource requiring significant investments in water management that can reduce the stress it has on our existing infrastructure while making our cities more resilient to climate change.
Buildings must adopt strategies to reduce potable water consumption. One of the ways this can be done is with rainwater harvesting—it is clear, clean, easy to filter, easy to store, and free of minerals, heavy metals, and chemicals. As many of our built environments’ systems don’t require potable water like toilet flushing, irrigating our landscapes, washing our vehicle, housekeeping, and industrial applications, tanks and cisterns can be installed either underground, alongside, or inside a building to conserve water use for both summer and winter.
This can create an architecture which is harmonized with the world’s water cycles, becoming a supportive force instead of a disruptive one. To harness volumes of water like runoff, however, it takes creativity to retain as much of it as possible on site by combining several strategies at once, as we can’t rely on a single catch-all solution:
- Irrigation: The water our buildings collect and redirect can instead be recovered by irrigating landscaping, public gardens, and other spaces which benefit both our health and well-being as well as the environment.
- Living Machines: Modelled on filtering marshes, these are artificial ecosystems made up of plant-filled basins that reconstruct wetlands in landscapes and architecture, recycling and reusing black water for systems that do not require potable drinking water, such as toilet flushing and irrigation, while providing rich biophilic effects.
- Permeability: Our urban environments’ roadways, parking lots, sidewalks, and buildings can be designed in ways to allow stormwater through to the soil below, where it can be absorbed and evaporated by plants and regenerate groundwater.
- Storage: This is where stormwater is harnessed, conserving it to use in both buildings for non-potable use via temporary internal storage and in outdoor spaces like public parks as ponds that enhance a site’s biodiversity.
- Rooftops: When designed for rain, green rooftops can capture water and release it through evaporation and the plant life they support with the added bonuses of increasing energy efficiency and rooftop’s durability and lifespan while reducing noise levels.
We know these strategies intimately because we’ve applied and are applying them to projects both realized and planned: At the LEED v4-certified manufacturing plant for SOPREMA in Woodstock, Ontario stormwater is managed with appreciable landscape in ways that increase its site’s biodiversity while transforming its surrounding industrial park by example. Over at the smart vertical community of Humaniti, a 39-floor mixed-use megaproject in downtown Montreal, it was designed to catch, collect, and use rainwater and snow to irrigate the greenery of its terraces and rental properties, reduce the overflowing by 90% against a comparable project. Finally, the upcoming finely honed and curvilinear design of the Bellechasse Transport Centre will be reusing groundwater for irrigation, cooling towers, and to wash the fleets of buses its design sends underground as it captures and releases rainwater into the city sewer.
Towards built environments integrated with water cycles
Water seems like such a simple thing, and our access to it can easily be taken for granted in advanced countries like our own. It’s a vital issue of our century, and its conservation is a global priority.
There are adaptive ways of approaching the architectural world around us, transforming it into something which is malleable, capable of shifting into something that benefit the environment. With architecture that takes far more considerate and integrative approaches to hydrologic systems, our buildings can manage the future effects of climate change on both an excess and lack of water, all in ways that create the more promising future we all need.
Learn more about NET POSITIVE™, our climate-positive strategies for designing a world that uses sustainable materials, and cutting-edge renewable technologies for a future that benefits our health and environment while reducing our carbon emissions.
