Climate Resilience in the Built Environment

Feedback to the Inquiry into Climate Resilience in the Built Environment.

The Inquiry into Climate Resilience in the Built Environment provides an important opportunity to examine how the Victorian Government can improve our buildings and infrastructure, and ultimately better protect people experiencing disadvantage from the impacts of climate change.

Public and community buildings and infrastructure are vulnerable to our increasingly extreme climate. Many of these buildings have already been badly affected by heavy rainstorms, floods, extreme heat, or bushfires. Across Victoria, public and community buildings tend to be insufficiently insulated and have ineffective, inefficient heating and cooling systems. In many community facilities, regular maintenance is often delayed due to insufficient financial resources.

These spaces should be safe for both community members and for the people who staff them even during extreme weather. The consequences of their structural vulnerability can be devastating, leaving people literally exposed to the elements.

This submission addresses what must be done to better prepare Victoria’s built environment and infrastructure, and therefore the community, for future climate disaster events. The submission focuses on extreme heat as the main risk of climate change facing the entirety of Victoria, but also discusses climate change risks that will be more localised in Victoria including flooding, bushfire, increased intensity of rain events, and sea level rise.

A key message of this submission is that prevention is key. While we cannot fully prevent the impacts of climate change from occurring, we can prevent them from getting worse through climate mitigation activities across society. Many of these mitigation activities within our buildings and infrastructure also contribute to climate resilience, which prepares us for the unavoidable impacts of climate change. Adequate preparation of our buildings and our people will ultimately require fewer financial resources than waiting until climate impacts hit and then supporting repeated recovery efforts over the coming decades. It will also head off avoidable suffering and death and reduce inequality.