Housing Design
If it’s possible you might be better off avoiding properties where there’s a risk of coastal inundation, flooding or bushfires. However, you may not have a choice - for instance no-one will escape increased heatwaves, and if you are in the north of Australia you certainly don’t get a choice about cyclones! Given this, there are some things you can do to reduce your risk.
In 2018 the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee presented a report entitled “Current and future impacts of climate change on housing, buildings and infrastructure”, the result of a long-running inquiry. This report contains a detailed analysis of the likely impacts of climate change on buildings around Australia, looking in some detail at coastal inundation, heatwaves, flooding, bushfires and severe storms, and considers a range of issues related to housing including urban and coastal planning, finance and insurance and building design. It’s well worth a read, but naturally focuses more on policy questions than on practical solutions for individuals and organisations.
In terms of design for both new-build and retro-fitted housing, there are a large number of resources out there written for Australian housing. Here is a sample.
Your Home
Your Home: Australia’s Guide to Environmentally Sustainable Homes is an Australian Government website devoted to sustainable housing. It contains a number of detailed resources on home design with climate change in mind.
-
Adapting to Climate Change is a short, readable guide to the key issues involved in adapting existing housing for a changing climate, addressing issues related to heat, extreme rainfall, storms, bushfires and low rain events. While brief, it contains a number of links to further resources.
-
Design for Climate covers a similar range of issues for new builds, with varying advice for eight different Australian climate zones.
-
Bushfire Protection is a resource outlining the ways in which bushfires damage housing, and design, building and landscaping ideas for maximizing bushfire resilience.
Queensland Reconstruction Authority
The Queensland Reconstruction Authority has published a series of highly detailed guides in its Resilient Homes series. While these are specifically written for the Queensland context and contain some specifics about planning and regulatory codes and environmental factors which may differ in other locations, a lot of the material is likely to be relevant anywhere in Australia. Separate guides cover flood resilience, cyclone and storm surge resilience, bushfire resilience and insurance-related issues.
Renew Australia
Renew (formerly the Alternative Technology Association) is an Australian not-for-profit focused on technology and design for sustainable living. It has a number of guides related to building climate-resilient housing. After the 2019 bushfires it published the Green Rebuild Toolkit which provides a step-by-step guide for people considering rebuilding after a bushfire. It includes expert advice on design for bushfire risk zones, as well as designing with increased heatwaves in mind.
​
Renew also has a number of other useful publications on energy efficiency and renewable energy and publishes two high quality magazines, Renew focused on sustainable technology and Sanctuary focused on green building.