Our national buildings codes have for a long time addressed enhancements to resilience, where one building has a higher level of protection from an environmental risk factor, such as for essential facilities like hospitals. For instance, where importance factors in seismic resistant design are greater than one. As our world leadership and policy makers come to terms with the outfall of weather changes and sea level increases we need to do much more than simply memorialize what sea level used to mean to cartography and GIS. We need a system that acknowledges shifting trends in weather such as wind speeds, temperature highs and lows, relative humidity highs and lows, and lightning strikes.
In addition to the basic shifts in environmental risks we also need an overlay system that address our need to protect certain buildings and systems more completely than other that may be less essential to the day to day preservation of our society. Essential buildings and systems such as fuel supplies, power plants, power distribution, water treatment, communications system, military readiness, police stations, hospitals, transportation, food supply systems, prisons, data systems, shelters, schools, and financial systems will all need higher levels of protection than the basics. They will need a graduated overlay resilience system that accounts for an agreed level of extremes.
Such a resilience system might apply 25, 50, and 100 increases in design wind speed. It might add extreme temperature spikes of 10, 20, and 40 degree F to design highs and lows. It might expand lighting strike maps to cover larger areas. It might require resistance to vapor pressure in more northern regions. It might call for protections from ice damage and frozen ground heaving in wider areas than previously considered.
Even with such systems we need to reassess what basic durability means. For instance, air barriers have become critical to the durability, energy compliance, and the basic mechanical function of our higher performing buildings. We need to take new levels of care to assure that our air barrier systems, much of which are embedded in our building enclosures, resist the full windward and leeward design wind pressures our buildings will face including the increased pressure factors at corners, roof edges, and venturi effect conditions.
In no uncertain terms we need to formulate a new way to deal with our new reality now centered on an expanding but undefined threat - climate change.