Evolution Sustainable Solutions

Our Environment & History

Australians currently emit more than 550 million tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. About 20 per cent of this is produced through everyday activities such as heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, driving the car, running appliances, travelling and from household rubbish rotting in landfill. In fact, the average Australian household emits around 14 tonnes of greenhouse gases per home every year. The energy used to create and transport the materials and furnishings in our homes also generate greenhouse gases.

Other impacts of unconsidered building design include a loss of community, reduced natural habitat, increased water pollution and continuing soil erosion. It now seems likely that the local patterns of our climate will shift and that we will need to adapt our homes and lifestyles to changing conditions. Climate change is an increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as storms, droughts, floods and bushfires. Sea levels are also expected to rise. All these risks lead to higher living costs including insurance premiums.

Choosing sustainably designed products and materials decreases our reliant on fossil fuels, therefore reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the quality of our environment. This is done by reducing air, water and soil pollution, and lowering the impact on our precious natural resources. This affects all life on earth, because the health of the planet, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat-has an obvious relationship to our own health and well-being, not just now but in the future. We may only be one small person or one family, but the choices we make can change the world.

Although these environmental problems must be managed on a global scale with Governments, businesses and nations working together, individuals need to take an active part in this process too. We can make a difference by the way we make our homes and live in them.

One of the most significant choices we can make is choosing sustainable, low-energy housing design. Built to respond to the seasons, low energy housing takes advantage of the sun, wind and on-site conditions to naturally regulate heating and cooling so that our homes stay warm in winter and cool in summer.

What can be learned from history?

Sustainable design is not a recent idea– it’s a recently lost one. To make safe, healthy homes that protect us from wind and rain, keep us warm from the cold, and to keep us cool and shaded when it’s hot is the reason we make buildings today and is the same reason we have always built.

Since the time when humans lived in caves and enjoyed the benefits of stable temperatures and natural ventilation with zero mortgage and environmental impact, we have been refining our use of resources to provide improved shelter.

Until very recently in human history, this clarification occurred within sustainable principles because it was dependent on available resources and technologies. These limitations meant that solutions had to be effective yet still work with the environment and available materials rather than transforming and dominating them.

Cheap, accessible, fossil energy sources and the proliferation of technology and new materials have encouraged us to solve building problems differently.

Unfortunately, many of these new methods are affecting the ability of our planet home to sustain us in the long or even medium term. Despite our technological advances, our housing needs have remained similar – although now with increased levels of comfort and technology. This is because in the last few thousand years, humans have evolved very little physically. It is our technology that has changed and it has changed the way we build – not always for the better.

The new challenge is to use our technology to minimise environment impacts, whilst continuing to improve the comfort and performance of the homes we create.

We have become used to the idea that buildings can be heated or cooled as we choose simply by burning energy.

Without heating and cooling, you would start to look at how to keep warm air in during winter and how to vent warm air out during summer, and that’s what our ancestors did.

If you look carefully at some of the buildings that have survived from the early days, you can frequently identify elements that are clearly designed for our climate, even if they are as simple as roof vents, or veranda’s designed with vented gables so that the achievement of shade doesn’t also trap hot air.

Early colonial buildings in this country often included elements of passive design in response to climate, often borrowing from the experience of other cultures. The ever-present veranda that is now so strongly embedded in the culture of Australian building originally came, along with its name, from India. Every culture that has brought its thread into the multicultural Weave of Australia has a deeper history that can be drawn on for inspiration and example.