ARC3501H F
Instructor: Alex Lukachko
Meeting Section: L0101
Thursday 6:00PM - 9:00PM

The recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis ^[1] is a “red light” for the world: a strong warning that we are not meeting our climate change mitigation targets and that we will not be able to limit global temperature rise to a level that has manageable impacts for the ecological and social systems that support us.

We are faced with an unprecedented challenge.

Architects, and other designers of the built environment, must now act in two ways: First, we will need to accelerate our efforts to aggressively limit greenhouse gas emissions - acting directly to mitigate climate change. Second, we also need to prepare for a future climate that is expected to have increased “frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, and heavy precipitation, agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions, and proportion of intense tropical cyclones, as well as reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost” ^[2] - we now need to adapt to a future climate that is significantly different from our current climate.

This course will examine long-term adaptation and focus on just one expected impact of climate change: rising sea levels. Hundreds of millions of people live in coastal communities and will be affected by Sea Level Rise (SLR). The impacts are going to be experienced in different ways globally (And in the extreme, some nations will be facing “climate extinction” ^[3], for example) and across the next few generations. Decisions about building design, community planning, and protection of natural systems could be used to shape a positive outcome that adapts to SLR. But only if we think carefully about the long term, and begin to plan and act now.

Instructor Alex Lukachko will be joined by guest co-instructor Craig Applegath (Partner and Founder at DIALOG, and host of the Twenty First Century Imperative podcast ^[4]), and several invited experts who will contribute throughout the course.

The format will include seminar discussions based on readings as well as guest lectures to help lay the foundation for understanding SLR and possible responses. In addition to the main topics of climate change adaptation and sea level rise, we will include seminars on fundamental skills that we need to help engage with and communicate about these issues, including the Community Climate Adaptation Workbook which has been developed to facilitate community-level planning.

As a group, we will work to understand the diverse global impacts, and by the end of the term work to develop and communicate long-term strategies for adaptation of the built environment to sea level rise.

Notes:
[1] You can find the report here: https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/
[2] IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
[3] Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58064485
[4] If you are interested, you can learn more about the podcast here: https://tfcipodcast.com/