Resilient by design: the case for increasing resilience of buildings and their linked food-energy-water systems

Abstract

The resilience of buildings and food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) to natural or manmade disruptions are closely linked. The resilience of a building goes beyond the safety of its structural elements and must include the resilience of its supporting systems and the services they supply. The resilience of FEWS, in turn, can increase through design elements of a building that affect generation and storage of FEW resources. In this commentary, I discuss increasing the resilience of buildings and their linked FEWS-improving their resistance, absorption, restoration, and adaptive capacities-through new integrated systems design practices. I begin with a discussion of the current state of building design at the FEW nexus. I then use the prior establishment and current use of sustainability design objectives as an analogue to developing and implementing resilience design objectives. I review progress and limitations of specific drivers for increasing resilient design practices, including economic incentives, regulations, extralegal programs and initiatives, and societal incentives. My recommendations for leveraging these drivers to increase resilient design include: for economic incentives, quantify the costs and benefits to make the business case for resilience; for formal regulations, specify increased building requirements with performance-based resilience objectives; for extralegal initiatves, integrate these resilience objectives with existing certification programs and award designs that address FEWS as an integrated network rather than as disparate systems; and for societal incentives, demonstrate public benefit to shift societal perceptions of resilience. Together, these actions will motivate the design of more resilient building and FEW systems to increase their longevity, performance, and robustness. Keywords:Resilience; buildings; food-energy-water systems (FEWS); design objectives; integrated systems; performance-based design; design practices and incentives School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, US itien@ce.gatech.edu Introduction Food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) are essential for the functioning, safety, and security of society. They provide critical resources and services for the population of a community. They are also characterized by interconnections and interdependencies, which can both support the performance of these systems, e.g., if outputs from one system can be leveraged for use in multiple systems; or expose the systems to additional vulnerabilities, e.g., if failures in one system cascade into losses for connected systems.Buildings are also critical to daily life. We live the majority of our lives in buildings, with Americans spending on average 87% of their time in enclosed buildings (Klepeis et al. 2001). Buildings and FEWS are inextricably linked, particularly for energy and water systems. Buildings serve as the final distribution points for most municipal energy and water systems. Once energy and water resources are generated...

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