The global challenges of climate change aren’t only a focus for researchers, but are also forcing universities to educate and train students differently. They must do so in order to remain fit for purpose.
When UWA’s Public Policy Institute published The Preparedness Report, a first-of-its-kind report on climate change, it pointed to the “large and tricky challenges” facing professions and disciplines as they, and the practitioners they train and educate, come to terms with what global warming means for them.
Image: Architecture students presenting at UWA School of Design
Institute Director, Professor Shamit Saggar, argues that while “Australia’s politicians are increasingly on the back foot”, this was something universities and professions could not risk doing.
“Many new skills and competencies will have to be taught – for example, the need to engineer heat-tolerant public transport systems and plan water-sensitive cities,” Professor Saggar says.
“Fresh mechanisms will be needed to ensure the value of current expertise, such as actuaries’ capacity to model commercial and household risk for insurance purposes. Greater use of cross-disciplinary collaboration will be needed too, in areas such as building design and construction.”
The ‘Prep Report’ put the spotlight on six areas; law and the legal profession, economics, architecture, healthcare, and engineering. We take a look at the nature and extent of retooling in two – architecture and healthcare – and how they might prepare to meet the challenges ahead.
Ensuring sustainability in architecture
Shopping centres aren’t usually synonymous with sustainability; however in Burwood, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, there’s a mall different to most others.
Hyped as ‘the world’s most sustainable shopping centre’, Burwood Brickworks has managed to achieve Living Building Challenge status, described by the International Living Future Institute – the global authority that administers it – as “the ultimate green building standard that can be applied to any building type around the world”.
For Gemma Hohnen, architecture consultant and tutor with UWA’s School of Design, it sets a benchmark for design that Australian architects should be aspiring to and follows their mass pledge to become carbon neutral in the wake of the 2019/20 summer of bushfires.
“Brickworks sits underneath a 2000 sq m urban rooftop farm, where the restaurant sources its produce; it’s powered by renewable sources; and grey and black water is treated and recycled on site,” Ms Hohnen says.
“Brickworks sits underneath a 2000 sq m urban rooftop farm, where the restaurant sources its produce; it’s powered by renewable sources; and grey and black water is treated and recycled on site,”
Ms Gemma Hohnen, UWA’s School of Design.
“This example of ‘regenerative design’, mitigating the impact of construction and operation, design continues right down to the products used in the nail salon at the centre which are non-toxic. It pushes the boundaries demonstrating what can be done when we rethink buildings from the ground up.”
Architects have a big role to play in reducing CO2 emissions, argues the architecture consultant, with the built environment contributing roughly 40 per cent of greenhouse gas locally.
But despite the Australian Architects Declare Climate and Biodiversity Emergency (AAD) being launched in 2019 in response to the Special Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there’s still a long way to go, she says.
“For the majority of practising architects, knowledge of designing to zero carbon requires education, yet, faced with maintaining a steady workflow, most default to the business-as-usual approach.”
She points to the bleak analysis of Scott McAulay, founder and coordinator of the Anthropocene Architecture School in Scotland: “The contemporary architectural education system – through both academia and continuing professional development (CPD) – does not equip current practitioners nor the practitioners of the future to work within the ongoing climate emergency. This must be addressed urgently.”
Education, Ms Hohnen says, can and must do more to equip future architects to address this knowledge gap.
“There are many elements that can be addressed in design to optimise the performance of buildings and reduce embodied carbon – design decisions that are so embedded the outcome may not look like typical associations with sustainability,” she says.
“Students are in a unique position of not only being able to test and evaluate new design solutions, but to rethink what these solutions might actually be and how we might use and engage with our built environment. I believe this gives our students agency in a rapidly changing future.”
So, what will business as usual look like for the profession and for students?
"The National Standard of Competency for Architects 2022 draft now requires all Architects and Graduates of Architecture to be capable of designing net zero buildings,” Ms Hohnen says.
“UWA – and the higher education sector more broadly – needs to deliver climate and carbon-literate graduates of architecture, who are conversant with what’s necessary, who understand what sustainability means in the context of the climate crisis, and who know what the profession can and should provide for climate mitigation and adaptation.
“The students who choose my studio know that we can make change happen and that we can do something other than business as usual.”
Investing in health is divesting from harm
Our changing climate means we’ll face many different faces of public health emergencies, warns Dr Sajni Gudka, Director of the Urban Impact Project and Adjunct Research Fellow.
“All over the world we will get more infectious diseases, more heat stress, more mental illness, less food and water and poorer nutrition”
Dr Sajni Gudka, Director of the Urban Impact Project and Adjunct Research Fellow.
“All over the world we will get more infectious diseases, more heat stress, more mental illness, less food and water and poorer nutrition,” she says.
“The InterAction Council, which consists of former Heads of Government and academics at the University of Southampton in the UK, published a manifesto headed Securing A Healthy Planet For All in which they reasoned that if they were to consider planet Earth as a patient, as health professionals it would be diagnosed as critically sick.”
Dr Gudka says there are many scientific and evidence-based frameworks available that provide health and medical disciplines with strategic and specific guidance on responding to the emergency.
“A cross-curriculum inquiry is needed into ways in which universities could take bold and courageous climate action and how health and medical schools could use their position to influence academic institutions to invest in health and divest from harm,” she says, with four immediate suggestions.
1. Teach the science
Public health and medical schools could replicate the approaches used in dealing with other major threats to health such as smoking, drug and alcohol misuse, obesity and sugar intake, Dr Gudka says, taking leadership in educating students on the impacts of climate change, exposures and vulnerabilities through the introduction of a ‘Climate Health, Without Harm’ unit.
2. Invest in health
Universities should actively look for and create opportunities to mobilise new cross-sectoral partnerships and collaborations and to apply global metrics, data and health mitigation and adaption strategies to climate hazards and population needs that are locally specific, says the public health expert. She suggests public health educators and researchers integrate Health Impact Assessments into their work, providing expertise to other research groups within and outside the healthcare sector.
3. Divest from harm
“If we start to acknowledge, understand and openly talk about the systematic and intertwined complex nature of fossil fuels as a public health emergency, we’ll find new ways to invest in human and planetary health, and divest support, research, funding and our day-to-day reliance on fossil fuels – just as we did with Big Tobacco,” Dr Gudka says.
This could be done by creating public health campaigns and advocacy tools, with a focus on positioning fossil fuels as the next new Big Tobacco, responding responsibly to the climate emergency and divesting support, research and funding from fossil fuel industries, she says.
4. Communicate the science
Health and medical professionals should fill an essential role in communicating the health risks of climate change and implementing a robust response which will improve human health and wellbeing – across universities, in all health sectors and in all communities, Dr Gudka says, warning “the threats and challenges of climate are great, and time is short.”