Why design for climate?

It’s never been more important to consider climatic conditions in building design and site planning.

While most of us will never have to cope with severe flooding, rampaging bushfires or cyclones on a daily basis, we’re all affected by the extremes of our climate every year. Climate change projections also show that more and more of us will be faced with the challenges of heat waves, drought and severe storms.

The built environment is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions so why are Australians ignoring their climate when it comes to building their own homes?

Only 1 in 10 Australian homeowners (12%) thought energy efficiency was an important factor when buying their home. Newspoll (2009)

Over 3.6 million Australian homeowners don’t know what to do to improve their home’s energy efficiency Newspoll (2009)

Most people believe the solution lies in installing air conditioning or heating and we’ve become increasingly reliant on technology to the extent that 40% of average household energy consumption goes to space heating or cooling alone.

We face an urgent need to reduce our energy consumption, which means we need to look at designing our homes to work with our climate.

The information we need to do this has been available for years, but it has always been in too complex a form for anyone but a professional to interpret.

Fortunately, Think Brick Australia is providing an answer.

Think Brick Australia is proud to present a new tool that makes designing for climate extremely practical and accessible: The Climate Design wizard.