Environments for Aging - Summer 2021 - 10

BULLETIN
Edited by Anne DiNardo
BULLETIN
Smart thinking
T
he past year has been especially challenging
for the senior living industry. Hit
hard by multiple crises-the COVID-19
pandemic, wildfires up and down the West
Coast, a record number of hurricanes in the
Southeast, and extreme cold in the South-
many in the industry were caught off guard.
These compounding crises required emergency
responses such as evacuations with
the wildfires and lockdowns for the pandemic,
which put extreme stress on residents and
staff and caused potential residents to question
making the move to a community.
To better prepare for a future with more frequent
and severe natural disasters, the senior
living sector must focus on resiliency-the capacity
to recover quickly from present stressors
and adapt to future challenges and crises.
While resiliency is important in all aspects of
the business, resilient buildings are the first line
of defense to keep residents and staff safe and
comfortable. The onus is on architects and
designers to guide clients toward developing
a climate resilience plan and incorporating
resilient strategies into their projects.
A call for climate resilience
A warming planet is bringing powerful natural
disasters more often, including pandemics,
super storms, heat waves, wildfires, and
drought. Seniors are typically more negatively
affected by these stressors than others
because they're more likely to have health
conditions that lessen mobility, impair cognition,
and hamper the body's ability to adapt to
environmental extremes such as heat waves.
These stressors also present a serious business
risk to owners because they may disrupt
daily operations and damage assets, reducing
the ability to market to potential residents.
The antidote is to create climate-resilient
communities, which have the ability to
10 EFAmagazine.com * Summer 2021
Developing a climate resilience plan gives senior living
communities the ability to respond more easily to current and
future challenges
prepare for and respond to natural disasters
and climate trends. This is more than just
adaptation to current and potential crises; it's
also about creating systems that can absorb
shocks and then self-renew, which ultimately
contributes to fixing the underlying problems
creating the crises.
Developing a plan
The path to climate resilience begins with developing
a specific plan that identifies potential
threats and stressors, establishes design
goals that incorporate resilient principles, and
particular geography. These can be acute or
chronic, localized or large scale, or they can
stem from natural disasters or human activity.
They can be fast moving, such as hurricanes,
or come on slowly and be prolonged, such as
chronic water and food shortages. Some exist
regardless of location, such as heat stress,
but others are geographically distinct, including
floods and wildfires.
Once threats are identified, the next step
Resilient
buildings are
the first line of
defense to keep
residents and
staff safe and
comfortable.
lays out a path for implementing concrete
resilient strategies into the design. This plan
can be developed during the design process
for new buildings or can be done for existing
buildings. Architects and designers typically
lead this process, with collaboration from the
owner, operator, engineers, and sometimes
sustainability consultants.
A key element of a resilience plan includes
defining vulnerabilities and threats for a
is to develop resilient design goals. During
this process, the design team gathers information
from the owner on its financial and
operational priorities before, during, and after
a threat. These priorities are then refined
into resilient design goals that are focused
on how the environment responds to and
mitigates threats as seamlessly as possible
to provide for residents' basic needs-life
safety, food and water, comfortable living
conditions, and energy.
Typically, resilient design goals fall into
three categories: adaptability and responsiveness,
or being able to change to respond to
different environmental conditions; diversity
and redundancy in building systems and
services for occupants; and durability, or the
environment's ability to last. Resilient design
goals may include such things as being able
to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature
during the winter in the event of a power
outage, ensuring that a building exterior can
withstand hurricane-force winds, or making
certain that optimal indoor air quality can be
maintained during a smoke event.
The next step is to use the design goals
and previously identified threats to develop
a risk assessment and strategies matrix,
which includes the likelihood and severity of
each threat as well as potential solutions and
associated costs. This provides a series of
alternative solutions that the owner and design
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Environments for Aging - Summer 2021

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