Belfast planners should be looking 200 years into the future when designing how to protect our city from the climate crisis, says a Queen’s professor.
Architecture and climate adaptation expert Nuala Flood spends her working life analysing how to protect ourselves from the extreme weather, overheating and flooded city centre that’s predicted. And her work on the subject has now gained international recognition with a Fulbright EPA Scholar Award.
Soon she’ll be leaving her colleagues at Queen’s University, Belfast City Council and Sustainable NI for New York’s Parsons School of Design. While there, she hopes to learn about how their infrastructure is designed with climate adaptation and communities in mind. But she plans to bring everything she learns back to Belfast.
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We spoke to Nuala following her prestigious award about the challenges facing Belfast and how she hopes to help the city become the best it can be. She told Belfast Live: “Sometimes cities feel complete - it doesn’t feel complete, there’s work to be done and that leaves it as a kind of exciting place to study architecture and research the built environment.
“There’s so much potential, a really rich built heritage and quite beautiful surroundings in a valley with the lovely mountains in the back ground - but it needs work.”
Nuala, who’s also on the board of Sustainable NI, says “there’s definitely challenges” for Belfast in terms of adaptation to potential sea level rise.
“Flooding is going to be an issue in the city centre and there is going to potentially be overheating issues - but the real threats are extreme weather events and flooding,” she added.
“I think we’ve got issues with biodiversity in the city, encouraging green networks and that’s just in terms of adaptation and mitigation. We can’t be using so much cars and fossil fuels any more, we need walking, cycling - active travel - all of the above.
“I think the first thing to do is to do an assessment of what we already have and adaptive reuse of the buildings we already have.
“Obviously we should save the greenspaces that we already have and then we have a lot of car parks that might be better suited to parks where people can have recreation, play, be near nature. Parks are great because they are like sponge for the city. We need more parks and we need more green spaces.
“There’s a huge amount of education yet to be done as well,” she added. “I think there’s an idea that it [the climate crisis] won’t affect us here in this part of the world but of course it will.
“The term resilient is overused but we’ll all need to be because what happens in other parts of the world will have an impact here.”
Easy wins include using the buildings we already have and insulating homes, she says.
“The easiest win for us here is that we have so many public buildings and heritage buildings that have embodied energy that can be adapted for use - another is insulation in homes.
“Those two are top of the list in terms of the net-zero strategy for Belfast.”
While originally from Longford, the architecture and sustainable design whizz has lived in Belfast for eight years.
“I love it. I think it’s great,” she added.
Nuala took up a post at Queen’s University in 2014 after studying architecture, becoming an architect and then studying for a PhD in sustainable urban development.
“In 2019, architecture at Queen’s declared a climate emergency and I was director of the architecture programme at the time,” she explained.
“Together, me and all of my colleagues focused on work to address the climate emergency.
“I work on climate adaptation in the built environment, which is looking at the long term potential impacts of climate change in Belfast and elsewhere and how architecture might respond to that.
“We are looking at things like potential flooding risks - how you design areas so they can absorb and deal with flooding hazards and where you build [and] how you make buildings that can be adaptable.... green and blue infrastructure in the city and also imaginative future scenario planning.
“At the moment I’m on secondment in Belfast City Council talking to them about all of this,” she added. “They are working very hard on this and I am trying to see how we can help them on education as well. Obviously they have big challenges on their hands.
“Then I go to Climate NI in July and work with them for a month as well to make sure I know everything that’s happening in Belfast so when I’m in New York I’m asking the right questions and things that are relevant to Belfast.”
When most of think about the climate crisis the first experts that spring to mind are scientists. But Nuala says: “As architects we can be really useful.
“We have been working with the students on adaptive reuse projects for the past three years - which is quite unusual for architects. “We’ve looked at the Bank of Ireland building, the Belfast Telegraph building and the Frames building - how we could use them for the public good for the city, thermally upgrade them.
“While you’re carrying out those kind of works you could look at public realm redesign so it can absorb storm water rather than just hard surface everywhere.
“Things like that - making the city somewhere you want to be in, live in and have a quality of life. Sustainable living is attractive living - that’s where we want to get to.”
Nuala says buildings hold around 10% of their carbon footprint in their bricks and so “we need to use them rather than actually making new builds”.
“It’s also a resource issue,” she added. As for materials used in construction, she believes a lot more work is needed to ensure buildings “aren’t giving off greenhouse gases through the construction of the materials”.
While those issues pose challenges of their own, Her focus in New York will be learning how to get communities on board with the changes that need to happen and how to change planning systems to look well into the future.
“We need to be planning for the super-long term rather than the near future - planning for 200 years time and that kind of change in mindset, that’s where we need to get to,” she added.
“I need to find out how they got everyone to start planning for the super long term rather than the near future - that’s where a lot of people’s focus is in terms of politics and planning.
“Flood defence and dealing with a different climate that’s probably a lot more unpredictable. There will be a lot more extreme weather events and it will be warmer.
“We need to design simple things like planting a lot of trees, street trees are good because they give you shade and a habitat for biodiversity and it helps with the overheating of cities because there aren’t so many reflective hard surfaces.
“These are things that we need to start thinking about now because it will take a long time to go to public consultation to get the money to get the projects off the ground. These are long term project.”
But if we can manage what’s needed, the rewards with be great.
“The Belfast of the future that is thriving is a much greener space with far more biodiversity, far more green infrastructure and nature based solutions for dealing with a changing and shifting hydro-scape.”
As for her trip to the Big Apple, she says: “I am super excited - thrilled and a little bit anxious about it all.
“It’s a huge honour but it doesn’t happen on its own. I’m part of a community of architecture and we have great conversations.
“I am lucky with the colleagues that I have and there’s no way I would have been able to formulate my own ideas without such good conversation around me.”
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