‘Using the wrong data’: Major problem with the 1.2m new homes

A new report has heightened fears that Australia’s big construction push could leave residents exposed to the dangers of global warming at home, even as the government warns thousands could die and millions of homes could be ruined as the climate changes.

Experts are calling for new homes to be built to a standard that will remain safe and comfortable during future heatwaves.

The first National Climate Risk Assessment report released Monday predicted, if nothing were done, 1.5 million homes would be lost to rising seas, $611 billion in property value would be wiped out, and thousands of Australians would die in heatwaves every year.

The report comes as the country continues to grapple with a housing crisis; the Federal Government last month announced it would freeze the National Construction Code until mid-2029 to speed up the construction of its 1.2 million homes target, except for quality and safety changes.

Western Sydney University urban planning and management Professor Sebastian Pfautsch said it was important to continue to improve housing quality while building new homes, to ensure that future residents could live safely in future conditions, such as a warming climate.

“We come up with the housing crisis and the politicians jump on a quick fix and the knee-jerk reaction is: ‘oh well, speed up the process, cut the red tape’ … we know if you speed up the process and cut red tape, the quality of homes goes down,” he said.

Research by advocacy organisation Sweltering Cities and sustainability not-for-profit Renew last year found that the energy efficiency standard used in the NCC to score new homes, the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS), was using out-of-date climate data to set its benchmarks.

“For the past 10 to 15 years, we’ve been building homes not fit for the climate because we were using the wrong climate data in the NCC,” Pfautsch said.

Sweltering Cities senior community campaigner Sanaa Shah was concerned that climate adaptation could fall to the wayside if not addressed soon.

“These discussions about pausing the national construction code are really dangerous. We need to ensure that the way we’re building houses is done in the safest way possible and will be safe for what the climate is,” she said.

“We’ve been advocating for our NCC to be updated so we’re using up-to-date climate data … people are tired of living in really unsafe and poorly planned suburbs.”

RMIT Associate Professor in the school of property, construction and project management Trivess Moore said the report highlighted the need for action.

“It actually really supports the urgency and the need for improved regulations and requirements not just for energy efficiency but also resiliency moving forwards,” he said. “We need to be thinking about if this house is going to last 50 to 100 years, what is the midpoint for performance … because if not, we’re locking in cost upgrades and expense for the owner and the community more broadly.”

Research shows living in unsafe temperatures, either too hot or too cold, can negatively affect health, and that Australia’s existing homes lacked insulation, double glazing and other technologies, and were not thermally safe for the existing climate.

“We’re going to have more severe and frequent heatwaves which is going to cause more heat mortality but will also put more strain on our health system … [climate change] is just going to exacerbate that,” Shah said.

Moore said speeding up the approvals process by cutting red tape was attractive to governments, but warned climate preparedness could fall by the wayside.

“[Housing] gets approved fast, but we don’t actually have anyone to build it. We’re not going to build things more quickly unless we have more people in the building industry,” he said. “It’s a bit rich to say we need to deliver more housing and to make it more affordable … but no one is putting in the structural changes to do that.”

Pfautsch said it was good that the government had acknowledged the scale of the risk climate change posed to Australian housing, but he was concerned that the report offered few solutions.

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“That’s still missing … The problem with this plan is it’s so high level and not applicable to the normal household and breaking it down will take time, and I don’t think we have that time,” he said. “You miss the point that we have lots of options we can do right now, instead of just talking about what happens at 3-degree warming in 2100.”

Pfautsch was hopeful that the report’s release would help unlock funding for programs to help residents retrofit their homes to be safer and more thermally efficient as the climate warms.