Homebuilders and residents in Canada are adjusting to climate change. Here’s how it works

The two-story family home with a traditional design and wood cladding blends in with its surroundings, but its thick, insulated walls, airtightness, solar panels, heat pump, and energy-efficient windows make it a home built for a warming world.

The home in Vancouver’s Point Grey neighborhood generates more energy than it consumes, demonstrating how a highly efficient building is also more resilient to the effects of climate change, such as bouts of extreme heat and smoke from wildfires that raged in southwestern British Columbia well into autumn.

The Net Zero-certified home was built to standards that exceed those of any Canadian building code. While they are evolving, Canadian building codes are generally designed to produce homes for cold climates rather than heat resilience, according to Chris Higgins, senior green building designer with the City of Vancouver.

“For so long in Canada, we’ve been focused on keeping warm,” Higgins explained.

“Now that summers are getting hotter, we have to adapt.”

The Net Zero home and others like it demonstrate that some consumers and builders are taking adaptation into their own hands by designing and building for a new climate, with the added benefit of increasing efficiency and lowering energy costs.

However, many existing properties, ranging from single-family homes to condos in skyscrapers, will require upgrades to meet the challenge. In June 2021, a prolonged heat wave shattered temperature records across British Columbia, emphasizing the importance of climate-resilient housing.

A coroner’s report from that summer attributed more than 600 deaths to the province’s record-breaking heat, finding that most people died in homes that were unsuitable for temperatures that reached the high 30s and beyond for days on end.

Builder Paul Lilley explains why encasing the Net Zero home with insulation, ensuring it has a very high air tightness rating, and installing highly efficient doors and windows means the building loses heat more slowly in the winter and takes much longer to absorb heat in the summer than a standard one.

These features also mean that the home’s mechanical requirements for heating, cooling, and ventilation are much lower than those of a code-minimum building, according to Lilley, principal and general manager at Kingdom Builders, which completed the home in 2021.

“As seasonal highs and lows become more extreme, this house is built to withstand them.”

Several windows are framed by deciduous trees and foliage that shed their leaves in the winter, allowing more sunlight in and providing shade in the summer.

“Why build a code-compliant house now that will be an energy hog in 10 to 20 years?” Lilley elaborated. “However, if you build a house like this today with the intention of selling it in 10 to 20 years, you’ll already have a house that meets the future standard.”

Although it lacks a basement, Lilley estimates that the Net Zero home cost about 5% more to build than a code-minimum counterpart.

He claims that the supply of Canadian-made windows and other components certified to high energy efficiency standards has improved in recent years, lowering the cost of shipping materials from the more established European market.

Bryn Davidson, a Vancouver architect, agreed that the cost difference between building a high-energy efficient home and a standard one is closing, at least in Vancouver.

“When you look at places around the world that have adopted Passive House or other kinds of efficiency standards, you get to a point where it doesn’t cost much more than the status quo after four or five years of doing it,” he said.

“And you get a payback in the form of a more comfortable and durable building with low operating costs,” said Davidson, co-founder and design lead at Lanefab, which builds energy-efficient laneway homes as well as larger houses.

According to him, the Lanefab team has advocated for the City of Vancouver to change some rules that can contribute to overheating, such as allowing larger exterior overhangs above windows without penalizing homeowners for the extra floor area.

While the requirements for new buildings in British Columbia are among the most stringent in the country, the majority of the homes that will be built in the coming decades have already been constructed, according to Richard Kadulski, a Vancouver-based architect and consultant specializing in energy-efficient residential design and building exteriors.

As global warming worsens, many will require upgrades to keep residents comfortable.

The glass-walled condo towers that protrude from Vancouver’s skyline have a gleaming facade, but they provide little protection from the sun’s energy during a heat wave.

Kadulski refers to the phenomenon as “glass-box syndrome.”

“I see how many people are desperate to control their overheating, putting foil in the windows,” he said.

According to Kadulski, advances in glazing technology have resulted in windows with higher levels of insulation and lower solar heat gain, and their cost has been decreasing as the domestic market becomes better equipped to supply them.

Another option is to add exterior shading that prevents solar energy from entering a home, a method used in hotter climates around the world, he said.

These measures represent a shift for the construction industry, which Kadulski describes as “fragmented” among different designers, developers, and builders, many of whom may not yet feel comfortable changing their tried and true methods.

Similarly, Lilley stated that efficiency is critical to controlling costs, and that becoming efficient at building a Net Zero-certified building may necessitate additional training and practice.

Some builders will no longer work in Vancouver because of the city’s additional energy efficiency requirements, he added.

“If they build elsewhere, they can just keep doing things the same way they always have.” They are not required to retrain or invest in the development of new practices.”

Yasmin Abraham, the co-founder of the social enterprise Kambo Energy Group, emphasizes that no one should be left behind in the transition to homes that are more energy efficient and resilient to the worsening effects of climate change.

“We’re not going to hit our targets unless we include everyone,” said Abraham, whose organization designs and delivers energy education and retrofit programmes with Indigenous nations, newcomers, and low-income families in B.C. and Alberta.

The built environment is Canada’s third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for nearly 80% of total emissions.

The Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, which was signed into law last summer, commits Canada to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. That means the entire economy should either produce no emissions or offset them.

The average Canadian spends about 3% of their income on energy, so anyone spending more than that is in energy poverty, according to her.

Because these families tend to live in inefficient homes, failing to assist them in making improvements ignores significant potential emissions reductions, according to Abraham.

On a smaller, less expensive scale, Abraham suggests that households looking to improve their home’s energy efficiency begin by reducing draftiness. She recommends installing door sweeps and caulking any other places where air flows in and out.

Living in an inefficient home can cause health problems, with studies linking respiratory and cardiovascular conditions to “thermal discomfort” caused by being unable to properly heat and cool your home, Abraham added.

She claims that, unlike the United States, Canada lacks a national strategy to address energy poverty. Some programs provide rebates and financing options for improving energy efficiency, including an income-qualified program in British Columbia, but access is patchy across the country, so federal support would be critical, she said.

The federal budget for this year includes $150 million for the development of a national green building strategy for both new and existing buildings to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase resilience to the effects of climate change.