Preparing Churches for Climate Disruption

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To assure the ability to serve their communities in times of climate-related crises, church buildings need attention now. Now is the time to do the careful planning and design that focus on reducing the overall energy consumed by the building, which is requisite for resiliency and passive survivability—and ultimately for the ministry of the churches.

In architectural design, a building’s passive survivability denotes its ability to maintain its function without outside municipal inputs like electricity or water. For example, a building with a high passive survivability will be able to maintain electricity, provide potable water, and sustain livable temperatures in emergency situations when those municipal services are unavailable.

As climate change continues to cause large-scale infrastructural disruptions, like the polar vortex that left much of Texas without power in 2020, church buildings will need increasingly to be more resilient. Essentially, church buildings will want high levels of passive survivability. Just like how buildings equipped with solar arrays and battery backups along the Gulf Coast of the United States were able to provide basic humanitarian aid to individuals during Hurricane Ida, while those without resilience measures were left largely unfunctional.[1]

More Energy-Efficient and Climate Resilient

Brugmansia Ministries has been working hand in hand with faith communities to do the important work of building up strengths needed to weather the challenges presented by climate change and an uncertain future—while also enhancing their current ministries. Foundationally, we are asking how our faith communities can more fully integrate their assets and buildings into their missional life to better serve their neighbors, communities, and ultimately God.

Listed below are a few examples of how Brugmansia Ministries has been helping faith communities envision how they can use their buildings to become more missionally resilient.

 Food Security, Resilience, and Energy Efficiency

The United Methodist Church of Kent is in the northeastern Ohio portion of the Erie Drift Plane ecoregion, an area that is projected to see increased flooding, decreased food production, and increased population due to climate-related migration based on current climate projections.[2] Within the community of Kent, there are already challenges around food security and potential issues with water quality relating to local geology that could be worsened by flooding events.[3]

After performing intensive evaluation of climatic impacts on local infrastructure for Kent, and how those impacts could exacerbate existing social inequalities in that community, members of the UMC of Kent have decided to form a climate-resilience team with the goals of converting much of their land into a permaculture food forest, establishing green roofing to reduce flooding risks while increasing the energy efficiency of their building, and installing solar panels to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. These efforts will reduce energy consumption in the production and transportation of food, make the UMC of Kent’s buildings more thermally stable and efficient, provide an additional local food source for their community, and help reduce flooding. Additionally, the permaculture food forest will act as a carbon-negative food source, effectively reducing the net amount of fossil fuel emissions for the properties of the UMC of Kent. The community resilience summary for the UMC of Kent can be found here.

Using Energy Efficiency to Build Economic and Community Resilience

COVID-19 has intensified existing economic and social challenges in Nashville, TN, placing many folks in that community into physically and economically fragile positions. As a large, prominent church located near downtown, West End United Methodist Church (WEUMC) is one of many front-line organizations in Nashville providing both economic assistance for housing and emergency food-aid to individuals in crisis. Challenges associated with the pandemic, coupled with a housing crisis deepened by climate migration/gentrification, have increased the demand for emergency assistance with WEUMC witnessing unprecedented demands for financial aid.[4]

To address the need for more financial assistance, Brugmansia Ministries is helping WEUMC by creating a framework to directly connect its efforts toward energy efficiency into its outreach work. Together we are tracking the energy efficiency of the WEUMC building and working with the congregation to accept a proposal that sets aside any monies saved in efficiency to be split 50-50, with half going toward a fund to be used for energy efficiency and half going directly to those in need. By concretely connecting energy savings with outreach, WEUMC is incentivizing the cultural and behavioral changes necessary to become energy efficient and building up a financial resource to fund larger efficiency measures in the future. In doing so, they are ensuring that their environmental ministries will be financially resilient while increasing support for their community. The full proposal can be found here.

Natural Disaster, Climate Migration, and Human Networks

The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer (ECR) has already been witnessing challenges associated with hurricane displacement and resource shortages, both expected to increase under climate change scenarios. On the Gulf Coast of the United States, ECR is in the early stages of becoming more resilient by reviving an old water well on their property to have potable water, investigating solar arrays and battery backups to have an independent electrical system, and beginning conversations with their diocese around how they can coordinate with other churches in a migration crisis to provide shelter.

Through the careful preplanning, ECR is building a strong human network to help them serve in the crisis moments they are already witnessing, while building up the resources necessary to be effective in their service. Even though these actions are not conventionally thought of as efficiency measures, in preparing for disasters, ECR’s actions will be reducing the amount of energy needed in disaster recovery and, at the same time, reducing their reliance on fossil fuels.

To learn more about the concepts of passive survivability or to read about the Living Building Challenge, which is a certification for buildings to become survivable, check out the work of the International Living Future Institute and the Living Building Challenge.

Works Cited

“4th National Climate Assessment,” 2019. www.nca2018.globalchange.gov.

Apple, Alex. “Out-of-State Companies Heighten Nashville’s Affordability and Housing Crisis.” wztv.com, 2021. https://fox17.com/news/local/out-of-state-companies-heighten-nashvilles-affordability-and-housing-crisis.

Feeding America. “Feeding America Projections.” Feeding America Projections – March 2021 – Food Insecurity, 2021. https://www.feedingamerica.org/.

Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. “Drinking Water Source Assessment for the City of Kent,” 2019. http://wwwapp.epa.ohio.gov/gis/swpa/OH6701812.pdf.

Robinson, Caleb, Bistra Dilkina, and Juan Moreno-Cruz. “Modeling Migration Patterns in the USA under Sea Level Rise.” Edited by Julia A. Cherry. PLOS ONE 15, no. 1 (January 22, 2020): e0227436. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227436.

United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Level III Ecoregions of the Continental United States,” 2013. https://gaftp.epa.gov/EPADataCommons/ORD/Ecoregions/us/Eco_Level_III_US.pdf.

Urban Housing Solutions. “Solving The Housing Crisis in Nashville, TN.” Accessed October 27, 2021. https://www.urbanhousingsolutions.org/nashvilles-housing-crisis/.

Wulf, David De. “Opinion | How to Lessen Suffering after the Worst Hurricanes? Outfit Restaurants with Solar Panels and Batteries. – The Washington Post.” The Washington Post, September 14, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/14/hurricanes-solar-panels-batteries-restaurants-resiliency/.

​[1] David De Wulf, “Opinion | How to Lessen Suffering after the Worst Hurricanes? Outfit Restaurants with Solar Panels and Batteries. – The Washington Post,” The Washington Post, September 14, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/14/hurricanes-solar-panels-batteries-restaurants-resiliency/.

[2] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Level III Ecoregions of the Continental United States,” 2013, https://gaftp.epa.gov/EPADataCommons/ORD/Ecoregions/us/Eco_Level_III_US.pdf; “4th National Climate Assessment,” 2019, nca2018.globalchange.gov; Caleb Robinson, Bistra Dilkina, and Juan Moreno-Cruz, “Modeling Migration Patterns in the USA under Sea Level Rise,” ed. Julia A. Cherry, PLOS ONE 15, no. 1 (January 22, 2020): e0227436, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227436.

[3] Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, “Drinking Water Source Assessment for the City of Kent,” 2019, http://wwwapp.epa.ohio.gov/gis/swpa/OH6701812.pdf; Feeding America, “Feeding America Projections,” Feeding America Projections – March 2021 – Food Insecurity, 2021, https://www.feedingamerica.org/.

[4] Urban Housing Solutions, “Solving The Housing Crisis in Nashville, TN,” accessed October 27, 2021, https://www.urbanhousingsolutions.org/nashvilles-housing-crisis/; Alex Apple, “Out-of-State Companies Heighten Nashville’s Affordability and Housing Crisis,” wztv.com, 2021, https://fox17.com/news/local/out-of-state-companies-heighten-nashvilles-affordability-and-housing-crisis.

Josh Richardson is the executive director of Brugmansia Ministries, an organization comprised of scientists, engineers, scholars, and religious leaders whose mission is to address climate change and climate migration through the building of physical, relational, and spiritual infrastructure within faith communities to increase the resilience and adaptive capacity of those communities to proactively address climate-driven environmental and human disasters. This article is republished with permission from the UMC Climate Justice Movement website.