Let me tell you a story of a typical Pakistani Family. 5 people in the house, mother, father, 2 sons and a little girl. All have their routines. Mother is a house wife, husband is on a 9am-5pm job duty, while all kids go to school. It’s the month of May and so the heat is unbearable. Sun has some scorching heat anger issues which it is spreading with full power. So the AC turning on and off times are necessary but since all are afraid of high electricity bills, thus the AC is turned on only for an hour in the evening when all kids and the father have come to home and then at night during sleeping hours.
A typical day when the mom is rushing to make the kids their breakfast and to prepare them for school. Husband is running late and trying his best to be ready on time to reach at 9am at office. The mom is successful in feeding all four members and asking the kids to go to school and the husband has also left for office 15 minutes before 9am. Now as the heat increases in the country, our government has a bad habit of increasing load shedding. So as usual when it is 5 pm , everybody is home and about to turn the AC on to get cool breezes, BOOM the light goes off. Everybody was already irritated by the heat, now get further annoyed and a fight begins. Now 2 hours later when the light comes, everybody is irritated still but now rush towards their pending tasks related to electricity. Now when 11 pm strikes, and time for real AC experience starts, light goes off again and comes after an hour. Now when the AC is finally turned on, guess what? It is not cooling yet. Because it has just been made out of order due to sudden electricity jerks and the whole family will now tolerate the heat till dawn.
Moral of the story: Your buildings are unbearable without electricity.
If we start making building with strong materials but good thermal properties e.g. the ones which do not allow heat to come inside for a long time or get cooled at night making it bearable to pass the night, the whole story described above would be different. One of the many reasons of this scorching heat, longer summers and shorter winters in Pakistan is climate change which indirectly is related to our buildings spreading carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s right! Each of our building is dependent on air conditioners or mechanical systems to keep them cool which are a source of releasing carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to the atmosphere, which in turn is causing Climate change and global warming. Furthermore, we even use artificial lights in the day because our buildings are not designed to make them lit by daylight.
Meanwhile in another world, if our buildings were designed according to the climate i.e. windows oriented to get least of hot summer sun rays and most of cool breezes in the evening, materials used e.g. sand stone like Shahi Fort, Lahore that keep the building cool by opening windows at night and if we maximize use of greenery around our buildings, then we can practically solve the problem of climate change. The scenario in such a building would be, if light goes off we can open the windows to let the air in. Since everybody in a large city is following the practice of using windows only for getting light in the day and not turning artificial lights on, thus we save electricity. Thus light will not go off at night when AC is required most. Even it goes off, we can open our windows to keep the building at least bearable to sleep. This can not only make the country socially and economically prosperous but we can also be the contributors to reducing harmful impacts of global warming in this world.
In short, we can save our money, raise happy families and make Pakistan greener if we start making buildings that are sustainable, energy efficient and the ones which can rely on themselves when energy crisis strikes.
Thank you for reading. I hope you have enjoyed my story.
Maha