Balancing risk and growth: Grunde Jomaas outlines how new materials and technologies pose fire risks
Iain Hoey
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By Grunde Jomaas, Head of the Department for Fire-safe Sustainable Built Environment (FRISSBE)
According to Gro Harlem Brundtland’s Our Common Future, sustainable development meets present needs without compromising future generations’ ability to meet their own.
Achieving this requires balancing environmental, social and economic goals, as all three pillars are essential for future generations to thrive.
While pursuing a sustainable built environment, we face pressing challenges.
New materials, systems and technologies are introduced to meet sustainability goals, but they bring new fire hazards and risks, such as electric vehicles (EVs), photovoltaic (PV) systems, battery energy storage systems (BESS), bio-based materials and mass timber.
Addressing these risks is crucial.
Identifying these challenges and securing funding is essential to ensure future fire-safe built environments that contribute to sustainability goals.
Climate change and decarbonisation impact the built environment, with construction being a major COâ‚‚ emitter.
This leads to increased use of new and previously less-favoured materials, like timber and bio-based materials.
Including fire safety in life cycle and sustainability calculations for such buildings is essential.
With rising wildfire risks, ensuring fire safety when using these materials is particularly important in wildland-urban interfaces.
To decarbonise the built environment and transport amid the energy crisis, governments promote renewable energy and technologies like EVs, BESS, solar panels and heat pumps.
However, these systems can pose serious fire safety challenges if not properly addressed.
Ensuring fire safety is not compromised while reducing carbon emissions is crucial.
Renovation and repurposing involve aspects like building envelopes, possibly overlapping with roof PV installations.
This requires understanding systems, including insulation materials.
If renovation leads to increased facade and cavity fires, the building isn’t resilient and sustainability gains are false.
This must be addressed through holistic sustainability tools, material choices and construction techniques ensuring fire safety throughout the building’s lifetime.
Clear evidence links firefighter exposure to toxic combustion products and cancer, necessitating new thinking.
Furthermore, many flame retardants and extinguishing agents don’t meet circular economy requirements, highlighting the urgent need for environmentally friendly alternatives.
Thus, let us unite to increase fire safety knowledge and competence so we can contribute to sustainability, fulfilling current needs without compromising future generations, ensuring a balance between economic growth, environmental care and social well-being.
The fire safety confusion is immense right now and it is an outstanding time to make profit for all stakeholders, so also the ones without anything of real value to contribute with.
Therefore, more than ever before, we need competence and we need ethics and a true wish for fire safety to have a higher priority than profit making.
About the IFSJ Influencer
Grunde Jomaas, ERA Chair holder and Head of the Department for Fire-safe Sustainable Built Environment (FRISSBE) at ZAG in Slovenia, is an award-winning mentor, educator and communicator.
He advises ESA and NASA on spacecraft fire safety and governments, research agencies and companies on achieving fire safety in a sustainability-driven society.
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