Flood resilient earthen construction technology: When earth meets fabric

Abstract

Human-induced climate change is causing extreme weather patterns, increasing the power and frequency of flooding that does not have the same impact on everyone across the globe. According to the Global Climate Risk Index (2021), developing countries have been the most severely affected by flooding for the last two decades. For example, floods in Mozambique and Pakistan are becoming stronger, denser and more widespread year by year. Most of the low-income people in these countries live in earthen houses. In Mozambique, most houses are made from wattle and daub and, in Pakistan, cob or adobe, and all of these houses are susceptible to flooding, having been built with low-compaction. While humanitarian agencies and respective governments have aided these flood-affected people, their help has been limited and caused problems. In flood affected areas, most international agencies have built houses with concrete blocks (IOM and Arup, 2017), which is an expensive building material that most local people have never used before. Because of a limited budget, only a very small number of people are privileged to have a concrete block house, and the vast majority end up living in temporary tents and makeshift houses. The short-sighted approach of humanitarian agencies has caused more environmental and social problems. Because they focused on dealing with the most pressing issues, they failed to provide a sustainable and flood-resilient housing solution and lacked foresight of the negative impact of their responses. In view of these limitations of humanitarian agencies and the context of flood-prone areas, where resources are scarce (for instance, timber for formwork) and construction budgets are very low, the author of this paper has conceived of flood-resilient earthen construction technology that can be built with locally-available and low-cost resources: soil and fabric.