Taking advantage of inevitable change.

War; pestilence; famine; flood: always with us and yet, in our media culture, always supposed to be a shock to the system. A truly extraordinary year would be one in which none of these four conditions arose, but this would be treated by news managers as boring beyond belief. They would turn to crime, corruption and politics as suitable alternatives for public dismay and horror. That may be one reason why the response of both media and governments to climate change has been so tardy. If you habitually portray the entirely predictable as a shock (for example hurricanes) rather than an expected event, then it is difficult to detach the individual disaster from what may be a new and disturbing trend; much easier to elide the two. Thus earthquakes somehow get blamed on rises in global temperature, while most of the recorded history of natural catastrophe has to be discounted as irrelevant to our current condition.

It was significant that the reaction to a recent report on the economic effects of climate change, commissioned by the British government, was given much greater publicity than a report from a climate scientist would have attracted. Scare people about money and you get their immediate attention. Economics is no more precise a science, probably less so, than climatology, but its exponents have the ability to make your flesh creep via the wallet. Alas, Sir Nicholas Stern's report offers no easy options as to how we might cope with what are now predictable increases in temperature coming our way. Investment will be required as well as changes in lifestyle, and though some changes will generate growth in new sectors of the economy, there are bound to be discontinuities and genuine dilemmas for decision makers. The coming decades will see an increase in the status and wealth of ground and water engineers.

The role of architects in respect of all this can be significant in two ways: first, in thinking about cities as a whole (this year's Venice Biennale threw down this challenge), and second, in considering (at the level of the individual building and neighbourhood) what represents smart thinking for long-term futures. Let's remember the amount of energy used is less significant than its source (nuclear power may make a comeback); that saving energy is easier to achieve, and will have more impact, than generating it; and that the biggest savings in energy wastage will be gained through retro-fitting, rather than achieving ever-higher standards on the tiny percentage of buildings which represent new stock. Perhaps most importantly, what architects can do is bring an attitude of mind to these issues; as we know, an architect's attitude of mind can help to change the world, for better or worse.