Reacting to climate change: From Manila

Built to survive wars, the Malate parish church in Manila now has a very different threat. Rising temperatures due to climate change is making attending mass a near unbearable experience. Local echo architect, Clifford Espinosa has a solution,“it's all about creating and humanizing spaces.”

Built in 1591, the Augustinian friars had the Church of Malate made of stone and bricks that could withstand lantakas or bronze cannons fired by the Moro tribes. Now over 400 years after, the Baroque-style Church yet again underwent another type of retrofitting, this time in a modern, innovative way to adapt to today's extreme weather changes.

It's summer and it's 36 degrees Celsius high in Manila. Inside the church, the temperature drops below thirty. The walls are cool, and air moves around the church doors freely even at noontime when it's hottest.

A “spatialist,” Espinosa is the pioneer of the green architecture movement in the country. He began designing green buildings way back in the 80s when climate change was practically unheard of.

Now that global warming has become a major environmental problem, his designs have become quite fashionable, and inexpensive.

For the Columban priests of the Church of Malate, it needed no figuring out. An environmentalist himself, Father Leydon was big on ventilation. Meeting Espinosa, he says, was like preaching to the converted.

Airconditioning was not an option. Doing so will not only harm the environment, it will also cost the church an additional one hundred thousand pesos in monthly electricity bills.

The airconditioning system was estimated to cost twenty-five million pesos. Espinosa's solution: two million pesos.

The Church's walls are made of adobe, a type of cement that quickly absorbs heat. And so even at five in the morning, when the church doors open, the heat is stifling. To fix this, Espinosa built a two-meter wide opening made of tin on the roof. Tin, he says, heats up quickly, creating more air movement within the church. It's called the Bernoulli principle of passive cooling – hot air rises because of the difference between the cool air from below and the warm temperature from the ceiling.

The tin has bullet-like perforations that creates more ventilation and prevents rainwater from coming in.

Now Malate churchgoers not only enjoy the cooler atmosphere, they can actually hear the mass better. The extra space fixed the acoustics, reducing the echo sound inside the church.

Father Leydon sees implementing green solutions as an opportunity for churches to take the lead in advocating for the environment.

For the Filipino architect, it's all about being humane or making community spaces more habitable. Espinosa says “without space, light and air, good living is not possible.”

He says it's helping communities actually “breathe”, and live.

Text and Voice Over by Avigail Olarte

Video by D J Clark

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About D J Clark

D J Clark has worked worldwide as a photojournalist for more than 20 years. He specialises in working with international development NGOs to highlight social, political and environmental issues through long term photography projects. D J Clark researches and writes about photography as a vehicle for social change, the subject that drives both his photographic and academic work. More recently his work has concentrated on Multi Media news production.