Transforming homes kick starts rapid transition. Providing affordable, energy-efficient and decent shelter is a primary responsibility of a society to itself.
Big global shifts in recent decades have seen populations rise and move to cities and urban areas where space is limited and the provision of housing a challenge. The built environment is one of the biggest users of energy and emitters of carbon, both in construction and day to day use.
Story of change
A fast plant for rapid shifts in construction – how the ancient supercrop Hemp can help build low carbon homesReducing emissions in the construction industry, with its dependence on carbon-intensive concrete, is notoriously difficult and extraordinarily important in tackling the climate emergency. When...
But there are huge economic, environmental and social gains to be made from making sure that new buildings are zero carbon, and existing buildings are retrofitted to become energy efficient. New thinking about how where we build relates to where we work can also radically reduce energy use and improve quality of life by, for example, designing out unnecessary commuting in cars.
New or revived interest in common land ownership, and cooperative or part-communal housing developments are further demonstrating how to change how we live to radically and rapidly reduce our climate impact, while also easing a range of social and health problems.
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Story of change
Heating households not the planet: from China to Denmark rapid transition in heating brings warmer homes with less climate costWinter is coming in the northern hemisphere and keeping homes warm is on everyone’s minds. Much housing stock is old, inefficient and leaks heat, and the...
Story of change
The big rebuild: one-week zero-carbon home makeovers and setting new comfort levels‘Build, build, build’ is a call heard to boost economies trying to bounce back from the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis impact of the...
Story of change
Upward spiral: how circular economies break the cycle of overconsumptionThe climate emergency is a result of the sheer weight of human economic activity on the biosphere. Extraction of resources and the production of waste is...
Story of change
S**t matters – how the Covid-19 crisis reveals both progress and the challenge of universal sanitationNever has a resource crisis been brought so swiftly to the attention of the global North than when toilet paper was suddenly in short supply and even...
Story of change
How learning to share again cuts waste, and makes more resilient communitiesSharing is one of the very first things we are taught to do as children, it’s almost the defining difference between being ‘good’ or seen as selfish....
Story of change
Transition Towns – the quiet, networked revolutionThe Transition Network began in 2006 in the small rural UK town of Totnes, Devon. It was initially a response to the twin threats of climate change and peak...
Story of change
Future homes: the rapid rise, fall, and return of UK social housingHousing is the ‘crucial backdrop’ to poverty in the United Kingdom according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human...
Story of change
Make do and mend: the rise of repair cafesThe relationship with ‘stuff’ in high-consuming, wealthy economies is set to change. From the European Union to the United States new laws are being...
Story of change
The World’s first renewable island – when a community embraces wind powerThe Danish island of Samsø went from being entirely fossil fuel dependent to becoming the World’s first 100% renewable island, in under a decade. In...