The Helm Bar over Cumbria in 2017 (BBC News)

A substack adaptation of my review for Resurgence & Ecologist Issue 359 • Nov/Dec 2026, get your issue now!

Do you believe that humans innately love “Nature”? That we connect easily with ecosystems, and that natural places make us calmer, happier and healthier? Sarah Hall’s new novel, the 2025 Goldsmith Prize-winning Helm, asks you to interrogate that belief more closely.

Twenty years in the writing, Helm is set in England’s Eden Valley, where former Booker-nominee Hall grew up. It is something of a biography of the Helm Wind, a tempestuous real-life wind that sometimes rushes into the valley from the Pennines in the late winter or spring. In the Eden Valley, Hall tells us, locals do not romanticise the titular Helm: “People have toiled here for centuries, fighting and working with the weather, respecting it, not denying the reality of its systems. When it rains, it fucking well rains.”

The novel starts in deep time. We cross aeons watching the creatures of the Pennines evolve, and are present at Helm’s first manifestation - “Cue, a wind-appropriate domain. / Cue, at some point, Helm”. Helm is a curious, mercurial, filthy, forceful, affectionate and destructive being, and Helm, who is pronoun-less, is desperate for attention “Everything is without self-consciousness, and adapts and adapts and just is”. At some point humankind arrives too, and thereafter follows the stories of an assembly of human characters from different periods of human history, each seeking to connect with Helm in their own way.

None of these people is a simple lover of Nature, let alone of Helm. Some are reverent, loving or respectful. Neolithic woman, NaNay, is on a mission to appease Helm by completing a Stonehenge-esque site, while modern atmospheric scientist Dr Salima Sutar is investigating microplastic levels around “Mrs H”, and grappling with Helm’s looming death. Crusader Michael Lang believes Helm is a demon to be slayed, while earnest Victorian experimentalist Thomas Bodger wants to investigate Helm in the name of “weatherproofing”. All deal with Helm in the various creative, fearful and curious ways available to them.

Helm is also profoundly important in all the characters’ similarly diverse experiences of loving other humans. Helm is at different points a proof of mettle, an exciting backdrop to a romantic liaison, an escape from heartbreak, a catalyst for separation and much more besides. Our connections with one another, Hall seems to be saying, reflect, and are entwined with, our connections with nature. Perhaps they are even one and the same thing.

So, Helm offers a profound and a nuanced depiction of a weather system of love and relationships in the Eden Valley. The novel convincingly, and usefully, complicates the popular idea that the “natural” relationship between humans and “Nature” is loving and benign on either side. But the thought feels unfinished.

Hall has spoken of her belief in ‘positive stories’ for environmentalism, and perhaps it is for this reason that the major characters all fairly straightforwardly fulfil their objectives to revere Helm, or have their more nefarious schemes fail. All achieve some kind of a reckoning with Helm, even those most antagonistic to Helm, like crusader Michael Lang: “I am ailing, Michael confesses. My head hurts and it is constant. This is a crown of thorns. I am a bad cap too, Helm says. The mountain wears me. Shall we be comrades, then? Aye!”

This positive-message tendency flattens this otherwise absorbing novel. It whispers of a common connection with Nature, or perhaps a glory in Nature, that is less compelling than the more complex and nuanced interpretation that fills the earlier parts. Humans’ needs undermine the drama of the approaching death of Helm, which is hinted at throughout, but forced into the background. One suspects Helm, in all Helm’s capricious, oblivious, dying glory, might resent it.

Thanks to Niellah Arboine at Resurgence & Ecologist for edits.

From Resurgence & Ecologist Issue 356 • May/Jun 2026

In 2021, scientist Suzanne Simard’s compelling memoir Finding the Mother Tree argued that life in the forest is more complex than a simple race for competition between species.

Forests are, she believes, a complex network of cooperation and competition, facilitated by mycorrhizal fungal connections between roots that operate something like a biological neural network. Trees, she said, have agency in the transmission of resources, and perhaps even a type of intelligence. The book blended science, memoir and an intriguing proposition to great effect, stimulating useful discussions about anthropomorphisation – Simard’s critics blanch at metaphors like ‘mother tree’ – and bringing an interesting scientific debate into the public domain.

Simard’s new memoir, When the Forest Breathes, covers the five or so years of her research since. Specifically, it drills down into forestry practices. The Mother Tree Project is a large study examining the effects of clearcut logging in British Columbia, the common practice of felling big sweeps of trees at once and leaving the ground to regenerate. Simard has been looking at whether there are less destructive methods that enable forests to regenerate more effectively and remain resilient to the accelerating effects of the climate crisis.

As the project’s name suggests, her priority is the mother trees: old, large trees that Simard thinks share their excess carbon and nitrogen through the mycorrhizal network with other trees and seedlings. Her hypothesis is that their preservation during felling will improve the overall forest’s capacity to regenerate: if forests are agentic adaptive systems, then the mother trees should be their most able restorers.

The team pick nine sites covering “an area the size of Denmark” and treat them with combinations of different logging and replanting patterns. Her graduate students install additional experiments – such as testing whether trees show ‘kinship’ with their own families – and the team frequently collaborate with Indigenous people of the sites’ territories to tailor the cutting and replanting regimes to local knowledge systems. The book moves between different sites and groups, exploring different facets of theories of cooperation, and documenting Simard’s experiences with friends, family and foresters along the way.

The resulting book is engaging, but somewhat uneven. Where Finding the Mother Tree was driven by Simard’s growing conviction in theories of collaboration in forests, and battle with the establishment, When the Forest Breathes has less thrust. The team’s findings seem to have been most revelatory in terms of proving the amount of carbon stored in the forest floor (rather than tree canopies) and unearthing the extent of destruction caused by clearcutting, intensive forestry machinery and the felling of old growth. These are topics that most readers are unlikely to have had strong preconceptions about anyway, and the links to Simard’s ideas about forests as connected systems can be unclear. The prose can be similarly slippery, veering between playful (“The whole forest awakens in a teeming, bustling surge, as rich and joyful as the young at play and the old at work, carrying forward the business of life”) and soupy (“Nature is waiting for us to learn that we are all bound by the same rules. And to remember that, when the forest breathes out, we breathe in. When the forest thrives, we thrive. When the forest lives, we live”).

But, for lovers of her bestseller first book, it remains a real pleasure to be invited back into Simard’s forests. When the Forest Breathes is another generous and raw glimpse into an unconventional group of scientists and communities, their lives, losses and experiments. Simard is an imaginative investigator of new and old ideas about forest ecology, and we are fortunate that she is willing to take us along for the ride.

When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard. Allen Lane, 2026. ISBN: 9780241763315

From Resurgence & Ecologist Issue 357 • Jul/Aug 2026

US president Donald Trump’s attempted annexations of Greenland and Canada earlier in 2026 were signs of mounting climate-linked geopolitical tensions, according to ex-diplomat Arthur Snell.

Central to the “Arctic Great Game”, both are rich in precious minerals. As the planet warms, shipping routes are opening across the sea ice, and the area may become more agriculturally and industrially productive. Other countries are making moves, too: Russia enlarged its claim to 70% of the Arctic seabed in 2021, and China began to include the polar regions in security laws in 2015, unveiling a ‘Polar Silk Road’ initiative in 2018. The “unfreezing of the Arctic”, writes Snell, “is leading to an unfreezing of the delicate strategic balance in that region.”

This is the sobering stuff of Elemental, Snell’s ambitious new book about the geopolitical implications of the climate crisis. Snell, who left Britain’s Foreign Office in 2014 and now hosts Behind the Lines podcast, is concerned with how today’s apocalyptic geopolitical headlines are increasingly inseparable from the deterioration of the planet.

Over the course of the book, Snell figuratively and literally roams the planet – in a way that perhaps only a former British diplomat can – exploring how the climate crisis and energy transition are starting to affect the global order. Unambiguous information about the impacts of the climate crisis is still surprisingly difficult to come by. As mainstream climate writing continues to prevaricate, Elemental traces the sprawling map of resources, state boundaries and transitions unusually firmly. The work is wide-ranging, covering food supplies, migration, energy market transformations, water access and much more.

Snell believes such changes aren’t simply a direct response to the climate crisis, but that they are increasingly a factor. “There is an important distinction to be drawn between the idea that ‘everything is because of climate change’, which is an oversimplification,” he writes, “and the truth, which is that ‘climate change changes everything.’” This nuance is useful without disrupting Snell’s clear-sightedness about the scale and reality of the issue.

Snell sensibly avoids a truly impossible scope by focusing fairly tightly on what is and will happen due to the climate crisis. He largely avoids judgements about why it is happening, or what must be done. As a result, he builds his case well to make confident, if not grim, conclusions: “As much as it is an unwelcome prospect, it feels most likely that the current growth trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions will continue for several more decades.”

But there is a lingering horror in this book that is separate to the awful realities of fires, floods and food chains. By translating the climate crisis into the faceless, impersonal game of geopolitics, Elemental reveals that for many it is increasingly being treated as a player in deeper and more insidious machinations – cynically framed in public as a question of possibilities and statistics, but in reality a geopolitical dimension whose course can be predicted with some accuracy. The US, Russia and China are making moves that suggest they are aware of the melting Arctic and the need to secure minerals for the energy transition. Elemental hints that current global leaders are fully aware of what is going on and are acting accordingly.

There are some moments of cheer: Snell is adamant that climate impacts can also generate cooperation, citing the example of scientific breakthroughs to improve crop production, countries deterred from conflict by risks to food and energy supply, and innovative new governance systems emerging. But while Elemental is challenging, it is useful. As the world’s powerful become clear-eyed about the impacts of this crisis, turning it to their own ends, understanding their logic becomes essential to resisting it. This is an unblinking analysis of the state of the global order as the climate crisis begins to bite.

Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It by Arthur Snell. Wildfire, 2026. ISBN: 9781035412969

Retrofit House Open Day: image by Paul Stringer

Last month, a National Audit Office investigation found that nearly 35,000 recent home insulation projects had been botched.

‘The insulation on inside walls was left in a mess,’ one recipient told the regulator helpline. ‘They ripped my nice windowsills out…we had leaks in the bathroom ceiling’. ‘Am now having to live in an unheatable mouldy house,’ said another. ‘If I cook walls run with condensation.’

Not all retrofit homes are affected - issues were mostly with external and internal wall insulation installations - but around 10% of all homes in the government’s Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme between early 2022 and 2025 had significant problems. In the wake of previous aborted government retrofit schemes, plagued by delays, unspent funds and mixed signals from policy-makers, it seems that national retrofit efforts are still in trouble.

But the same cannot be said for the network of community climate action projects that has been steadily growing across the UK. The Retrofit House open week in Birmingham earlier this month, coming just a few weeks after the NAO report publication, is a case in point.

Retrofit House

Retrofit House, an unassuming terraced house in inner Birmingham, has been gutted, carefully, with patches of wall cut out to reveal layers of plaster and insulation. The walls are papered with photos of street parties from previous years, murals and slogans: ‘What if the climate transition and retrofit of our homes and streets were designed, owned and governed by the people who live there?’. During the open week, a gazebo with free street food stands in the front yard, with a mixture of neighbours, campaigners, tradespeople and researchers passing through.

At one session, people are discussing what a street might use a shared house for - maybe a booking system for guest rooms, a store shared equipment or a venue for parties? In other rooms, Planet Cheltenham talk about how to approach climate work in areas with extreme wealth polarities, and Wessex Community Assets talk about how to remove the middle man (Big Energy companies) when procuring green energy. Upstairs, local ceramicist Hristiyan Pavlov is running a workshop making platters for sharing food, and poet Siana Bangura is performing.

Blending art, food and activism, the week looks and sounds nothing like a government-approved contractor parachuting in to install insulation. Instead, it kicks off a collective retrofit process. Over the coming months, neighbours will work together to decide how to use and decarbonise the house and improve the street, whether through creating shared spaces, procuring clean energy, tree planting, electric vehicle chargers or any measures they choose.

Retrofit House Open Day: image by Paul Stringer

CIVIC SQUARE

Retrofit House is the brainchild of CIVIC SQUARE, a Birmingham neighbourhood organisation dedicated to ‘working in place… to discover and share new forms of public goods’. They bought Retrofit House, with the neighbours’ blessing, earlier this year. Researchers Dark Matter Labs will help the community develop and test ways to make collective decisions, and architects Material Cultures, who specialise in bio-based materials, will lead the actual retrofit.

The project is a demonstrator for processes and approaches that could be replicated across the UK. Though it may not have come from the street’s inhabitants directly, the scheme embodies the fervent belief of CIVIC SQUARE that retrofits can actually be extremely popular - we just need better structures and stories to build on.

We need, says Imandeep Kaur, co-founder and director of CIVIC SQUARE, to ‘make the story of retrofit less about the deep technical’ and more about the fact that we all know that ‘better quality homes are better for your health, cheaper to run, better for your children.’

In that vein, climate actions on Retrofit House and its street are likely to cover typical climate topics like thermal performance, damp, air quality and biodiversity. But, says Kaur, although ‘people are interested in retrofit… they are more interested in why the cars are going past so fast’ - one does, indeed, zoom down the quiet street alarmingly quickly half an hour later. This is why the participants have such flexibility to choose what they spend their funding on. CIVIC SQUARE aren’t telling them to meet a specific climate goal, but instead using the exercise to help the street decide what a better, healthier, safer life looks like, of which less ecologically destructive living is just one part.

An ecosystem of programmes

Retrofit House Open Day: image by Paul Stringer

Retrofit House is not the only programme by CIVIC SQUARE, which is running a similar project for a whole square a 10 minute walk away. It’s not even the only initiative in Birmingham: since 2022, community group Retrofit Balsall Heath have used door-knocking to encourage 650 homes to take up council ‘warmer homes’ funding, while other organisers have been creating community-owned hubs and hotels. Re:Builders, a learning programme for midlands SMEs, will be testing sustainable retrofit processes like lime mortar repointing using waste materials, bio-based insulation and earthen floors on Retrofit House itself.

Retrofit House is also being visited by community retrofit groups from across the UK. As well as Planet Cheltenham and Wessex Community Assets, Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust are sharing how they are bringing life and wealth back to their corner of Liverpool, having turned a street clean-up effort into award-winning home renovations, street planting and the creation of a monthly street market. CIVIC SQUARE’s wildly popular annual Retrofit Reimagined festival tours the UK to bring together thousands of community and climate groups.

The truth is that community retrofit action is everywhere. The numbers aren’t huge, but the outcomes are durable and deep-rooted: from Scottish towns jointly buying infrared cameras (to check where their houses leak energy), to renters’ rights groups campaigning for energy efficiency requirements in landlord regulations, to long-term projects like CIVIC SQUARE and Granby buying back homes and infrastructure. There is a huge, proactive interest in climate and housing action in the UK.

Birmingham

How has such a thriving network emerged that braids so many knotty ideas together - the use of ethically sourced bio-based materials, democratic decision-making processes, retrofitting and creating new collective ownership models all in one go?

Government schemes like ECO, the source of the botched retrofits, are in short supply, and largely not being spent on such bottom-up community projects. And, while climate action is generally popular in the UK, specific actions tend to be more controversial. As Kaur points out, in terms of housing ‘we don’t have the cooperative culture that lots of Europe has’, while the density of concentration of UK land and assets in the hands of the few makes community-led housing programmes challenging in practical terms.

But schemes like CIVIC SQUARE have appeared anyway. There were, Kaur says, until recent city council asset fire sales, lots of public spaces for community groups in Birmingham, in part thanks to low land values. They were filled with a multicultural community linked to ‘ancestral histories of rebuilding, of imaginative vision’. As a result, people are well connected and know the value of creating good, shared spaces in the shadow of austerity. On top of that, says Kaur, there is ‘absolute dogged, endless belief that things can get better’. Once again, interest in climate action has relatively little to do with it.

The commitment to their city is also why CIVIC SQUARE is spending money to purchase land, not just deliver individual climate actions. Retrofit House was acquired by the team just this summer (from a landlord who had left it with ‘layers and layers of quick fixes’). They ultimately managed to buy their nearby square, a former Amazon distribution hub, because between ups and downs of the pandemic and development cycles, the developer saw that they were there throughout - ‘Everyone disappeared, who was left?… everyone who had a stake in that place’.

These origins flip the narrative of most retrofit programmes, which usually prioritise ‘bang for your buck’ spending (£ / tCO2e saved) with vague appeals to social impact as a “co-benefit”. The more enlightened recognise community involvement and social impact as a vehicle to making schemes more effective.

But CIVIC SQUARE and their peers demonstrate that improving their homes and streets is not a side benefit of successful climate action, it’s often the driving force. They didn’t buy Retrofit House because it was easier than convincing the landlord to do a retrofit (which maybe would have been true), they bought it because they believe in creating permanent, stable improvements to the city. ‘We’re not just this community project’ says Kaur. ‘We are the foundations.’

Lessons for the government

Retrofit House Open Day: image by Paul Stringer

The ‘root causes’ of the issues with ECO, according to the NAO, are institutional. The audit report points to an ‘overly complex system’, insufficient monitoring, a lack of government oversight and even accusations of contractor fraud.

This may be true, and perhaps explains technical deficiencies in specific retrofits. But this skirts around how inevitably unpopular top-down, intrusive schemes that parachute construction works into peoples homes were going to be, or why recipients had such harrowing experiences. ‘The company refused to accept my complaints’, said another hotline respondent. ‘They even said this to me… “Well, you shouldn’t be complaining anyway as you got it all for free”.

The ecosystem spearheaded by CIVIC SQUARE isn’t a full answer, either, and certainly CIVIC SQUARE doesn’t claim to be - ‘there are twenty different solutions’, as Kaur likes to say. Community retrofit programmes are almost universally small, and all require funding, time and a lot of effort. Sometimes the range and diversity of the projects is hard to navigate, and there is little to no support available for the many community groups which lack media skills and experience with funding applications.

But there are a brilliant selection of models for socially sustainable retrofit programmes emerging in the UK, with an increasing focus on replicability. They are forcefully disproving patronising - and often racially prejudiced, in diverse cities like Birmingham - attitudes to bottom-up climate projects.

The programmes gaining traction are joyful, connecting and inclusive. They meet people where they are at, and seek to make lives structurally better and more empowered as a central feature of achieving climate goals, not as a ‘co-benefit’, nor as a way to ‘accelerate’ net zero. They show that when you give people the freedom to improve their surroundings, climate action is a natural bedfellow.

The next round of government home retrofit funding can’t come soon enough. We can only hope they take serious note of what’s happening in Birmingham and beyond.

In short: I looked into what ‘green concrete’ really is, finding that genuinely ecological concretes are both impossible, because they can’t avoid the issues of pollution and material mining, and not appearing anywhere near quickly enough to meet net zero targets. Even creators of green concrete, who kindly lifted the veil on some of the bottlenecks and priorities in the sector, were skeptical. I argued that while the Built Environment sector cannot yet be totally rid of concrete, a genuinely green future could be secured by pivoting away from the current single-material monopoly system to one where we use a diversified palette of smaller amounts of materials, which have been extracted in controlled, fair and careful conditions.

Not only is that hopefully a challenge to any designers reading the Architectural Review, it could be great news for the billions of people working in construction, inhabiting cities, part of big supply chains, living near to extraction sites, or running small businesses.

In May 2024, Microsoft revealed that its emissions have risen by a third since 2020, a far cry from the year‑on‑year reductions it had planned. Since the company has invested extensively in renewable energy, new emissions are only partly from energy use. The rise has instead been almost entirely caused by the launch of AI software such as ChatGPT; Microsoft has been opening a data centre every three days to meet the demand. According to their environmental accounts, the rise ‘primarily comes from the construction of more data centres and the associated embodied carbon in building materials’. Microsoft’s worsening environmental impact is an architectural problem.

Data centres are made of concrete. This material is responsible for around eight per cent of all global carbon emissions; created at every stage of concrete production, these emissions have been doubling every 20 years. The crucial first step to creating cement, the binding component of concrete, is firing clay and limestone in kilns at 1,400°C. Truly enormous quantities of greenhouse gases are released by burning coal and other fossil fuels to heat these kilns. In addition, limestone (CaCO₃) decomposes in the kiln into lime (CaO, the primary component of cement) and an almost equal amount of CO₂. Most of concrete’s global emissions are released in this process, with the rest resulting from running the equipment and vehicles to mine, transport and process its other main component parts – sand, aggregate and water.

Concrete causes devastation in other ways, in addition to its carbon emissions. Manufacturing, packing and transporting cement, aggregate and sand generates clouds of fine particulates, both from running equipment and vehicles, and the physical spread of the materials themselves, risking cancer and respiratory diseases among cement workers, and even children and adults living near the plants. The problems continue in use, in our buildings. Concrete creates a raft of negative impacts on health, including musculoskeletal issues from lives spent on hard surfaces and overheating in urban spaces.

Read on the full article on the Architectural Review website (Paywall, but allows 1 monthly free article).

Tipping points are a huge motivating factor for many climate activists. ‘Cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control’ Greta Thunberg told the UN Climate Action Summit in her famous September 2019 address. ‘Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice… a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us.’

Climate tipping points are where small environmental changes, such as in the amount of arctic sea ice or changes in the size of the Amazonian rainforest, create knock-on environmental effects that ‘cascade into global consequences’ explains Tim Lenton, in his new book Positive Tipping Points. Professor of Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter, Lenton has been at the very forefront of global efforts to identify climate tipping points for decades. Positive Tipping Points offers his perspective on tipping points, and a snapshot of the latest understanding of where we are in terms of risking hitting different escalations in environmental change - its not good, unsurprisingly.

For Lenton, though, tipping points are about more than strictly environmental systems. The greater part of the book deals with technical, social and economic cascades: ‘damaging tipping points in climates, civilization and our life-support systems are the biggest risk we face, but positive tipping points in society, technology and our relationship with nature can be our salvation’.

We hear about how social change has forced tipping points, be they moralistic anti-slavery campaigns, the organised protest of suffragettes (Lenton’s relative Lilian Lenton was a prominent suffragette), or cooperative national alliances to handle ozone levels. The historical analysis is fairly light - the role of enslaved people themselves in anti-slavery efforts, for example, is not really considered - but a range of different styles of network are covered. Lenton even touches on the efforts of individual billionaires seeking to use their capital and influence to tip norms - though recognises that 'we may rightly smart at the idea that the elite who have profited most from the status quo are going to voluntarily tip us out of it’.

Technological changes are also given close attention. The introduction of the car, for example, Lenton characterises as a ‘socio-technical’ tipping point that came from a ‘tipping cascade’ of economies of scale in production, technological reinforcement (adoption of networks of fuel stations) and ‘learning-by-doing’ among users and manufacturers. Lenton similarly dissects the emerging tipping point of electric vehicle and PV panel adoption in some countries, highlighting the importance of multi-country public investment in technological development, subsidies, feed-in tariff design and researcher training in driving such swings. He provides a refreshingly un-technocratic reading at each turn: ‘social and technological tipping points differ from climate and ecological ones in a crucial way: the changes behind them are usually driven by human intent… A small event may occasionally precipitate a big change in worldview’.

The policy menu that Lenton ultimately espouses is one where government, the market and activism ‘work together towards a common goal… [activating] numerous reinforcing feedback loops that can accelerate change’. Despite many allusions to having politics that are likely shared by many tipping-point-fearing climate activists, including a skepticism of growth and capital allocation, the system Lenton presents is largely not analysed against these areas of thought. For that reason the ‘positive tipping points’ he chases are slightly untethered from any clear or rounded landing point, but there remains lots to get into in this lively and impassioned book. It is great to see cross-disciplinary, James Lovelock-infused environmental systems thinking alive and well.

There are always infrastructure problems at COP, the UN’s annual climate change conference. Businesses and schools were temporarily closed for COP29, held in 2024 in Baku in Azerbaijan. Dubai’s COP28 relied on exploited workers, while COP27, in Sharm el‑Sheikh in Egypt, was plagued by food and water shortages. This year is no exception: COP30, which will be held in Belém, Brazil, has been hit by revelations that a new road to service the conference is slicing through the Amazon rainforest. Cutting down ‘lush rainforest towers’ is ‘undermining the cause’, suggests the BBC.

The port city of Belém started as a Portuguese colonial settlement in the early 17th century, quickly becoming a hub for local sugar extraction and cattle farming. A rubber boom in the 19th century, founded on debt slavery, funded urban reconstruction and modernisation in subsequent decades, including local road systems. A national industrialisation programme aiming to deliver ‘freedom through oil’ in the 1950s drove the construction of the 1,900km BR‑153 highway from Belém to the new capital city Brasília, cutting through parts of the rainforest that had previously been inaccessible. ‘Land‑grabbers and speculators, small family farmers and impoverished people without land – they all followed the road into the forest,’ describes environmental historian Sunil Amrith. The assault was quickly accelerated by the 1960s military junta, which extended the new highway network and parcelled out land on the model of industrial extraction pioneered in the west.

Belém’s surroundings are now more cattle pasture than forest. Neglected since the initial push for urbanisation, the city’s infrastructure is in many instances inadequate for its size, with poor housing, faltering waste infrastructure and high levels of poverty. The wider state of Pará, thanks to the web of roads in the region, has gone from being 90 per cent forested in 1985 to 75 per cent today – a loss greater than the total combined area of England and Wales.

…

Read the full article on the Architectural Review website (Paywalled, but you can access one article per month without paywall). Lead image credit: Adriano Machado / Reuters.

Property: the Myth That Built the World is an accessible and engaging account of the inner workings – and failings – of our housing system, writes Martha Dillon. Read the full article on the Architects’ Journal.

In the 1950s, the private US company Levitt & Sons could complete one house every six minutes. Levittown, New Jersey, grew into a ‘sociable and lively’ 12,000-home suburb, famed for its community spirit and sense of ‘family cohesion’. It was born of ‘a rare act of American socialism’, according to Observer architecture critic Rowan Moore, author of Property: The Myth That Built the World. The 1948 Housing Bill ‘loosened billions of dollars in credit and gave every American the chance to get one of those five-per-cent-down, 30-year mortgages’. But Levittown was only for white people. Black buyers were turned away, with Levitt claiming that the presence of Black families in the neighbourhood would cause house prices to fall.

Levittown, argues Moore, illustrates how home ownership can be both a source of independence and a powerful weapon. It promises security, freedom and shelter – and it bitterly amplifies divisions, prejudices and inequalities. Today, in the UK, a quarter of renters (who are disproportionately mixed race, Black or of Bangladeshi or Arab heritage) find it difficult to pay rent, compared to just 7 per cent of mortgagors who find it difficult to make their monthly repayments. As a result, less than a third of renters expect to buy in the next two years. Renters live in measurably more crowded, unsafe and precarious conditions than owners. Over a quarter of a million people have no home at all. People are ‘stranded’, says Moore. It is ‘a social, political and economic failure of colossal proportions’.

Read the full article on the Architects’ Journal.

In her expansive new book Natural Connection, academic and campaigner Joycelyn Longdon explores six roots of environmental practice: RAGE, IMAGINATION, INNOVATION, THEORY, HEALING, and CARE. Innovation is an area that she has explored more than most in the climate movement.

Longdon is a true polymath: she originally studied astrophysics (‘as far disconnected from planet Earth as possible’), at the same time as founding BLACKONBLACK, a studio for Black creatives. Her long-standing interest in environmentalism ‘bubbled away’ in the background, and in 2019 she founded ClimateInColour, a hugely popular online climate education platform and community. Racial justice campaigning, creative media, computational skills and environmental knowledge are all braided across her ongoing PhD and, now, Natural Connection.

These experiences appear diverse in a Western system that siloes fields of expertise. But it is precisely this separation that is the problem, she argues: ‘it's impossible for me to view technology as something that's disconnected from people in a living world. Technology has physical, material, cultural implications… [even in] a purely computational project, the tools that we're using are made of materials of the earth.’

Instead, Longdon considers herself a designer, and received the London Design Festival’s Emerging Talent award in 2022. Natural Connection has partly been an effort to start pinning down her approach in words, she tells me. The result is ‘rooted innovation’ which, she writes, is ‘a way of looking more closely at the objects and structures around us and embedding them in the greater ecosystems of nature and culture… [it is] the ability to solve problems in the unlikeliest of places, with the resources available to us.’ Through this lens, the technological and the natural are indistinguishable, ‘recent’ knowledge is not prioritised over ancient, and social justice is paramount.

Longdon isn’t interested in capital-T Tech, for Tech's sake (‘it probably took me six months to use chatGPT for the first time after it came out.’) But she is open to new tools and processes, within a wider consideration of natural and traditional knowledge systems. In her PhD, she uses machine learning to interpret results from bio-acoustic sensors, which are placed in a forest in the Ashanti region of Ghana. She works with a group of local people to design the sensor network and its functions.

Her willingness to test novel computerised technologies is not shared by all in the environmental movement. With ChatGPT and generative AI in the public consciousness, engineered by rapacious companies and unscrupulous billionaires, many rightly focus on the malign applications of modern technologies, their vast ecological footprints and their staggering privacy and surveillance risks. Longdon empathises: ‘so many of us are becoming disenchanted with and fearful of a lot of the technologies that we interact with on a daily basis’. But she thinks that perceptions have become too polarised. ‘There's this idea that technology will either save us or that it will be the source of our demise’, she says. But ‘there's a huge amount of exciting projects going on in the low tech space that are using technologies building sensors from scratch…AI is a [wide] space of analysis techniques.’

This is true: the ecological footprint of a sensor, for example, isn’t nothing, but is negligible compared to that of an AI chatbot. But can the sensors she uses actually help connect the people she works with to the ecosystems around them? Computers do, after all, usually create a distance between ourselves and the real world. As Longdon herself writes of the Vision Pro VR headset: ‘Apple asks us to be satisfied with a few high-definition videos of nature as we spend ever more time in their digital universe…[might this] exasperate our already dwindling meaningful interaction with the rest of the living world?’

Longdon doesn’t think that disconnection has to be the case. In her PhD, she asks people what they want to use eco-acoustic technology for. So far, she says, the community she’s working with mainly wants to understand the forest better. Many feel disconnected from it - some worry they’ll be arrested if they go in at all (she notes that after colonial administrators demarcated the area a formal forest reserve, its boundaries have been policed). They have decided to use the sensors to help identify which birds they are hearing.

Even the process of entering the forest to lay sensors has proven connective: ‘there's 20 of us together, walking, talking, laughing, running, scrambling, playing, teaching… we're going to deploy the sensors. But also we are kind of bonded together around this activity that we're doing.’ It’s a lesson that citizen scientists know well: monitoring pollution, digitizing rainfall records and documenting changing landscapes are all digital activities that can be community strengthening, defining and nourishing. Just listening back to recordings doesn’t bring us closer to ecosystems, Longdon notes, but ‘rooted innovation takes understanding that these technologies are situated in locations, and can have a goal to be very connected with place.’

Longdon feels her project is enabling a deepening, rather than replacing or sanitizing, of human experiences of the natural world. But it has also ended up interacting with the forest very differently to conventional Western ecological research. ‘The most common way that people might use AI in eco-acoustic monitoring is to pick a specific species or a range of species, or to do a kind of baseline survey… this has been going on for a long time’. This compartmentalisation, or tendency to measure and categorize, is something Longdon thinks comes from a colonial impetus and agenda, not AI tools. In Natural Connection, she argues that ‘science’ separated decisively from being about people during the industrial revolution and colonial era, during which Indigenous peoples were cast as ‘backward’ or ‘anti-technological’, and enforced colonial education severed Indigenous communities from their traditional skills and practices. By deploying technologies through a genuinely deliberative approach, she is also seeing much more organic forms of knowledge production emerge.

There’s a lot to Natural Connection, it’s far-reaching, ambitious and deliberately open-ended. But her willingness to see through boundaries is deeply refreshing, whether those separating fields of expertise, between natural and digital technologies, or across the environmental movement. For her, most technology has potential depending on how and where it is used, and she is one of few people trying to properly investigate what this could look like in ecological spaces. ‘Often, as a Black woman and environmentalist living in the West,’ she writes ‘I encounter individuals whose lives have not been touched by environmental disaster or oppression but who have already admitted defeat… unable to imagine the world outside its current extractive and destructive systems, they are resigned to apathy and inaction.’ For her, a true natural connection is ‘to plant strong roots in our communities and within the Earth: to build better futures’, whatever the technology.

When pupils at St Mary’s Voluntary Catholic Academy, Derby, were asked to photograph where they would most like to have their lessons, they all took pictures of outdoor spaces: the amphitheatre, forested areas or gardening club shelter. Asked what made them feel calm in their classrooms, they snapped the windows. In a mapping exercise, red stickers showing where they ‘least liked’ were mostly assigned to covered areas and indoor spaces (one Year 5 stole the pack and put them all on his classroom).

St Mary’s, designed by Hawkins\Brown and the winner of last year’s AJ100 Sustainability Initiative of the Year, is the UK’s first Department for Education-funded (DfE) biophilic primary school, meaning it fosters humans’ innate tendency to seek connections with ecosystems. When the original buildings burned down in 2020, it was selected for DfE’s GenZero pilot to construct schools ‘working with nature… for health, well-being & the environment’. The site has been re-oriented, re-landscaped and built to low embodied and operational carbon specifications using standardised timber modules and PV panels. Last month, the DfE and engineers Tilbury Douglas held a symposium to share lessons from its first year of life.

The school’s most notable biophilic feature is that it massively expands outdoor access. In the UK, only 24% of schools provide daily opportunities for pupils to experience nature, dropping to 18% in more deprived areas. Here, every classroom opens outwards: the school’s five single-storey timber blocks connect through winding paths and a covered outdoor canopy. ‘Wherever you are, you've always got sight of some greenery’ says Hawkins\Brown Technical Director (project architect?) David Brook. ‘Rather than an efficient footprint with internal circulation, most of that circulation is outside… kids get a little bit of fresh air when they go back and forth.’ There are no fenced-off ‘nature areas’, and service routes that previously cut off access to trees have been diverted. The outdoor amphitheatre and outdoor WiFi spots facilitate external lessons.

But simply going into or seeing ecosystems does not necessarily represent a deep interaction with the natural world – consider the famous Singapore Changi Airport trees, which encourage more flying than they dissuade, or office ferns, usually cared for by cleaning staff. ‘We have busy lives and there is a battle for attention,’ Professor Miles Richardson, a leading expert on connections with nature, tells the symposium. Architects need to be ‘designing a place or space so that it prompts engagement’.

In St Mary’s, the grounds are broken into a variety of different areas: busy playing fields, a meditation space, functional hard surfaces (excellent for dance routines, apparently), private forest, and sheltered courtyards. Headteacher Amanda Greaves tells the symposium that she thinks the most impactful change is that children now ‘choose where they want to go in their play and lunch breaks’, creating their own ways of interacting with their surroundings. For Brook, spaces with ‘a bit more identity’ give children ‘options and preferences, and then, because each one of those [spaces] can be characterized, they will change peoples’ decisions’.

While spaces might initially look conventional, the same ecosystem-esque flexibility and flow applies within the buildings. The layout is organic: the five school blocks are like organs around the central covered spine. Many of the walls and desks are whiteboards and some classroom furniture is on wheels, so pupils can move and write dynamically. Even the services are exposed or wall-mounted. This was originally intended to help maintenance and reduce embodied carbon, but in practice also reinforces the sense of buildings as moving, living systems. Some children have apparently picked up on this, wanting to understand the pipework labelling. According to Brook, this ‘speaks to those biophilic principles of being in harmony with your natural world, rather than existing in a separate plane independent of it, where we sort of lose that context.’

An even deeper immersion with ecosystems comes from active learning. St Mary’s has a gardening club, which prioritises access to students who don’t have gardens at home. While this isn’t exactly radical, Greaves says they plan to involve parents too. Swales around the site can be used to teach children about blue habitats while low paved walls and brambled areas provide pupils with ‘positive and manageable risks’. This is reminiscent of the Forest Schools philosophy, which holds that wilder green spaces are the most fertile places for young people to explore and learn for themselves. Brook notes that there is an environmental educational component to risk too: ‘having some spiky bushes is quite useful, because then we learn that we shouldn't just be running riot through the landscaping.’

Measuring the overall ‘success’ of biophilia is tricky. Many formal frameworks are dissatisfying, prioritising aesthetics and passive allusions to ecological features, like shapes and colours. It is to St Mary’s credit that the experience of the pupils is centre stage instead. Its blocky buildings may not ‘mimic shells and leaves’ but they are having an impact.

According to pupil surveys by University of Derby PhD student Sophie Rickard, pupils have shown a ‘sustained increase in life satisfaction post-move’, and their reading and mathematics scores have risen. The school also seems to be having a calming effect: the teachers allow ‘stressed and overwhelmed’ children, many of whom have chaotic home environments, to ask to go outside, which academics interpret as them using eco-systems to self-regulate. ‘I like these big trees’ one child reported. ‘They survived the fire and that gives me hope that if you are ill you can think about that big tree that survived.’ The findings add to a wealth of evidence that natural systems are crucial for children’s health and development.

Another consideration is the health of ecosystems themselves. Last September, a major compendium of international evidence showed conclusively that ‘the view that humans are separate from and superior to nature and that nature is comprised of objects for humans to use as resources’ is one of the three main causes of the staggering levels of biodiversity loss worldwide. Shifting to a more reciprocal relationship with ecosystems is quite literally life or death; we cannot use biophilic principles only to plunder nature for its productivity or wellbeing benefits. In St Mary’s, a link is emerging: academics say they have seen in pupils a ‘small but sustained increase in nature connectedness’, ‘a continued increase in pro-conservation behaviour’ and ‘stronger environmental perceptions scores’.

St Mary’s can’t be replicated for all buildings. It is a new build, in a large, open site peopled by young children with structured opportunities to go outside and learn. But there have been transferable successes here: the diversity of St Mary’s outdoor spaces, its blurred boundary between covered and open areas, and the opportunities it provides to directly engage people with their surroundings are all steps towards a more reciprocal type of architecture.

At the symposium, the DfE revealed that it has started a feasibility study for a biophilic secondary school down the road, suggesting that the (unspecified) cost uplift of delivering this pioneering new school has not deterred further exploration. The department also plans to include lessons from St Mary’s and other pilot schools in design guides, including refurbishment guides, which will be published later this year. Brook wants the project to ‘enshrine a higher standard that we should be working towards.’ Let’s hope so: thousands of UK schools are overdue major safety and sustainability upgrades, let alone millions of homes and other buildings. What an unmissable opportunity to drop the greenwashing, and start to repair human and ecological connections at scale.

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Trump and Musk do not agree about the climate emergency. According to their joint pre-election livestream, Musk thinks ‘we should just generally lean in the direction of sustainability’, believing that fossil fuels will run out long-term, and rising CO2 levels will give people ‘headaches and nausea… [making it] uncomfortable to breathe’. Trump’s line is erratic rather than specious: he praises Tesla but rambles about nuclear warming and wanting to expand energy infrastructure to feed AI – literally ‘drill baby, drill’. The only thing they seem to agree on is that they don’t ‘believe environmentalism should mean that you have to suffer’.

This sentiment is not the unique to the far right. Keir Starmer says climate action is ‘not about telling people how to live their lives.’ Backlash to climate policies that affect a perceived status quo can be intense. Research consistently shows that the public are generally worried about climate change, yet are reluctant to embrace many basic policies that would reduce emissions.

Sunil Amrith’s new epic, The Burning Earth: an environmental history of the last 500 years, looks at this fearful dynamic head on. It is, he says, about the ‘impossible quest to continue to expand the frontiers of human possibility while disregarding the health of the planet’.

Amrith leads us through a history of efforts to build wealth, mine and harness resources, and overcome diseases. Like most other environmental histories, he explores how ecological conditions have shaped human development, and vice versa – starting with the Mongols’ choice to embrace lucrative agrarian administration over nomadic life on the Steppes, and mapping the implications of volcanos, weather patterns and resource distributions on the following centuries of cultural and political shifts. It is well-written, alive with first-hand accounts, and genuinely global in scope.

But The Burning Earth is also prepared to grapple properly with people. For Amrith, any ‘arcs’ of progress that can be gleaned in modern history have not only been linked to climatic shifts and resource scarcity, but the human desire for safety and security, and all the selfishness, evil and oppression that this has justified. The Mongols, for example, seem to have supported a ‘late-Song [era] idyll of a harmonious society’ and promoted organised agriculture, but their quest for huge wealth through trade facilitated the spread of plague. In the World Wars, justified by ideas of freedom and security, animals, timber and fossil fuels were exploited in vast numbers alongside immense human suffering. And in recent decades, ‘governments sped up their quest to conquer nature: they built or licensed more dams, more roads, more mines, more wells - all to deliver development, to pay off loans, to enrich their supporters, or sometimes just to show that they could. Animals, trees, and birds died by the billions.’

So, when Amrith writes that ‘history is environmental’, he is not simply saying that the role of ecology has been underplayed in historical accounts. He is probing the limits between prosperity, injustice and environmental destruction, and insisting they be better understood. ‘When I first started out as a historian,’ he writes ‘I saw environmental concerns as secondary to political rights, economic empowerment, and social justice. I now believe that they are inseparable, and that the pursuit of environmental justice extends and builds on those earlier and still-unfinished struggles for human freedom.’

The Burning Earth isn’t entirely conclusive: Amrith makes a compelling case that historical accounts have underplayed socio-ecological factors, and that shifts in history have tended to rely on new exploitation of people and places. But it can be hard to parse what to do with this; the book does not linger much on societies or moments where alternative routes were possible. But it remains instructive, not least in elucidating why climate action is not always a reassuring or instinctively easy prospect - evidenced in the extreme by Trump’s and Musk’s fear of climate action and their parallel obsession with militarism and freedom. There are few books and forums willing, as Amrith is, to really face up to the break with history that this moment requires.

By posting online a New Year’s ‘to-do’ list with only six tasks on it, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) was asking for trouble.

It could have been written at any point in the past 100 years. Dealing with structural injustices, boosting housebuilding and tackling poor housing quality are longstanding concerns.

But times have changed and MHCLG doesn’t seem to be keeping up. In 2025, the UK still has a housing crisis, but also less than a quarter of a century to totally rewire its built environment. We need to swap over 20 million gas boilers for heat pumps and other clean sources, insulate half of all homes and protect at least one fifth from rising temperatures.

We must radically change how we build, massively downscaling the use of materials such as concrete and steel. How dystopian, then, that there is not a hint of this mission in MHCLG’s list. And how unnecessary, when environmental and housing goals can be tackled simultaneously.

Building safety, private rental reform and Awaab’s Law, which relates to mould and other health issues, all connect through retrofit, which is an opportunity to make homes warm, safe and sustainable in one go. The Renters’ Rights Bill was expected to include requirements for landlords to improve home energy efficiency, but it has been kicked down the road.

Private rented homes are, on average, less energy-efficient than social homes, with a fifth of renters living in ‘non-decent’ homes and a quarter in fuel poverty. Tenants gain most benefit from energy bill savings and improvements, but without regulation there is little to incentivise landlords to retrofit.

Climate levers also emerge through MHCLG’s core responsibility – planning. Last month, the ministry and Defra published a joint letter claiming the Tories had ‘pitted housing against nature’. But, despite recognising the connections, their solution was a conservation fund for new developments.

They did not address the unresolved tension between housing targets and climate impacts: homebuilding in the UK relies on the use of concrete and steel, staggeringly destructive and polluting materials. There are design solutions, but they need investment, attention and collaboration between industry and government.

Not mentioned on the MHCLG’s list is housing affordability. Among the many intersections between housing economics and the climate crisis, at a basic level housing affordability leaves little money to spare for retrofits. Homeowners have record high mortgages, social housing providers are chronically underfunded and tenants can’t make permanent environmental improvements to their homes.

But solutions designed to ease affordability can also accommodate environmental priorities. Co-operative ownership models can manage places for broad community benefits, not just profits. Property-linked finance can fund home improvements, paid back through energy bill savings. Housing or land tax reforms could enable councils to recoup the benefits of investments in low-carbon infrastructure and green space. There are opportunities for bold new housing policies that tackle issues concurrently.

Perhaps MHCLG is burying climate concerns under housing concerns to make them more palatable? While this may be happening behind the scenes, in reality the government has prevaricated on, or ruled out, many of the most impactful housing/climate levers it has. Crucially, it has delayed efforts to tighten energy efficiency standards and scrapped plans to ban gas boilers.

Keir Starmer wants to ‘rebuild’ as ambitiously as after the Second World War. This famously involved enough homebuilding to change the face of the built environment, creating local authority architecture departments, work for thousands of companies and new approaches to development.

We still need housing transformation in 2025, but now we must use retrofits, climate-safe building and sustainable infrastructure. This can still help solve the housing crisis – but it really must be on the to-do list.

I reached out to various people in the climate space to ask them what they’ve been reading in 2024. Featuring recommendations from Venetia La Manna, Joycelyn Longdon, Adrienne Buller, James Meadway, Ashish Ghadiali, Diyora Shadijanova, Guppi Bola, Nonhlanhla Makuyana and many, many more. It’s a long one!

And if this list isn’t enough for you, you can also check out this short note I posted on Substack which has gained a few more recommendations in the comments - please do add your own!

Poetry & Fiction

God Complex, Rachael Allen

Dr Rebecca Tamás, Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, University of London, recommends this ‘stunning, innovative poetry collection which tells the story of a toxic relationship falling apart at the same time that the environment is degrading and being changed – poetry that speaks of the shared knot of our human and nonhuman bodies, our shared sufferings, our shared transformations.’ Also recommended by Lottie Limb, journalist at Euronews Green: ‘“thank god I am grieving / while the climate dims. What an effort otherwise” is a line that has lodged in my head all year. Through the pain of a failed relationship, the narrator reaches into our polluted environment – its toxic rivers, ill-greens and gagging birds – resensitising us to the damage in glorious, abject detail.’

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Ruin, Blossom, John Burnside

Patrick Romero McCafferty, author of Glass Knot Sun (2025), recommends the late John Burnside’s final poetry collection, which ‘makes a pilgrimage through early faith, madness and landscapes rich with pre-Christian and German Romantic symbolism to explore the many ways we find shelter.’

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Baby Schema, Isabel Galleymore

‘Isabel Galleymore’s second poetry collection explores ecology through the unique and fascinating lens of cuteness. Galleymore zooms right in on the details (a slug, a doll, a certain cartoon mouse) to explore the big stuff: environmental care, late capitalism, the decision to have children. Through tight, precise language, the poems lead to an opening up, a new way of seeing’ says Billie Manning, a poet from Hackney (you can read her work in And Other Poems, Magma, bath magg and more).

Order through your local independent bookshop or Carcanet Press

Orbital, Samantha Harvey

Russell Warfield, Head of Communications at Possible, recommends this year’s Booker Prize winner: ‘the first winner which can plausibly be claimed as cli-fi. (It has also been shortlisted for this year’s inaugural Climate Fiction Prize). But it’s not just notable for its role in bridging cli-fi to the mainstream of literary fiction. You’ll be hard pressed to find a 2024 novel of any genre better than this. Set in a single day on a space station orbiting Earth, its inhabitants gazing down on our home planet, this slim volume with almost no plot dazzles with its imagery and captivates like nothing else I read this year.’

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North Woods, Daniel Mason

This is a sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries. Picked here by Katie Urquhart, Associate Editor at Yale University Press.

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How High We Go In The Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu

Several people I approach recommended this novel, which according to Adrienne Buller, Author and Host of The Break Down, is a ‘harrowing, generation-spanning and deeply affecting set of stories documenting how we love and grieve on a changing planet. In a genre often defined by action and scientific speculation, this is an intimate take on “climate fiction”’.

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Lunar Tides, Shannon Webb-Campbell

Ellspeth Wilson, writer and poet, said this was ‘a poetry collection that feels like swimming – sometimes easy, sometimes hard but always worthwhile and better for having engaged with it. Nature is always acknowledged as a co-collaborator in the collection, as are the author's ancestors, both settler and First Nations, and the way the book uses the cycles of the moon for its structure lends it a rhythmic pull with many poems written as incantations.’

Order through your local independent bookshop or Book*hug Press

Non-fiction

The Burning Earth: an environmental history of the last 500 years, Sunil Amrith

I picked this one, having recently reviewed it for Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. Amrith's history explores the longstanding human pursuit for prosperity and its profound human and ecological costs. It forces us to think more deeply about what it means to change our relationship with the planet, without losing sight of its necessity.

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Material World: a substantial story of our past and future, Ed Conway

‘If we are to understand the ever evolving climate crisis, we need to better understand the raw materials that go into the goods and services we use everyday – and Conway's book Material World is as great a starting point as any’, according to Níall Glynn, economist and researcher.

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More and More and More: an all-consuming history of energy, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Laurie Laybourn, Director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, says that ‘in this path-breaking and readable book, Fressoz shows that, contrary to mainstream opinion, there have been no full energy “transitions”, only energy “additions”, with the emergence of a new fuel boosting the use of the old, which means fossil fuels will only go when they are actively removed, something markets cannot do alone.’

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A Nutmeg's Curse, Amitav Ghosh

Several people we asked read Ghosh’s second non-fiction work in 2024, including Imandeep Kaur, Co-Founder and Director at CIVIC SQUARE, and Scott McAulay from the Anthropocene Architecture School. The book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. It argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism.

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Crude Capitalism, Adam Hanieh

According to Adrienne Buller, Author and Host of The Break Down, ‘it's hard to imagine that there's anything particularly new to say about oil and capitalism, but Adam Hanieh manages to provide a completely innovative and insightful journey through the development of the oil economy and its mutually constitutive relationship to contemporary capitalism. There's no better analysis of the predicament we are now in – from the pervasiveness of petroleum products to the growing might of state-owned oil majors – than Crude Capitalism.’

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Slow Burn: the hidden costs of a warming world, R Jisung Park

James Meadway, economist and host of the Macrodose podcast, told us this was ‘an urgent challenge to the climate movement: what happens when climate change doesn't mean the Apocalypse, but the “slow burn” of everyday life slowly and steadily getting worse? Packed with vital new empirical research, Park presents the liberal case for capitalist adaptation to a climate-shocked world. It should be read critically by everyone who suspects we imagine the end of the world a little too easily.’

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Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world, Naomi Klein

Polly Bindman, Investigative Journalist at Global Witness picked the 2024 winner of The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction: ‘consumed by a particularly perverse case of mistaken identity with prominent right wing conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein (writer, leftist stalwart, climate activist) takes us on an obsessive journey down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, spitting us out into the ‘mirror world’, where clouds aren’t real and covid (and climate change) are a hoax. This book is jammed with fun anecdotes; it also provides a serious diagnosis of how far right narratives have burrowed their way into the mainstream, fracturing the social fabric and posing a serious threat to our chances of creating a just, liveable world.’

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Groundbreakers: the return of Britain's wild boar, Chantal Lyons

Editor of Inkcap Journal and author of Nature's Ghosts, Sophie Yeo, told us that ‘the reintroduction of large mammals is a hot topic in conservation right now – what is less discussed is that Britain already has a thriving population of large wild pigs, which roam the Forest of Dean, where they are beloved and feared by residents in equal measure. Lyons writes with nuance and elegance about this controversial beast. Groundbreakers leaves you wishing for more wildness in the landscape, without shying away from some of its more challenging consequences.’

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The Age of Loneliness, Laura Marris

‘The Age of Loneliness has stuck with me’ says It’s Freezing in LA! Editor Jackson Howarth. ‘Laura Marris' wonderfully emotive collection of lyrical essays explores both human and non-human loneliness and how we reach out in an increasingly sparse world.’

Order through your local independent bookshop or at Greywolf Press

An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, Eds. Nur Masalha and Nahla Abdo

‘As a dyslexic babe, I like to buy books that I can pick up and put down. That’s why I enjoy collections and anthologies. The collection of stories within this book viscerally convey the importance of orality as an embodied and unending knowledge centre and why oral histories need to be safeguarded and archived under oppressive systems. A must read’ according to Georgina Johnson, Editor and creator behind The Slow Grind – intersectional environmentalist books which hold together global perspectives on climate and social justice.

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A Flat Place, Noreen Masud

Kitty Grady, writer and digital editor at A Rabbit's Foot, recommended this love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, which reckons with the painful, hidden histories they contain.

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Namesake, NS Nuseibeh

Elspeth Wilson, writer and poet, recommends this ‘beautifully-written collection of essays that considers gender, heritage, land, colonialism and identity when you have links to multiple places. Weaving a largely secular look at Islamic history and myth-making with personal reflection, this book by a British-Palestinian author is especially essential reading during a time of genocide and accompanying ecological disaster.’

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Survival is a Promise: the eternal life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Ashish Ghadiali, artist & curator and director of Radical Ecology, picked this ‘unique literary biography by the author of Undrowned that reveals how environmental imagination works as the beating heart of Audre Lorde's black feminist poetic of liberation and solidarity.’

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Half Earth Socialism: a plan to save the future from extinction, climate change and pandemics, Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese

Diyora Shadijanova, journalist, columnist and Hothouse bookclub co-organiser, was reading this in 2024: ‘for those caught in the doom cycle of the climate crisis, Half Earth Socialism offers a vision of a post-capitalist world centered on rewilding, renewable energy, and fundamentally reshaping our lives to reduce carbon intensity. Paired with an interactive online game, it provides readers with imaginative ways to chart a new course away from our current trajectory.’

Order through your local independent bookshop or Verso

The Farmer's Wife, Helen Rebanks

‘An ode to the rootedness of rural communities, and the cultural and social significance of small family farms. Helen writes beautifully, and this is a movingly honest and unapologetic celebration of the importance of farming and its link with domesticity and a sense of home’ according to Ele Gower, food systems strategist, who focusses on the shift to sustainable farming in ugly, unhealthy and seriously imperfect corporate food systems.

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Shado Mag, including What Is Green Colonialism and “Wallah my grandmother knows everything”: how do we preserve the lifeways of our ancestors?, Tatiana Garavito, Juliana Vélez-Echeverri, Emilie Muszczak, Lillie Aissa-Jeanrenaud & Javie Huxley

Guppi Bola & Nonhlanhla Makuyana, the double trouble duo who have been running Decolonising Economics for the past five years ‘love Shado Mag's commitment and resourcing of BPOC organisers, and their visionary approaches to bring struggles for justice to life – these two selections represent two of our most valued roles in the movement, care-based organising and storytelling, demonstrated by our pals Javie (Nourishing Economics) and Tatiana.’

Access here.

The Living Mountain: a celebration of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, Nan Shepherd

Alexander Harris, Idea Store Tower Hamlets, picked this classic masterpiece of nature writing, in which Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland.

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Exhausted of the Earth: politics in a burning world, Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Smith Mordak, Chief Executive of the UK Green Building Council recommends this new work by Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. The book connects our exhaustion and that of the planet, exploring whether the status quo is to blame and arguing for political struggle between those attached to the power, wealth, and security of 'business-as-usual’.

Order through your local independent bookshop or Repeater Books

Confronting Climate Coloniality: decolonizing pathways for climate justice, Ed. Prof. Farhana Sultana

This collection brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship and ideas from around the world to present critical examinations of climate coloniality. It exposes how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and exacerbate the climate crisis, create disproportionate impacts on those who contributed the least to climate change, and influence global and local responses.

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Designing for Society: products and services for a better world, Nynke Tromp and Paul Hekkert

Picked by Kyle Turakhia, Birmingham Hub Manager at the National Literacy Trust, who described it as ‘a readable, step-by-step guide to creating infrastructure that encourages civic behaviour, including climate-conscious choices’.

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Fire Weather: a true story from a hotter world, John Vaillant

Another one that many we asked recommended, including Joycelyn Longdon, an environmental justice researcher and educator who runs @ClimateInColour. ‘I had the pleasure of reading this book as a judge for the Wainwright Prize and was blown away. It is not a book I would have picked up had I not been introduced to it in this way and I was immediately hooked. The writing is beautiful and captivating, the storytelling intense and deeply informative.Some might find it a bleak and heavy book to hold, but I felt it connected me deeper to the histories and structures of oppression on this planet, the way they wreak havoc on people and planet and the ways in which we must resist them.’ Jeremy Till, Professor of Architecture, Central Saint Martins UAL, called it ‘pretty gobsmacking.’

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All The Houses I've Ever Lived In, Kieran Yates

Venetia La Manna, fair fashion campaigner and Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 judge, picked this: ‘love letter to home and community. Drawing on personal experience, interviews with tenants and the stories behind homewares, Kieran highlights the invaluable work of community organisers who have led the way to change and improve the housing system, inviting us to re-imagine what the future of housing could look like.’

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Nature's Ghosts, Sophie Yeo

This 2024 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation shortlistee examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last Ice Age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries.

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Guy Shrubsole has long been concerned with Britain’s land. 2019’s Who Owns England was one of the first attempts to fully map the country’s owners since the Domesday Book, confirming that it remains an appallingly tiny group of people. In new book The Lie of the Land, he returns to lay Britain’s deteriorating ecological condition at their feet. ‘For centuries, landowners have claimed to be the trusted stewards of Britain’s landscapes… [these claims] increasingly ring hollow.’ It’s a scorching explanation of how ecosystems are brutalised by archaic structures of land and property management in Britain.

Formerly a civil servant, Shrubsole is a writer and activist, best known for his participation in Right to Roam campaigns, which agitate for improved access to green spaces in Britain. He co-wrote, with George Monbiot and other notable housing policy specialists, the interesting Land for the Many, an independent recommendations report for Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2019. His book The Lost Rainforests of Britain explored often-forgotten hotspots of rich biodiversity hidden across the UK.

In his new offering, Shrubsole argues that the landowners of Britain are failing to take their ecological responsibilities seriously. The immediate point is clear: a very few number of landowners own Britain; the land is deterioriating; this is their responsibility. But he goes further, arguing that these failings even extend to those landowners and gatekeepers who do claim ecological goals and intent - including the Church of England, one of the UK’s largest landowners, according to Shrubsole. The Church holds (directly or via investment bodies) around 182,000 acres of land, including precious fenland, and have not revealed whether or how they are protecting them from degradation, despite their relatively ambitious environmental targets. And a great part of the book is dedicated to the surprisingly significant environmental destruction caused by the leisure activities of ultra-wealthy, elite landowners, including seemingly niche pasttimes like grouse and pheasant shooting (passages which have triggered the ire of The Moorland Association).

This hypocrisy is important, argues Shrubsole, because claims that landowners care for Britain’s land are foundational to modern land politics. We are ‘constantly told by politicians and the press that landowners and farmers are the “custodians” of the countryside’, he notes. This ‘stewardship’ framing protects them from accountability, a ‘PR term’ used to ‘greenwash’ and ‘deflect attention away from the many landowners doing the opposite’. Unsurprising, then that even the most egregious cases of environmental pollution go little punished, and the introduction of strict legal duties of care over land remain politically taboo. The book covers a litany of policy failures and warped priorities, replete with genuinely jaw-dropping examples of perverse incentives offered to landowners, and closed-door deals.

The greatest strength of the book is Shrubsole’s argument that it is public access to land and community involvement in conservation that would better protect ecosystems. Landowners ‘cast themselves as responsible stewards, a bulwark against rampaging hoarders of townies with their litter an uncouth manners… [but recreational access is] very far down the rankings for things society is doing to screw up nature. Compared to moorland burning, fenland drainage, the release of invasive species, the agricultural pollution poured into rivers, or the mass graves of pheasants dumped by some shoots, going for a walk in the countryside isn’t exactly the most ecologically reckless activity.’ Indeed, Shrubsole is quick to remind us that communities are frequently ecosystems’ most ardent protectors and whistleblowers. He recounts the very long history of campaigns to protect ecosystems, and the extraordinary efforts of citizen scientists and activists who are testing polluted water, cleaning up litter and writing their own country codes. Shrubsole is adamant that we are biophilic: ‘none of these activists own huge estates or great tracts of land, yet they care for land and water they do not own’, he says. And, ‘if one is to develop such a deep love for a particular place, it helps to have access to it.’ It’s a convincing argument.

But I did want more from Shrubsole in terms of the wider context. Though he reexamines the waves of land privatisation that have increasingly shut out public involvement in conservation, from enclosure to the unfinished business of British national parks, there are ideas from pre- or a-colonial conceptions of property that would offer much to this debate (should and can anyone ‘own’ a forest?). The lack of consideration of racial and health justice angles to land access are striking. And, while Shrubsole is right to note that it is hypocrisy to smear environmental campaigners as middle class busybodies when the object of their ire is the landowning elite, equally it would have been valuable to cover the factions within this campaigning space, the disagreements (HS2, anyone?) and opportunities to widen participation and ally with other battles.

Yet this remains a book bristling with energy and ideas. Shrubsole clearly has the new administration in his sights - ‘time and time again… the government in charge takes on board a few recommendations of the review, whilst ignoring the more radical proposals’ - and provides detailed lists of policies and interim policies ‘until a government is brave enough’ to pick up the core recommendations. And in the meantime, readers are offered a useful list of important and brave campaigns to join for themselves.

After a quiet first half of the year I’ve been lucky to write two pieces of great importance to me, for two publications I really admire.

The first was a long read on climate and housing, for The Break Down, a new climate and capitalism media project from Adrienne Buller (author of the excellent The Value of a Whale) and think tank Common Wealth. I explored the overlaps between the climate and housing crises, which are typically treated as two separate campaigning issues - particularly in the housing policy space there is criminally little discussion of either climate mitigation or adaptation. Link to the full piece here, or text below… https://www.break-down.org/post/uniting-the-climate-and-housing-crises.

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Uniting the Climate and Housing Crises

Critically acclaimed musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge has been a resounding success in the UK this year. A melancholic love letter to the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, the show has put urban planning centre stage. It traces Park Hill’s origins as a 1960s brutalist social housing estate for local workers, then as a landing point for burgeoning immigrant communities, and now as a privatised landmark, popular among middle-class millennials fleeing London for cheaper cities. As one character, Nikki, tells it: “They did kick people out. They promised them they could come back, but as soon as they’d finished tarting them up they flogged them all off to posh pricks like her.”

The pain in this story is not usually mentioned in coverage of Park Hill’s other recent claim to fame: its acclaimed renovation. Not only was the 2013 redevelopment (Phase One) shortlisted for prestigious architectural awards, its recent environmental refurbishment (Phase Two) was named AJ Retrofit of the Year 2023, also winning in two sub-categories. The renovation has been praised for showing that it is possible to drastically improve the energy efficiency of even neglected, decades-old spaces. It is, according to judges, “an important precedent for how the UK should deal with its ageing housing stock”. 

Park Hill reflects the strange dynamic between the two greatest challenges facing homes across the world. On the one hand, Standing at The Sky’s Edge tries to articulate fatal, chronic problems of affordability, homelessness and gentrification, but leaves the looming threat of climate crisis — commonly and wrongly assumed to be far-off and slow-moving — conspicuously absent. On the other, efforts to reduce Park Hill’s greenhouse gas emissions are too often lauded without consideration of its economic and human backstory. Park Hill serves as a forceful reminder not only that insecure housing systems and growing environmental pressures concern the same buildings and the same people, but that they cannot, in fact, be separated at all. There is an urgent need for campaigners, researchers and policymakers alike to look at housing and the climate crisis as shared challenges, seeking common responses and a more strategic approach to tackling them.

Homes as assets: how financialisation makes both the housing and climate crises worse 

Park Hill was constructed in the early 1960s, at the end of the UK’s post-war social housing construction boom. Political attention was by this time starting to shift away from social housing provision and towards promoting the dream of a “property-owning democracy”, a Conservative Party commitment that former Prime Minister Thatcher herself explicitlychampioned in her first speech as leader to the Conservative Party conference in 1975. Today, around two thirds of UK households own their own home, compared to less than ten per cent at the start of the twentieth century. The way in which this shift has been managed, in the UK and in many countries abroad, has had long lasting and devastating effects.

A foundational driver of the homeownership dream was a move towards framing the purchase of homes as an investment, such that homeowners have an interest in their home not only as a secure place to live, but also as a purchase whose value should continue to rise. This crucial element of the homeownership dream was enabled by a combination of UK government policies in the second half of the twentieth century, including liberalised mortgage lending conditions and the retraction of support for social housing. 

As explained by the New Economics Foundation: when growth in mortgage lending outpaces new building supply, “more money chasing the same number of homes” results in price inflation. As mortgages were liberalised in many countries, including the UK, into the 1970s and 80s, house prices began to rise in a feedback loop: as they inflated, buyers were encouraged to take out ever-bigger loans, and banks could more confidently offer them. In this same period, alternatives dwindled as state investment in the public building stock around the world was slowed or repealed. Estates like Park Hill became increasingly neglected due to lack of funding, with many homes sold off without replacement. People became trapped permanently in extremely poor housing conditions, with those that could afford it fighting for a way out, into the market. Homes became, rather than simply a place to live, financial assets. 

This route to mass home ownership has had a direct effect on affordability, with house-price-to-income ratios rocketing in the many countries which undertook similar financial reforms. One OECD study, for example, found that financial deregulation between 1980 and 2005 “has increased real house prices by as much as 30 per cent in the average OECD country”. In these countries, including the US, France and the Netherlands, a huge proportion of bank lending goes to mortgages, diverting funds from productive investment (including retrofits) and leaving homeowners highly vulnerable to wider economic conditions, interest rate changes and credit crunches. 

Importantly, this housing-as-a-market system has overlooked environmental consequences. In a market, price competition is expected to drive quality and reflect priorities like condition and environmental performance. But house prices are in large part set by the value of the land a home is on, the infrastructure and conditions in the local area, and the health of the wider economy and interest rates — not the state of the home itself. The extent to which house prices reflect physical condition and environmental impact is therefore enormously diluted. 

Accordingly, across the UK and beyond, high house prices bely the millions of homes in poor condition, uniformly low energy efficiency performance and continued dominance of fossil fuel gas boilers. In the UK, house prices are only slightly higher for homes with higher energy efficiency ratings, and show no difference at allin areas of high housing demand. The uptake of heat pumps has been shockingly slow, home energy consumption (and thus fuel bills) remains stubbornly high and there is little evidence of mass preparation for rapidly rising heating and drought. The underfunding in the public sector that has complemented financialisation leaves social homes in a similar situation. The financialised housing market is thus utterly and abjectly failing to drive or even accommodate the environmental action our homes require. 

A deregulated system: the split incentive

The other obvious implication of turning homes into an asset class with reliable returns is that demand for homeownership is no longer just about habitation. While landlord investment in homes has always existed, the practice becomes particularly attractive when gains from steadily inflating house prices can be expected on top of years of rental income. As the numbers of overseas non-resident landlords, corporate landlords and financial investor groups like hedge funds and asset managers increase, ever-more finance-focussed, metricised and corporatised forms of landlordism emerge. 

The economic and social effects of landlordism are well-documented, and need little further elaboration here. But an additional problem with landlordism arises with respect to the climate crisis in the form of the “split incentive”. Absent regulations, and when tenants have little to no power in the rental system, landlords have no incentive to improve energy efficiency or provide heat pumps in the homes they own, because, so long as these changes do not impact house prices, the tenant will reap all the benefits, including savings on fuel bills, better air quality and protection from rising temperatures. Surveys show that landlords are less keen to make environmental investments in the homes they own than other groups, and UK private rented homes have notably worse environmental ratings than social rent homes.  

This problem tends to be worse in financialised housing markets, which also typically have the most deregulated conditions for landlords as an inducement to invest in homes. In Germany, which has a greater proportion of renters, who stay renting for longer, and are more likely to be involved in tenants unions, there exist much stricter regulations for both rented and owned homes than in more financialised housing systems such as the UK’s. Environmental performance is now becoming part of this arrangement: all German buildings are subject to common energy efficiency regulations; dates have been set that require the phaseout of fossil fuel heating and landlords are required to bear the costs of emissions generated by tenants for home heating, reflecting the fact that they hold the responsibility for installing clean heating systems and upgrading the building fabric.

Build mania: new homes with a vast carbon penalty 

Financialisation is a negative force for both the crises in housing condition and affordability and in addressing the role of homes in the climate crisis. At the same time, the improved condition and environmental performance of homes tend to go hand in hand: Phases one and two of the Park Hill redevelopment have not only improved the blocks’ condition but should have reduced fuel bills and will protect people from rapidly accelerating heat risks. Regulating rented homes properly and restoring funding to social housing providers can do much to improve living conditions and take action on the climate crisis at the same time. Climate and housing campaigners thus have many of the same battles to fight, and would do well to collaborate more closely.  

But climate and housing campaign priorities are potentially less easily aligned when it comes to housing supply. Increasing housing supply is seen by most campaigners and advocacy groupsas a central route to combatting inflated house prices. While this is emphatically not the sole solution to housing crises and high house prices, a far greater availability of quality, genuinely affordable homes would certainly help alleviate poor housing conditions and provide decent homes for more. 

This approach poses an existential environmental challenge, however, in that new homes have truly enormous consequences for the climate. Even when created with ultra-low energy demands, renewable energy sources and protection from climate risks and on land that has already been built over, new homes are almost always built from concrete and steel. These materials have vast greenhouse gas, pollution and ecological impacts. Concrete alone is responsible for a full five to ten per cent of all global emissions, sucking up a tenth of industrial water use and depending on quarrying that chokes local areas with dust and eats up natural resources. 

Importantly, however, there are routes forward here: one reason Park Hill has been so celebrated is that it demonstrates the potential for high quality environmental refurbishment of a listed building, avoiding the wasteful and socially destructive demolition of peoples’ existing homes. Elsewhere, designers are pioneering large-scale timber homes, reuse of materials, building extra storeys on existing buildings and supporting more efficient use of existing building stock — nearly a fifth of US office space is empty, for example, and with the right regulatory environment could be converted into quality homes without the need for large amounts of raw materials. These are all significant changes that can be done badly: in the UK, lax regulations that encourage developers to turn non-domestic space into homes have needlessly allowed shoddy home conversions. But done right, they represent radical improvements in how we design and adapt buildings, and they are urgently needed. Despite this, the need for an enormous shift in how we build is rarely part of the conversation about housing supply. Indeed, the “build build build” approach to homes is often associated with arguments for deregulating planning systems, not adding new requirements.  

Housing and climate campaigners need to create constructive coalitions dedicated to unpicking and understanding the nuances and common ground in this particularly fraught space. In some places, this work has already begun, and conversations about the overlaps between climate and housing concerns have notably flourished in grassroots anti-demolitioncampaigns. But otherwise, the two conversations are distanced, with climate commitments by designers and engineers rarely referencing housing policies, and housebuilding debates frequently sidestepping climate concerns. Meanwhile, planning systems, which should be the ideal spaces for these detailed, serious, complicated decisions with permanent and long-lasting effects, are famously beleaguered. 

Routes forward: homeownership as stewardship

The question of “who owns”, or how and whether you own, is central to considerations of financialisation, regulation and construction in the context of the climate crisis. In many economies, owning and not owning is split starkly along lines of existing inequalities in society, like race, disability and marginalisation. Funding conditions are too tight for social housing providers to retrofit their homes. Landlords are not held to their responsibilities to maintain decent, environmentally safe conditions in the buildings they own, treating them as assets rather than spaces that people must live well in. Within this fraught, atomised context, environmental concepts of stewardship, shared resources and community can feel far from achievable. As a result, many concerned about the climate crisis have returned to entirely different conceptions of ownership and living.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) represent one particularly popular example of these models. Just as the first residents were settling into Park Hill in Sheffield in the 60s and 70s, Black farmers and activists in the US were buying land collectively. New Communities, the first project to be called a CLT, was established by Southern civil rights activists in Georgia in 1969, who bought 5,700 acres of land for collective and leasehold farming. The group still exists today, despite closing for a period due to loan discrimination, and has spawned dozens of similar projects around the US. Their “long movement” seeks to maintain access to land over future generations, preserving local habitats, farming areas collectively and creating spaces for community and social development. Today, CLTs are rising rapidly in popularity. The total number of European CLTs has increased tenfold between 2017-2023. In the UK, there are now around 500 CLTs with a reported pipeline of 300,000 new homes, with some building their own renewable heating supplies or regenerating depleted high streets without resorting to demolition. CLT numbers have also grown steadily in the US since the 70s, particularly in urban areas. 

CLTs are almost always predicated on this combination of ecological and social principles. As a result, they claim increased participation by underserved members of their communities as well as positive social outcomes. Early studiesfind that new building proposals by community-led housing groups outperform national energy efficiency requirements. As Melissa Mean, founder of the We Can Make CLT in Bristol, which has started its own microfactory to construct local homes out of biomaterials, writes: “Rather than treating homes as financial products to be traded and extract a profit from, we are motivated by how much wider social value the homes can generate — things like jobs created, carbon saved, and increases in health and wellbeing”’.

CLTs are not easy to form and maintain: they require the capital to buy land; the time to develop expertise, community and roots and they can be arduous to set up and run. Some modern CLTs have been criticised for downplaying collective principles in favour of promoting individual homeownership. But there is no doubt that CLTs and other forms of ownership, stewardship and community wealth creation are surfacing ways of living that aim to be more economically healthy and environmentally sound to run. Community-oriented housing models suggest a way out of the ownership/renting binary, diffusing the knotty and competitive system that many economies have worked themselves into and that is proving so bad at adapting to new challenges. They show us that there are better routes for providing good, clean homes.

Park Hill itself shows little sign of being reimagined in this way. It was sold in 2004 for £1 by Sheffield County Council to developers,though the council has still reportedlycontributed millions to the renovation. Rather than the exciting project the architectural community likes to claim, the estate has become a poignant illustration of the inexorable link between the housing and climate crises. Privatised, deregulated, and financialised housing systems are neither delivering safe, warm, affordable homes nor tackling the existential task of decarbonising and adapting our current building stock. 

However, while both crises are escalating, they also have answers in common. There are specific first-step reforms to regulatory, planning and financing structures which will better protect people and address the climate crisis at the same time. There are natural opportunities for coalitions of campaigners to drive change and hold systems to account. And there are proven approaches to seeding and growing fundamentally more clean, stable and quality ways of living long-term. It is time that the housing and climate crises were treated as one exceptionally urgent story.

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The review below was recently published in the May/June 2024 Resurgence & Ecologist. I’ve slightly edited this version, not having to stick to print word counts here, and added some links. You can read it on their website and buy the full R&E issue here.

Hannah Ritchie is the head of research at Our World in Data, a website that publishes research and data to “make progress against the world’s largest problems”. It’s a fantastic resource, bringing together readable, user-friendly, open-source graphics and articles. Now, Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World offers her ‘apolitical’, data-driven reading on “how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet.”

The majority of Not the End of the World is staple Our World in Data. Each chapter delves into a different environmental metric, such as deforestation, air pollution or overfishing, giving Ritchie’s reading of how we got here, and how to “end it”. The writing is clear, the data crunching is impressive, and the core assessments of the technical transitions we need to deliver are, with some exceptions, hard to dispute. Using fewer cars is indeed the only way to tackle both traffic air pollution and emissions, just as there is no doubt that beef farming is a primary driver of the trifecta of biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation. The rub is that you can’t actually or usefully be apolitical about any of these things.

The first hint of the problem is in how the book deals with inequality. Ritchie has been rightly criticised for a lack of assessment of wealth and power in her analysis of climate action. She does, to be fair, discuss inequality to some degree, covering the inequity of wealthy countries having largely caused the climate crisis while the less wealthy bear more of its impact. She frequently returns to the need for countries with lower rates of public energy access to leapfrog oil and gas in favour of renewables. But she rarely considers how such inequalities and political knots might remain important to the ‘how’ we fix our planet; such as how historic power imbalances and priorities are present in state decisions today, the practicalities of less wealthy or marginalised groups accessing clean technologies, or the role of powerful corporates and petrostates actively working to prevent any such leapfrogging.

This is characteristic of the whole book. The ‘what we need to do’ side of this book is usually pretty convincing, while the remainder of the work – especially the ‘how to get there’ – is frustratingly and dangerously simplistic.

Ritchie barely ever offers tangible answers to how we create change. The book is replete with assumptions that past trends in wealthier countries will somehow inevitably happen for less wealthy countries: “Rich countries all have [smokestack scrubbers], and poor countries don’t. But just as we saw with China, each will reach its tipping point.” The few tangible policies Ritchie does present are not explained with the detail and analysis she affords the environmental data. Carbon taxes, for example, are not the easy, breezy solutions that she implies. But, more often, having presented a detailed, well-researched assessment of what caused a problem and what systems we need instead, Ritchie presents no clear route to get there at all, abruptly ending chapters with passive calls to action: “We have the tools to do this. The question is whether we are motivated enough to use them”; “[the tools are] a demanding citizenship, the money and political will”; “Knowing that the world is capable of producing so much food should give us all the means and motivation we need to fix the problem.”

This passivity, the lack of tangible pathways to change in a book billed “how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet”, is deeply frustrating. What’s more, Ritchie seems to believe that the environment movement is overly negative, ill-informed, and choosing the wrong priorities. She frames the book around the errors of environmentalists – every chapter bemoans how difficult she found it to learn about these topics and how wrong people get it. Her point is the need for accuracy – fine. But in practice she essentially defangs the environment movement through relentless criticism and ultimately implies that environmentalists are overreacting. Meanwhile her lack of ‘how’s means she puts very little pressure on governments and powerful people to make real, hard choices. Not the End of the World could have been a useful bible of environmental data, but it has been packaged all wrong, revealed Ritchie as a technocrat, and ended up a gift to anyone looking for excuses not to do more.

Cover image CC by 2.0 Attribution 2.0 Generic: photographer Ivan Radic.

One of the squat, orange buildings of Roding Valley High School (RVHS) in Essex, UK, closed suddenly in August 2023, leaving the school short of 18 classrooms, all catering facilities and some offices. By October, school management had installed some temporary buildings, but still had not decided what to do with the original. Parents were given a new two-week home learning rota and commiserations for the ‘disappointment and frustration at the disruption you and your children have suffered’.

Essex schools were expanded quickly and cheaply in the second half of the 20th century to accommodate Londoners displaced by wartime bombing. This was achieved in part thanks to the use of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) panels. These are slabs of aerated concrete that are mixed and fired off-site. This recipe makes them light but reduces their durability: water can more easily sneak through the aerated material and rust the rebar inside. As such, RAAC is typically found in non-structural applications – like the roof of the RVHS building. This low durability does not make RAAC an inherently unsafe material, if specified and installed correctly, but it does mean that it may require more frequent maintenance and repair than other concretes. Since such care has not been taken, RAAC panels have been failing for decades. Three roof planks collapsing in a school in the summer of 2023 finally pushed the UK government to abruptly close school buildings containing RAAC, including RVHS.

Maintenance funding for schools is currently around 40 per cent below levels of need, say researchers. The 2004 Building Schools for the Future rebuild programme was scrapped completely in 2010, and capital spending on schools halved between 2010 and 2022. Schools have shifted towards using outsourced contractors for maintenance, resulting in a loss of memory and knowledge of school buildings – compounded by a lack of proper maintenance plans and usable drawings or data collection. This is partly why RAAC has not crept up on the NHS estate so dramatically, even though it is used widely in hospital buildings across the country: hospitals tend to have permanent estate management teams.

…

Read on the full article on the Architectural Review website (Paywalled, but you can access one article per month without paywall)

At the start of 2018, I was an unhappy Engineering PhD student. My thesis was on soil mechanics, which felt very distant from the challenges in the world around me (indeed, it transpired that my Masters research into offshore wind turbine foundations had been linked to Oil & Gas industry funding, since oil rig foundations faced similar design challenges - no doubt they knew few students would sign up under a more honest headline). Pre-XR and Greta, the options for effective, politically-aligned climate action felt limited, particularly in a small university town. Most of my friends were in another city, and I was struggling after a bereavement.

I quickly left the PhD - I think I did a total of 3 months, including the time my encouraging supervisor gave me to think about rewriting the brief. In the strange period that followed, I started It’s Freezing in LA!.

I was seeking a place to feel purposeful and to find a community. But I mainly wanted a space to have more serious conversations about climate. In 2018, it felt to me like my fellow climate-people were all earnest fellow engineers who could talk climate but avoided politics. I knew lots of earnest politics students but they seemed to talk about everything but. There felt like few avenues to hash out the overlap. The only way I knew how to try was go on protests (not much detailed conversation) or, kind of, make magazines - I’d been the editor of my uni science magazine.

I reached out to Nina Carter to join as Art Editor; we’d been at primary school together and ‘reconnected’ through Facebook when we’d done a call out for illustrators for the science magazine. She brought in Matthew Lewis, our designer. Alice Attlee joined to support with the text editing and gave me a much-needed push to improve the diversity of contributors and bite in the content of the first articles.

Much has changed since. In 2019, just as our 3rd issue went to print, XR arrived, and the face of climate crisis and climate activism completely changed (‘climate change’ being on the cover, rather than ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ is definitely a hangover from pre-2019 language). Suddenly we had readers, writers and a topic around which there was actual momentum. Our team has changed: Alice left after the first issue and Jackson Howarth became Deputy Editor - he and Nina are now taking over from me as co-Editors. Steph Glover, Hiren Parmar and Shaista Hussain all joined over time, and we had wonderful stints with Gina Castellheim, Sophie Compton and Joycelyn Longdon running events. Grace Richardson Banks ran our social media (and generally provided energy, ideas and morale) for several years. Throughout it all we've had a truly brilliant cast of editors helping Jackson and I with the articles and commissioning, many of whom were friends who humoured me when we were trying to get the first issue into the world and then supportively continued to help. And, my hope for the project became more specific, seeking to amplify the emerging and sharpening left wing ideas around climate that the 2019 renewal of attention to the topic brought, and which my own career and attentions increasingly turned to.

I never planned to be an editor, and have left mainly because I know that to be a good one requires a focus and dedication to shaping new media that is not my interest. But I am so proud of this project. It has brought me stability, peace and community, and I hope that it has contributed its own small ripples into the climate movement. I’m so thankful to the many, many people who have given us and me so much time and support. Their names are at the bottom - it has truly been a privilege.

Looking back, some highlights

• We hand-bound the first issue to ‘save money’ - a huge waste of time (it would have cost us about £50 to get the printer to staple it) but we were learning, and now it’s very special and the magazine-heads love that it lies flat. We got the spreads printed flat, trimmed off the margins in the London Graphic Centre and spent hours sitting in my dad’s kitchen pressing and sewing them up. My brother put in a mammoth shift helping, thanks Joe.

• We printed 200, maybe 250 copies only. Everyone did it for free, and when printed we sent copies to magazine shops and distributors and got enough pre-orders of issue 2 to keep going. These issues are hard to find now, I only have one copy.

• This was our first time working with our friends at The Sustainable Print and learning about recycled papers and non-toxic inks.

• Matthew’s graphics in this issue are NASA temperature maps, the pages get redder as you read the magazine.

• A cover redesign, £1 increase in cover price and staple binding. People still calling it a zine in the pub stopped bothering me because we were feeling happy with it now!

• Some of my favourite illustrations of all IFLAs are in this one - above Mary Herbert and Sammi Lynch. We were starting to find our feet and rhythm, the articles are a bit more focussed.

• It contains an article by Caroline Lucas, probably one of the most well-known of people who have written for us. This came about thanks to Chris Venables, who was at the Green Party at the time and now heads policy at the Green Alliance. His help was a huge boost for us as I think it helped us persuade Stack to order 3,000 copies for their subscribers (which in turn got us on our feet with a cash injection). Thanks Chris, and Stack!

• Matthew’s graphics are taken from smoke patterns from Californian wildfires.

• Getting into our stride with issue 3, including one of my all-time favourite pieces: on guerrilla gardening, by my friend Alexander Harris with illustration by Giulia Corascello. When we released this on audiobook, read by Bill Milner, it had an amazing response.

• More people from across the wider climate movement and outside our friends and peers were starting to contribute at this stage, including people whose work I really admire and follow religiously today - Katie Kedward and Lizzie Lomax being two examples (and ft illustrations by Carbon Brief’s own Josh Gabbatiss!)

• Matthew’s graphics map School Strike numbers around the world. We were publishing around the same time as XR, Greta and Fridays For Future took off, hence the theme.

• ‘Post’ XR, this was an issue looking at how things might actually start to be changing. I’m not sure we realised this was the theme at the time but it feels forward-looking when reading it now.

• More of my favourite illustrations are in this one (above Nina’s amazing 3D-printed coral reef double spread), and some interesting articles: an interview with Olafur Eliasson by long-time IFLA writer Kitty Grady, and we were starting to get contributions by climate journalists thanks to the early version of the London Climate Drinks network - two lovely pieces in this one by Diego Arguedas Ortiz and Jocelyn Timperley, in particular.

• This issue was sponsored by Octopus Energy, as they were starting to take over as the big Green energy company. We made a spread on some quite cool ideas about community energy that I sadly don’t think they have really done much with. Maybe I’m wrong.

• Matthew’s graphics here were spiralling hurricane maps… I think we had copyright drama about this but I can’t quite remember.

• We have so many copies of this issue left: it was after having a big success with issue 4 so we printed loads, then COVID hit and all the shops shut. I think we still have about 1000 in storage… if anyone wants a copy let me know.

• It was also a bit lost in terms of content, some lovely things in there but a bit of a strange mix! To me its strength is that we had really improved in terms of international contributors by issue 4 and 5. This one has our first piece in translation (Remembering the Timok, by Miroslava Kojadinović, who sadly passed away shortly after publication, translated by her son Miodrag).

• Some of my other favourite things in it are Billie Manning’s poem Apples, the first article for us by Zainab Mahmood, who went on to join our editorial team and is now making waves in the slow fashion world, as well as Aaron Bradshaw’s brilliant piece about synthetic vs natural bacteria. Jackson and I always got very excited when there were good science pieces!

• Graphics here show the ozone layer healing, mapped by Harry Lloyd and rendered by Matthew.

• I think this issue was where I really felt we had something to say: it’s the first with a strong theme, ‘Greenwashing’. This helped us focus the writing and the curation better, and the pitches we got were also stronger as a result (we always got/get hundreds of pitches each issue, I think 6 was the first open call that became really unmanageable).

• Some favourites here are Inkcap Journal founder Sophie Yeo’s piece on shifting baseline syndrome, Guardian writer Christine Ochefu’s piece on I May Destroy You and Blackness and the eco movement, and artist Alice Bucknell’s excellent deconstruction of Silicon Valley’s futuristic, climate-destroying architecture.

• Matthew’s graphics here were coral reef bleaching patterns around the world. My Editor’s letter talked about how ‘greenwashing’ was a term first used by Jay Westervelt to describe the phenomenon of hotels claiming they were green (‘pick up your towels’) while building along fragile coastlines.

• No strict theme for this one, but IFLA 7 is still a favourite, perhaps just because of the fitting icey graphics. These showed ice cores tracking historic emissions (Matthew developed these with a climate scientist, Dr Joan Fitzpatrick).

• I think it just has some great articles: Adrienne Buller on the idiocy of schemes to ‘price in’ climate breakdown (the next year she wrote a full book on this which I highly, highly recommend); Molly Lipson on digital activism (she was given a book contract off this article!); and Josh Fenton from Afterparti on the anti-demolition movement and built environment activism space that is my non-IFLA day job.

• I think it has our first colourful photos, a big design step!

• IFLA 8 was about borders, and as with ‘greenwashing’ the theme helped it focus. It’s a nice issue: to the point and Jackson and I were being more precise with the messaging and ideas.

• It has Jackson’s first ‘Deputy Editor’s Letter’, I wrote about carbon accounting and targets (on my substack here) and we had Ciara Quilty-Harper doing an amazing graphic novel responding to Gail Tasker’s review of Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime album.

• Matthew’s graphics show the areas that have been mapped of the sea floor - mostly for oil and gas exploration, and most of which the data itself is privately held, despite being open ocean. Slightly abstract but I think this actually still has legs as a relatively unexplored (excuse the pun) topic.

• IFLA 9 is the sharpest and best edited IFLA, in my view. We had five articles sponsored by the Wellcome Collection for their digital space, and a good fee for our time on it. This gave us breathing space and direction.

• I love the resulting mix of well-known and emerging writers: Owen Hatherley, Aja Barber and Imani Jacqueline Brown from Forensic Architecture next to students and testimonies by people being affected by climate (the opening article is by Manila Pharmacist Jean Ong, talking about how the people she sees are already needing new medications and facing new threats). It also contains the first write up of ideas from Abi Deivanayagam and Rhiannon Osbourne about anti-capitalist health care. They are now setting the medical world alight and getting articles in proper publications.

• Matthew’s graphics here are different ‘plumes’ of pollution.

• The special edition was an idea to try to make something a little quicker and simpler after a hiatus - obviously changing format is neither so it was ultimately more complex and time consuming. But it’s also another favourite: a mixture of projects and ideas that grapple with the climate crisis in different creative ways.

• We curated the articles as a team, rather than solely from the editorial side, and the focus was reusing materials in innovative ways and using more photography than illustration. It was designed by our friends Open Practice, who ‘retrofit’ Matthew and Nina’s original creative concepts by mixing and matching templates and ideas from old issues and adding their own twists.

• In this issue we had writers respond to old illustrations, and illustrators respond to old articles which I really enjoyed - we sent one of these writers her image to probe if she’d be interested and on seeing it she wrote a story straight away and sent it back before we’d even agreed terms or discussed it. In one article we had QR codes (that linked to sound pieces) rather than illustrations. Myself and Nina did our first, hopefully of many, piece together about Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s algorithmic garden and Nina also wrote an ‘Art Editor’s Letter’ to open the edition. The back spread has a ‘think pink live green’ barbie hiding in it given the barbie furore at the time. Barbies are pure consumption and the messaging in that film was awful, fwiw.

• The graphics here were icons and symbols sourced by Open Practice.

• My final issue! We thought a lot about whether to splash out and do a shiny / big / long / super issue for the 10 milestone. But we decided that wasn’t very climate: we didn’t want to be thinking in the framework of endless growth and consumption mentality. So it’s more of the same, and hopefully that’s a good thing.

• I wrote a more personal editor’s letter for this one. It’s about losing my mum (I didn’t go into the PhD debacle, substack fans only), and how building IFLA was about passing things on, community and learning from each other. It’s also about how plants can be this too, and how they are entangled in climate and our responses to climate. I think it’s maybe the piece of writing I’m most proud of, not that anyone reads editor’s letters. I worried a lot about publishing something so personal (even like this blog), but ultimately I suppose I wanted to make it clear that IFLA has always been, for me, dedicated to her.

• Some highlights in this: Karthik Shankar’s brilliant mini essay on queerness and Indian botanic/colonial gardens, quietly one of the best things we’ve published in my opinion; Ojo Taiye’s poem about the ecology of Goi Creek, famous for being wrecked by oil companies; Holly O’Neil’s graphic novel imagining how climate scientists feel studying the changing world. I also love Hiren’s plant mix, to listen to as you read, at the back.

• Matthew’s graphics here are drawings of lichens and fungi - a whole new world and not even plants!

Goodbye IFLA!, and good luck to the team with its next phase. I hope you do something wild with it! I admire and love you all very much.

My Thank Yous

Team, editorial team, editors, advice-givers and collaborators past and present:

Nina Carter, Jackson Howarth, Matthew Lewis, Grace Richardson Banks, Stephanie Glover, Hiren Parmar, Shaista Hussain, Sophie Compton, Alice Attlee, Anya Landolt, Open Practice.

Katie Urquhart, Grace Duncan, Lily Hosking, Eleanor Leydon, Harry Lloyd, Eleanor Warr, Alexander Harris, Alice Skinner, Jack Cribb, Christina Ivey, Leila Sackur, Elspeth Wilson.

Beatrice Liese, Joanna Lee, Robin Brinkworth, Seán Thór Herron, Gina Castellheim, Elana Sulakshana, Christiana Smyrilli, Pheobe Radford, Aranya Ram, Joseph Dillon, Seb Casalotti, Amira Damji, Rachel Angeli, Georgia Evans, Josh Marks, Riley Thorold, Kyle Turakhia, Aidan Chisholm, Joycelyn Longdon, Maryam Nahhal, Phoebe Thomson, Matt Hay, Lucy Wagstaffe, Helena Hosking, Arwa Nadeem, Sofia Palazzo-Corner, Jonny Lucas.

Jeremy Leslie, Steve Watson, Where the Leaves Fall, Contra Journal, Róisín Tapponi, Nikki Simpson, Lewis Beresford, Tim de Lisle, James Astell and the Sustainable Print, Ellie Wang and the San Mei Gallery, Rachel Angeli, Ashley Firth, Matt Booker, Patrick Dillon, Jo Moore, Housmans Books, Will Houghton, Cameron Beccario, Josh Flack, Aleksander Hamid, Jim Marschalek, Oliver Mettle, Rosy Schofield, Laura Coutinho, Helen Babbs and the Wellcome Collection, Andy Marsh and Central St Martins, Rebecca Lardeur and Climate + Cities, Tia Tasbihgou, Textile Exchange.

Writers:

Alice Attlee, Chris Barton, Andrew Clarke, Grace Duncan, Lily Hosking, Eleanor Leydon, Harry Lloyd, Joycelyn Longdon, Finlay Prescott, Kelsey Reichenbach, Grace Richardson Banks, Eleanor Warr, Shanar Tabrizi, Andrew Clarke, Suzanna Dhaliwal, Hayley Hardstaff, Matt Hay, Seán Thór Herron, Caroline Lucas, Ella Thorold, Jessica Tomlinson, Leslie Watson, Nicholas Canon, Robert Cobbold, Kitty Grady, Alexander Harris, Katie Kedward, Hannah Mac, Alice Skinner, Zoe Svendsen, Pheobe Thomson, Jake Thorold, James Woodall, Lola Young, Diego Arguedas Ortiz, Pierluigi Bizzini, Keira Dignan, James Morrison, Lucy Sherriff, Jocelyn Timperley, Veera Vehmas, Nicholas Barratt, Aaron Bradshaw, Rachel Dobbs, Vandana K, Adrienne Katz Kennedy, Miroslava Kojadinović, Zainab Mahmood, Billie Manning, Rhea Nandy, Aron Penczu, Carolina Salazar, Alice Bucknell, Charlotte Grubb, Christina Ivey, Ibrahim Kombarji, Christine Ochefu, Kyle Turakhia, Marco de Vidi, Sophie Yeo, Adrienne Buller, Amardeep Dhillon, Arielle Domb, Natalya Falconer, Josh Fenton, Kitty Horlick, Molly Lipson, Farai Mabeza, Jared Spears, Phobe Thomson, Ellen Grace, Jakob Hoffman, Andrew Key, Lakshmi Mitra, Vicky Mochama, Sudeshna Nag, Rudy Wickremasinghe Schulkind, Sahar Shah, Anna Souter, Ojo Taiye, Gail Tasker, Aja Barber, Alice Bell, Kayla Cohen, Abi Deivanayagam, Joe Duffy, Owen Hatherley, Imani Jaqueline Brown, Esther Kaner, Jean Ong, Rhiannon Osbourne, Tuğçe Özbiçer, Clayton Page Aldern, Dr Arianne Shahvisi, Elspeth Wilson, Samantha Cheh, Adrian Holme, Anoushka Khandwala, Daniel Milroy Maher, Lucy Zhang, Tina Alise Drupa, Annija Danenberga, Amirio Freeman, Georgina Johnson, Nicholas LePage, Gita Parihar, Hana Pera Aoake, Chris Saltmarsh, Karthik Shankar, Milly Shotter, Bouchra Tafrata, Giulia Trojano, George Walker.

Illustrators:

Charlotte Ager, Joey Yu, Matthew Armitage, Laurie Avon, Imi Black, Jade Delmage, Grace Dickinson, Matilda Ellis, Ruby Martin, Holly Mills, Sean O’Brien, Jiye Kim, Haeun Kim, Daise Rowe, Sienna Collins, Arad Golan Coll, Mary Herbert, Scott Kennedy, Sammi Lynch, Holly O’Neil, Zhu Ping, Giulia Corascello, Laina Deene, Josh Gabbatiss, Kitty Glavin, Lizzie Lomax, Theo Payne, Divya Scialo, Thomas White, Hannah Buckman, Leo MacDonald Oulds, Maggie Saunders, Rachel Wignall, Laylah Amarchih, Maxine Granzon, Zhongwen Hu, Charlotte Mei, Anna Skeels, Stefan Tiburcio, Holly Warburton, Alyina Zaidi, Jake Alexander, Laura Coutinho, Bobbye Fermie, Malena Guinet, Claire Harrup, Hua Jia, Bran Mackie, Danielle Rhoda, Ben Walker, Arjuna Gunarathne, Oliver MacDonald Oulds, Fungai Marima, Anthony Padilla, Liv Page, Fan Pu, Iwo Zaniewski, Misbah Ahmed, Ridha Andiantomanga, Vinna Begin, Rebecca Danning, Adriana Lozano, Amy Marici, Ciara Quilty-Harper, Catherine Ross, Sally Booth, Alberto Casias, Camille Deschiens, Ines Gradot, Jiye Kim, Jess Nash, Ifada Nisa, Shanti Panchal, Ines Viegas Oliveira, Byun Younggeun, Michelle Fung, Farida Eltigi, Aileen Harutunyan, Deming Huang, Serena Katt, Rachel Lillie, Shana Pagano Lohrey, Elisa Terranera, Arielle Walker, Sharpay Chenyue Yuan.

Venture capitalists (VCs) like to make grandiose claims about changing the world. Twitter account ‘VCBrags’, for example, chronicles investors boasting of discovering public transport, revolutionising biotech straight out of college and inventing the colour purple. It reveals a braggadocio‑plagued and hyper‑competitive culture – one whose latest target is property.

VC investors typically provide rounds of funding to young companies with the potential of making aggressively high returns. The hope is that one successful investment will cover the losses on others that fail. This is known, within the industry, as the ‘power law’.

In the last few years, VCs have cottoned on to the fact that property might fit this profile. Not only is the sector deeply dysfunctional, and thereby apparently ripe for ‘saving’, it is large enough to yield huge riches. Despite global VC investments halving in 2022 amid a general slump, the overlapping fields of ‘proptech’ (the intersection of property with technology and software) and ‘AEC tech’ (architecture, engineering and construction) have blossomed. US$50 billion of VC funding was invested in AEC tech between 2020 and 2022, 85 per cent higher than in the three years before that, while low‑carbon building start‑ups received a record US$2.2 billion last year. The size of the proptech market is expected to increase fivefold by 2030.

…

Read on the full article on the Architectural Review website (Paywalled, but you can access one article per month without paywall)

• Framing and governing our homes as homes, not assets whose ownership status and value are more important than their condition;

• Ensuring that renters can expect decent, warm, stable homes;

• Shifting bank lending towards ‘real economy’ organisations like retrofitters and heat pump installers; 

• Expanding new lending models, like stakeholder banks, local investment banks and community-lending schemes;

• Accounting for the future savings from retrofits in decision-making tools;

• Shifting government subsidies onto retrofits and electricity;

• Use falling house prices to bring homes back into the council housing stock, and retrofit them now.

We urgently need to retrofit our homes. The health impacts of leaky, damp spaces cost the NHS £1.4 billion a year. Last winter, at least 3 million households couldn’t afford to keep the heating on. Lack of maintenance and creeping disrepair are used to justify building demolition, forcing people out of homes that should have lasted decades longer. A third of building emissions could be removed by 2030 using retrofit. Retrofitting and decarbonising homes is, as much as any technical intervention ever can be, a silver bullet solution to all these problems. But it’s not being aggressively pursued by our politicians and housing specialists - it's often not even mentioned. As a result, UK home decarbonisation efforts are proving slow, lagging greatly behind other countries in Europe.

Because home decarbonisation is such an important, all-encompassing idea, policies to encourage it align pretty closely with policies to improve the housing system as a whole. In the following blog, we explore some of the large and small financial interventions that would accelerate climate action in the built environment and tackle deeper inequities in the housing system at the same time.

A cultural shift

The first barrier is a cultural one: given their financial and health benefits, why is retrofit, or any investment in upgrading, maintaining and adapting our homes, so unpopular in the UK to begin with? 

Much of this problem stems from the dominant cultural notion of the ‘property-owning democracy’ that has been championed by governments since the 1950s. In the decades prior to this period, mass social homes were being provided for people of all incomes: safe homes viewed more like a right or a public good. But when governments began to prioritise the ownership status and financial value of homes over their condition and affordability, the housing system changed. Governments from the 80s onwards gutted the social housing stock, unleashed the power of finance into the mortgage market, and encouraged private landlords to buy up our increasingly valuable homes. This period of ‘financialisation’ comprehensively reworked our housing system into one defined by scarcity, precarity and speculation; one in which the government was radically less involved. And, of course, it made our homes extremely expensive.

This has had several consequences for modern home decarbonisation efforts. The first is that councils have been confined to regulatory roles and left with limited budgets for maintaining and retrofitting the 4.4 million homes they manage. The second is that the astronomical value of homes means that money can still be made from them regardless of their quality and energy efficiency. This is allowed by law: investor groups like landlords, who manage a fifth of the stock, don’t need (and are not required) to decarbonise homes, or even keep them in decent conditions. As a result, nearly a quarter of privately rented homes fail the Decent Homes Standard, while 60% have an Energy Performance rating of D or worse. Less than a third of landlords are willing to pay more than £500 towards retrofits, despite evidence that the median landlord earned a gross income of £46k in 2021, and a third of landlords have no mortgage debt to pay off. And finally, the rising cost of housing, thanks to financialisation and today exacerbated by Bank of England rate rises, now means that most of us are paying so much on our homes already that any upfront investment in upgrading them, regardless of the payback we might receive from energy savings, is or feels untenable. Homeowners spend 4% more of their income on mortgages than they did just 10 years ago. Private and social renters are usually not even allowed to make changes in the fabric of their home (and private renters who request improvements to the condition of their home are more likely to be evicted).

Financialisation has made housing so expensive and commodified that decarbonising our homes feels impossible. To move back towards viewing homes as homes, not assets, requires a mindset change. 

Politicians and policy makers must end their obsession with home ownership being the ultimate social aspiration, and stop blindly targeting rising homeownership rates. Instead, they should move towards the idea that homes are a human right, and that the goal is good, dignified living conditions for all. The headline target should then be tenure parity: equally good living conditions for social renters, private renters and owners. This means all homes meeting the Decent Homes Standard, all homes achieving EPC A, and no-one spending more than 30% of their income on bills and rent or mortgages. And, rather than expecting (or even encouraging) ever-increasing house price rises, the government and Bank of England should target long-term house price stability and deflation relative to wages.

This shift in mindset would move us from an expensive, commodified system towards a healthy, affordable and dignified housing system, steering political discussions away from circular debates about house prices and property ladders and towards more rounded policymaking. For example, tenure parity targets would force politicians to do more about the truly appalling conditions in the private rental sector, and to put proper funding in place for council home creation and decarbonisation. Well-managed, dignified and affordable renting and cooperative homeownership models are a cheap, flexible alternative to homeownership in many countries, not tenures that permanently set you back. Similarly, equal respect for people living in all tenure types would herald an end to policies that prioritise homeownership to the detriment of renters. Right To Buy, for example, has gutted the social housing stock in favour of higher homeownership rates, with many of those homes now in the hands of private landlords, who charge more than councils did. Stabilising house prices would reduce investor interest in our homes, and encourage people to plan their finances around what they need from their home, such as retrofits, rather than simply attempting to stay afloat.

New banking and lending structures

Another way to tackle financialisation is by rethinking bank lending. Regulations on UK mortgage lending and international bank borrowing were peeled back during the 70s and 80s. Where formerly only building societies provided mortgages, now private banks and other lenders could too. They could also tap into international money markets under riskier terms and newer structures - such as the interest-only model that many landlords use today. As a result, more money (in the form of newly created credit) was injected into homes, rapidly inflating prices. We have covered the evidence for this in depth elsewhere, with, for example, an OECD study of 19 countries finding that financial deregulation and expansion of mortgage credit may have increased house prices by as much as 30% between 1980-2005. Compare this to the ~7% increase in house prices that government models indicate would have been avoided were house building targets to have been met. 

But this liberalisation also triggered a shift in the role that retail banks played in the British economy: they transitioned from mainly lending to ‘real economy’ businesses, like the contractors and builders who could be carrying out retrofits and heat pump installations, to primarily lending to financial businesses and providing unproductive loans like mortgages. The share of UK bank lending to real economy businesses fell from 23% in 1986 to only 8% in 2023. Efforts to reshape bank lending back towards actual investment in our buildings, services and infrastructure could, therefore, both reduce house price inflation linked to mortgages, and also support businesses offering retrofits and heat pump installations in the first place - which are in urgently short supply.

Shifting bank lending towards home decarbonisation could be encouraged by national policies. Many central banks, though not the Bank of England, offer reduced rate funding to commercial banks if they’re using it for home decarbonisation loans. (In the UK, this could be based on a variation of the Term Funding Scheme, through which the Bank of England lent £127bn to banks and building societies between 2016 and 2018 with the intention of reducing the costs of loans like mortgages. The 2020 TFSME version was tailored to boost bank lending to small businesses.) The Bank of England could also be setting stronger quotas and targets for banks: the EU Mortgage Portfolio Standard obliges European banks to increase the energy efficiency of the homes their mortgages cover in line with Science-based targets. Other G20 central banks limit private banks’ access to central bank funds if they are not meeting energy efficiency and decarbonisation targets.

An even better alternative would be the creation of more local, community-led and stakeholder banks and lending schemes. As researchers at Dark Matter Labs and the Laudes Foundation have pointed out, our highly financialised housing system is also highly individualised: ‘retrofit, in attempting to deliver a collective climate transition of our built environment, still operates within the primarily individualised institution of property.’ In practice, home decarbonisation programmes are most effective when run at local level, they strengthen community networks and contribute to new skills and knowledge in the community. Retail banks can of course lend to community-led schemes, but tend to be less familiar with non-standard styles of housing management. Stakeholder and regional banks offer an exciting new set of possibilities.  

Stakeholder banks are cooperatively run or public savings banks. They are often ‘mission-oriented’, with the New Economics Foundation noting that they tend to focus on community needs, promote financial stability and invest in local development more than retail or highstreet banks. They have been found to develop more long-term positive relationships between customers and the businesses they finance, which means they are more able to lend responsibly and usefully - such as to local climate action and health priorities. They are also known to better engage with underserved communities (which would support widening access to energy efficiency schemes). Regional and local development banks, which are far more common internationally than in the UK, similarly offer the potential to more effectively direct lending towards local priorities and small businesses (like retrofit providers and heat pump installers). They can also align with speciality local industries and help retain wealth in underfunded areas.

Accordingly, new lending models are appearing in the UK as part of climate action schemes. Lendology, for example, is a social enterprise based in the UK that manages over £10 million on behalf of local councils, using close customer collaboration to allocate loans for retrofits and upgrades of 1,500 homes. Local authority-issued climate bonds are rising in popularity, as are community wealth procurement structures where councils prioritise local businesses and suppliers on their projects to funnel money in the local area. However, on the whole alternative funding schemes suffer from a bureaucratic funding competition model, budget cuts, fluctuating lending rates and lack of government support for new financing models. The government and Bank of England need to bolster the development of such initiatives, including by providing patient long term capital for their initiation, developing central infrastructure, regulations and guidance to help people to start them and strengthening green finance regulations such that investors support alternative funding and banking models.

Policy, regulations and decision-making

Alongside basic regulatory changes like mandating minimum energy efficiency regulations, there’s a strong opportunity for a wider suite of housing policy changes that boost financing for home decarbonisation projects. 

One option is for public bodies to be smarter about how decisions and targets are costed. Decarbonisation costing is typically carried out on an upfront cost basis, with the multiple benefits of retrofit and clean heating - such as their significant benefits for health, or the cost of inaction in terms of climate adaptation - not considered. Government programmes and decision-making should adopt a broader costing definition in relation to energy efficiency and clean heat, learning from the many multivariable tools already out there: the UCL HIDEEM model, Greater Manchester’s carbon-linked cost benefit analysis tool, the Dark Matter Labs civic value of retrofit model, or the Multiple Benefits of Deep Retrofit toolkit used by cities like New York. Broader costing exercises won’t reduce upfront costs, but they will allow users to understand where savings will be garnered elsewhere.

The government should also urgently review its subsidies allocation. The scrapping of VAT on retrofit products and services should be extended beyond 5 years, for example, alongside adjustments to how landlords pay taxes on decarbonisation costs. Currently, the cost of electricity is significantly higher than the cost of fossil gas (sometimes called ‘natural’ gas), perversely penalising those who have invested in heat pumps and clean heating sources. The government must make good its aim to equalise the cost of gas and electricity, moving its subsidies over to clean energy producers and rebalancing levies on bills. 

And finally, councils need to take the approaching softening of house prices as an opportunity - and receive funding and access to cheap loans accordingly. Buying up existing homes is essential if we are to expand the council housing stock once more, ensuring more people have an affordable place to live and rolling back some of the financialisation of our homes of the last decades. These ‘Right to Buy Back’ commitments should be coupled with efforts to decarbonisation the newly-bought homes, incorporating them into local authorities’ emerging climate action plans and programmes.

Conclusion

Climate campaigners often talk about a ‘war on retrofit’ to meet 2050 goals; a frenzied effort to install heat pumps and insulation, come what may. But, in reality, many people simply don’t have the money to do this, and have more immediately visible concerns to contend with than poor energy efficiency. Separating climate action policy from basic housing policy will always make both an uphill battle.

Deeper, more long-lasting changes to improve our housing system will unlock retrofit more organically, including reexamining how we talk about our homes, how they are managed and how they are funded. Managing homes as homes, not assets, will make them more affordable and more available, freeing up funds to decarbonise them and putting them in the hands of those who will care for them. Ensuring we have a lending system that provides the right investment to the right places will boost companies that can provide retrofits and heat pump installations, and make these activities cheaper. Aligning our regulatory, decision-making and subsidy system with greener, people-oriented principles will remove the myriad of perverse incentives people face when trying to decarbonise their homes. A healthier, more dignified and cheaper housing system is also a greener housing system. 

This was originally posted on the Positive Money blog. I currently lead on Housing Policy at Positive Money, and these ideas and analysis build on the 2022 report ‘Banking on Property’, by Danisha Kazi and Laurie Macfarlane. This piece was edited by Simon Youel and Chloe Musto, thanks also to Ellie McLaughlin for her comments. Images sourced via Philip Oldfield @SustainableTall.