Retrofitting & densification — an illustration showing how we could support neighbourhoods to maximise the space and materials that already exist.
This work is undertaken in partnership between Dark Matter Labs & CIVIC SQUARE as new research into understanding the risks UK neighbourhoods face on our current trajectory (a +3ºC global average temperature rise above baseline by 2100).
The full report can be
found here ↗
This work seeks to outline the scale of risks in which we currently sit as well as the transformative action and reinvention needed in our current economy and the fabric of our neighbourhoods. It is not an endorsement or acceptance of a +3ºC future, but merely a attempt to understand it and chart a path towards a more just, regenerative future.
This research follows on from work with the European Commission to outline fundamental shifts in our economy and the formation of a New European Bauhaus — read Designing Our Future here ↗
Where are we now?
We are living through what feels like the peak of a self-destructive economy; climate breakdown and ecological collapse, rising food and energy prices, the retreat from globalisation fuelled by a resurgence of reactionary politics, and the reemergence of global geopolitical tension and war, all set to a backdrop of wildfires, drought, food security and floods. This is the lived reality of the polycrisis, and together these strands are locking us into a future of greater uncertainty and risk for millions.
The scale and speed of action needed to address this means shifting rapidly away from our carbon economy — laid on the foundations of fossil fuel dependence, material extraction, and exponential growth — as the minority world’s route to social progress. That economy is over.
2023 was a landmark year
Last year was the hottest year on record and likey the warmest in at least the last 125,000 years [IPCC], temporarily breaking us through both the +1.5ºC and +2ºC global average temperature ceilings. The agreed ‘1.5ºC’ Paris climate accord target, the basis of almost every net zero plan, represents our most ambitious climate goals, yet it’s already a temperature limit at which millions are at risk and beyond which dangerous warming will be hard to contain.
At the time of writing, global mean surface temperature (GMST, an average temperature of land and sea above a pre-industrial baseline) stands at +1.3ºC, and is on track to break the +1.5°C permanently by the end of this decade.
Source: UN, IPCC
That means it’s now more than likely that those born today will experience a +3ºC planet (at minimum and if we ignore tipping points). Without hyperbole, this is the basis for societal collapse. Flooding will happen more often and causing a greater degree of damage. Storms will be stronger and more frequent, damaging power lines, homes and transport links, with each occurrence making it harder and more costly to rectify. Summers will not just be ‘hotter’ they will be dangerous, and represent one aspect of a new global climate the result of which will be the loss of predictable seasons and the reliability of food security.
The map below shows large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable at +3ºC, with the UK relying heavily on many of these regions for food, energy and other basic supplies. Also located in many of these areas are some of the planet’s most vital ecosystems that keep the globe’s climate stable; the Amazon, central Africa and South East Asia. These are also some of the geographies predicted to be worst hit by land temperature rises.
Source:
GlobaiaWhat’s brought us here is a global economy founded on the energy ‘dividend’ of fossil fuels — unmatched in their energy density, a single barrel of oil is the equivalent of 5 years of human labour, with the average UK person consuming around 2,700 barrels a day. This invisible ‘workforce’ upon which our current lifestyles and neighbourhoods are built, has paved the way for the rapid consumption of energy, material extraction, and biodiversity depletion at a planetary scale. GDP, material extraction and energy have a new 1:1 correlation.
If it wasn’t already clear, the early 2020s have shown many of us that the energy windfall the UK has relied on for the past century is borrowed from both the lives of future generations, and a livable planet.
What does this means for the UK’s neighbourhoods?
If we’re already experiencing the global impacts of climate breakdown and temperature rises, and we’re becoming gradually more cognisant of our intimate entanglement with the fossil fuel economy, then how does this play out at the neighbourhood scale? And what does it mean for how we might adapt and transform the places we live?
This work seeks to understand the current risks the UK’s urban neighbourhoods face over this century due to climate and ecological breakdown under a high emissions scenario and a global temperature rise of +3°C above a pre-industrial baseline.
This is not an acceptance or endorsement of this future. We firmly believe that every effort and action in structurally reducing GHG emissions is urgently needed.
An increase of +3ºC average global temperature by 2100 pushes us far beyond the global tipping point thresholds, threatening food supply, energy security and destabilising much of the global economy. *providing the ocean doesn’t heat faster than we think.
A +3ºC average warming means a +5ºC average land temperature globally. For the West Midlands this means that the maximum summer temperatures will be about 8ºC higher than today’s.
n.b. This represents a modelled area of 25km, meaning that localised impacts are likely to be much greater in their extremes and relative to the most vulnerable people.
Heat vulnerability A ‘heat risk’ map of Birmingham, 2022. Source:
Natural England↗,
Uni of Manchester/FotE↗,
UK Gov↗,
BBC/4EI↗This map outlines the current heat risk and locations for UHIE in Birmingham. By 2030, heatwaves will be hotter and more frequent, putting more people at risk. By 2080, heatwaves are expected to be five times more frequent and be 5–7ºC hotter on average, making peak heats well over 40ºC. Birmingham has the greatest number of neighbourhoods of any local authority in the UK identified as priority areas for adaptation on the basis of a 3ºC scenario.
Green Infrastructure & Indices of Deprivation An overlayed set of maps showing green spaces and IMD for Birmingham, data from 2019. Source:
Natural England↗,
Uni of Manchester/FotE↗,
UK Gov↗,
BBC/4EI↗This map is a composite showing access to green infrastructure and IoMD. There is a loose overlap with the indices of deprivation, yet a more detailed study is needed to highlight different data points that constitute the index. People of colour in the UK are four times as likely to live in areas at high risk of dangerous heat.
“Our research … shows that the poorest people and people of colour are disproportionately impacted by extreme weather in England. This is true across the UK and internationally. The communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis also have the lowest carbon footprints — they have contributed the least but are being hardest hit by rising global temperatures.” Friends of the Earth, University of Manchester↗
What are the risks? Overheating
The most obvious impact of a warming planet is higher summer temperatures and heatwaves, which are intensified by urban heat island effect (UHIE). Heat islands produce unequal impacts, and profoundly accelerate existing inequalities; people living in deprived areas, peoples of colour, those with underlying health conditions, as well as those with limited access to green space will face the worst adverse outcomes. In the UK, by 2080, the chances of exceeding 40ºC will be similar to today’s chance of reaching 32ºC. By 2030 Birmingham’s summers will consistently exceed 40ºC (
Met Office↗), hugely increasing the risk of hospitalisation and death, as well as the failure of basic services and infrastructure
↗. To address this we will need to implement neighbourhood sites for dealing with heat related emergencies, to adapt our homes, as well as to create greater access to and quality of green and blue infrastructure
↗. Drought
At +3ºC globally, the likelihood of droughts in the UK becomes almost 2.5 times more frequent
↗. Droughts in the UK are already chronic — not only reducing the availability of water for drinking and agricultural use, but also increasing the risks of wildfires, encouraging tree disease, and undermining the ability of forests, wetland and peatland areas to store and sequester carbon, and in some cases turning them into carbon sources
↗.
Drought has a big knock-on effect on food security, by limiting both the ability of the UK to import food (on which the UK is heavily reliant), as well as threatening home-grown food production. Addressing drought will require a much greater use and reuse of rainwater, as well as a bias for local food produce and creating habitats for pollinators
↗. Flooding
For every 1ºC of temperature rise, air can hold up to 7% more moisture
↗, making rainfall and flash flooding much more likely across the UK in the future. The chances of what is currently considered a ten-year flood increases in the West midlands from 10% each year to almost 20% a year at a +3℃ rise.
↗ This puts just over 1 in every 5 homes at risk of flooding in England by 2100
↗, with little evidence that current property developers are adequately planning for our current or future risks of flooding
↗. Food shortage and price inflation
The world is already experiencing a food production and affordability crisis, with the UK food prices having inflated by almost a third in the last two years, and the CCC estimating that GMST rises could increase food price inflation by a further 20% by 2050.
In 2020, the UK’s wheat yield dropped by 40% due to a mix of heavy rain and drought. Biodiversity loss and species extinction are further degrading the overall soil health needed to grow food.
Food shortages and food inflation will exacerbate our existing inequalities in food security and access to a nutritional diet. Droughts across the globe will exacerbate food insecurity, particularly the price and availability of fresh food needed to sustain a healthy diet. Climate migration
Over the next three decades the combined impacts of environmental migration (estimated 1.2 billion people by 2050
↗↗) and predicted global population rise (we expect an increase of 20–25% by 2050) will place more responsibility on the UK to resettle and shelter millions of climate migrants and refugees. The UK’s historical and per capita emissions disproportionately impact areas of the world that are likely to experience extreme heat. By 2050, the number of people suffering from a month of inescapable heat could further grow to a staggering 1.3 billion.
↗ Increased cost of living
The cost of energy (particularly heating over colder months) will remain a problem for many homes in the UK, driven by old, poorly performing homes as well as rising gas & electricity costs.
On a more macro level, drought and flooding will make trade and access to our current energy and food supplies more difficult and expensive, further exacerbating the price of energy and its health and social care costs. Droughts and harvest failures already account for 30% of euro-area inflation volatility between 1961 and 2016
↗. The current energy transition isn’t viable
Many of our most optimistic climate targets are still built around projections of transitioning to a clean energy system, yet much of what’s embedded in both committed policy and net-zero goals doesn’t address the systemic extraction and overuse of natural resources. This is a problem embodied by the material demands of shifting our energy system.
The climate activist Nate Hagens refers to this as our ‘energy blindness’; as global GDP is almost entirely tethered to the energy we use (99%) and the amount of materials we consume (100%), a global energy transition without a decoupling of growth and material consumption, and developing a meaningful circular economy, will only give us clean energy for one single generation, and ignores the wider systemic environmental destruction this creates.
Current economic forecasts predict a doubling of our energy and material use every 25 years (material use up 60% by 2060 ↗). Despite impressive technological and efficiency gains, what’s known as the rebound effect (improvements in technological efficiency prompting increased demand and greater resource consumption) means that absolute decoupling of GDP from energy on a global scale is yet to materialise. Studies have shown no evidence that technological progress will lead to a reduction of material use ↗.
When we talk about a clean energy transition, what we’re actually talking about is a rapid increase in the supply of a number of critical minerals — lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite, which are crucial for batteries; rare earth elements, used in permanent magnets in wind turbines and electric motors; copper and aluminium for electricity networks.
By 2030, demand for lithium could reach fifteen times current levels. By 2050 it will require a 600% increase in copper production. This, alongside other transition materials, will require a historical increase in mining and processing, one of the most carbon intensive activities on the planet. Even meeting net-zero targets by 2050 would require six times more mineral input over the next two decades than today.↗
Production and processing capacity of these materials are predominantly located in countries of instability, corruption and conflict.↗ What’s more, their locations often overlap with Earth’s most vital carbon sinks and where the need for restoration is greatest.↗
The geographical concentration of these minerals (lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements) means that three-quarters of global output comes from just three nations. Alongside this, complex global supply chains increase the risks of disruption, trade restrictions or other geopolitical tensions↗ associated with extraction. Yet most crucially to the question of accelerating our energy transition, whilst there may theoretically be enough materials for our transition, the average mine takes 16.5 years to move from discovery to production.
Our material economy is the main cause of environmental damage globally, with 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress being caused by resource extraction and processing ↗. These same activities contribute to about half of global greenhouse gas emissions ↗.
Cumulative per capita emissions — the minority world has already consumed far beyond their own carbon budgets, and robbed the majority world of theirs. +1.5ºC is a New Age of Imperialism
Our agreed global climate target of limiting average temperature rise to 1.5ºC fundamentally sacrifices billions of lives to conflict, trauma and deadly climates↗.
Yet even the sum total of current global policies and policy commitments means we are locked-in to surpassing +1.5ºC within the next decade↗.
Embedded in the global north’s most ambitious climate action plans, from net zero commitments to the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, are contemporary structures of colonialism. Successful outcomes in the pledges laid out by global minority governments (inc. the UK) rest on extractivism, externalisation of ecological impacts in key decision-making processes, and the continued dehumanisation of the global south. The growth mandate that defines western democratic economies doubles down on the accumulation of wealth rooted in our colonial legacy: the existing form and discourse around climate commitments exacerbates historic violence while feeding local and global injustices.
As a result, the UK’s current national strategies are centred around decarbonisation (e.g. mass retrofit and energy transition) and are undertaken from a green growth, carbon-centric and material consumptionist mindset. Most materials and minerals essential to the transition, such as cobalt, lithium, and other rare earth minerals, exist in their highest concentrations in global south nations ranking high on the corruption index, and with documented abuses associated with their mining industries. For example, cobalt, on which many “zero emissions” scenarios rely, is sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where atop highly unregulated and extractive mining practices, European corporate influences are entangled with political instability in the region, as well as corruption and genocide, contributing to a contemporary form of imperialism.
The regions of the world that will enable our attempts to balance the earth’s systems and enable future thriving are those that have been profoundly over extracted and exploited historically, while seeing little or no regeneration in return. Often these modes of extraction are justified as a means of maintaining (GDP) growth at a macroeconomic scale — yet they directly and indirectly impact countries that already are and will continue to be most impacted by climate breakdown, alongside the cascading and compounding impacts of the polycrisis.
This de-facto way in which we can understand and rationalise the UK’s climate action plans, and its role in a wider just climate transition, makes its current approach problematic for two reasons:
The first is that if we attribute the emissions of colonised nations during the years of colonialism to the colonising nation, the UK has one of the highest per capita emissions rates in the world, already blowing the UK’s remaining carbon budget by 230%. This matters because it represents the stolen time and carbon budget from countries that it has historically oppressed and impoverished, all of which fall well below the per capita carbon allowance for limiting global temperatures to below +1.5ºC.
The second is that we are already seeing greater emphasis being placed on energy security, and the importance of securing the critical minerals and raw materials needed to make that a reality.
However, climate breakdown and global temperature rise are symptoms of a problem, not the problem itself. Regardless of our decarbonisation efforts, we need strategies that can address the root causes of climate breakdown and environmental destruction.
We need to adopt practices and ways of being that change how we relate to the world. In many cases, these ideas exist in non-western cultures, among peoples who have been in kinship with land as opposed to relating to it primarily by extraction. These are ideas and practices that aren’t new, but represent a ‘re-indigenisation’ of how our infrastructures and institutions function.
This is not abstract for many UK residents who have direct family and friendship connections to the global geographies and lands that are presently, and in the future, set to be most impacted by the polycrisis, and from whose indigenous and local communities we might relearn how to relate to the planet.
Re-imagining our Fundamentals
The UK’s carbon budget is 2.32 GtCO2e, meaning we will need around a 20% reduction each year between now and 2050*.
So what does a radically different built environment look like?
Sources:
ARUP↗,
LETI↗,
Carbon Budget Calculator↗,
SBTi↗The embodied carbon emissions alone for the UK’s new build housing is approximately 16.7 MtCO2e/yr**, meaning at current pace we have 5 more years of carbon budget for building new homes at their average current embodied carbon. Even today’s lowest carbon, bespoke new build homes have a footprint of around 150 kgCO2e/m2, more than fifteen times what every new home will need to be in 2030.
*based on global carbon budget (Paris Agreement 2015), and with a 83% chance of remaining below +1.5ºC, and meeting 2030 reduction targets (UN, Emissions Gap report 2019)
**based on average dwelling size of 90m2, and 800 kgCO2e/m2
Without profoundly transforming how we design, build, use, re-use, and live with the built environment around us, a permenant +1.5ºC threshold is only a few years away.
What would it mean to reimagine our climate transition?
We need to be aware of and prepare for the worst, whilst building towards a new, more hopeful future. Whilst immediate actions to adapt to the impacts of global temperature rises remain necessary, the focus on this alone risks only dealing with climate breakdown on a purely symptomatic level, and in some cases creates new industries of growth and extraction.
Alongside confronting the consequences of a warmer planet we need to actively reimagine how our neighbourhoods and economies function. Following on from work done by Dark Matter Labs that outlined the foundational shifts needed for a future regenerative economy in the built environment, what follows is six re-imaginings at the neighbourhood scale that look to highlight possibilities for shifting how we build, organise, and own our neighbourhoods.
Recoding comfort for a +3ºC planet Creating the civic infrastructure and building standards for a hotter and wetter climate.
As we can see through the heat vulnerability study (above), the future risks of a warmer planet will be huge accelerators of existing inequalities in society. People living in poor quality housing, who suffer from poor air quality, and have little or no access to green space are already indicators of the structural wealth and racial inequality in British society.
This means resilience will need to become a core driver of how we look to adapt our built environment and social networks in response to the future risks of a warmer planet.
On the physical upgrade of our streets and buildings, this means the fabric of the UK’s neighbourhoods will need to deal with flooding and overheating as primary objectives, as well as catering for the knock-on impacts these may create.
At the street scale this means investing and building things like solar shading; from urban trees to temporary covers and shelters. It means looking at how those same infrastructures can double up as sites for urban flood protection and water retention. It means developing neighbourhood-based and regional warning systems and emergency response sites as a key part of responding to more localised climate events. Norms will have to change, too: our expectations around convenience and comfort, which rely upon consumption patterns rooted in imperialism and ongoing extraction, can be reconfigured at a neighbourhood level to reflect sensitivity to this moment.
Regenerative resources Rewiring neighbourhood resource flows to encourage longevity, bio-materials and reuse as a default.
Materials, water and nutrient cycles will need to shift to be bio-based and circular in their production, consumption and reuse as far as possible.
This is a reimagination of our neighbourhoods as metabolic systems; with the resource flows already present and active within it needing to become as self-sustaining as possible, and for their maintenance to be regarded as paramount. Reimagining nutrient and water cycles will build capacity for local, low-carbon and nutritious food systems supported by local water systems and practices.
At the scale of our homes, the bricks, steel and timber in existing buildings should be treated as carbon and material stores that need to be reused as much as possible. We need to collectively rethink what it means to live regeneratively in our neighbourhoods, by establishing alternative ownership and stewardship models for buildings and their materials, and using policy to increase specification of long-life and bio-based materials.
It also means that civic and public spaces need to be geared towards supporting this reality and helping to make it happen; creating the spaces, infrastructures and new commodity flows for dealing with bio-based production and circular resource use.
Retrofit & densification Supporting neighbourhoods to maximise the space and materials that already exist.
In the UK we already know that our current yearly housing need would eat through our entire national carbon budget in the next five years (not factoring in the historic bias built into UK’s carbon budget, suggesting that our allowance should be much lower, as discussed above). The status-quo of how we deliver and build new homes is, for this reason and others, untenable.
Campaigns such as ‘RetroFirst’, with the design and construction industry, promote the necessity of biassing the adaptation and extension of existing buildings and infrastructure in order to make the most effective use of resources (both past and present). In alignment with this, in reimagining our neighbourhoods, new build housing and infrastructure, as well as site demolition, will become an exception and the creation of housing will need to be designed to become carbon positive and fully circular by design.
This transformation can be influenced at the governance level through policy and regulation to support densification and vertical extensions of building, while limiting new builds. In our communities, we’ll organise and design to normalise space sharing and the fractional leasing of spaces, to make the most of the buildings we have. These processes contribute to a revaluation of our built surroundings to treat them as a further form of shared community infrastructure to be cared for and made to last longer.
Renewable energy systems Building the physical and institutional infrastructure for just local energy transitions.
An energy transition through full electrification will need to be married with a strategy of reduced mineral and material consumption in order to fully transition away from fossil fuels.
This will mean changing how local energy demands are managed, and by whom, through new energy services and leasing contracts as well as demand reduction. Community-owned, and distributed renewable energy systems and heating and cooling networks will build neighbourhood agency around the transition, developing a universal basic energy provision. We should move away from renewable energy existing as a luxury for only the ‘able to pay’ market, and instead use community energy schemes to lower bills for those most in need, reducing inequality in our neighbourhoods.
We can expand this reimagination to shared ownership models for zero-carbon mobility networks and last-mile logistics, transforming our streetscapes into urban green corridors to reflect this reimagination.
Rewilding the city Finding opportunities for supporting civic-led blueand green infrastructure
Rewilding urban neighbourhoods is a primary strategy for maximising overlapping co-benefits associated with adapting to a 3ºC scenario. Targeting indicators like improving biodiversity, soil health and air quality, we can bring about a huge range of cascading, positive outcomes associated with thriving blue and green infrastructure, while reducing critical risks associated with floods and urban heat islands.
This will mean adapting private green space into shared allotments and green social space, as well as opportunities for community planting and care of urban trees and vegetation that will make up a street forest with increased canopy cover and permeable paving surfaces. In existing parks, wildflower meadows and bioswales support the entangled benefits of biodiversity and mitigation of the direct impacts of climate breakdown.
Rewilding the city will support neighbourhood-scale financial health in the long-term, but its benefits will be felt, too, in improved physical and mental wellbeing and growing practices around neighbourhood care.
Re-infrastructuring Rebuilding the social and organisational networks for a more unpredictable world
Central to reducing our overall demand for resource consumption and building our capacity for further reimagination of neighbourhood fundamentals is the reintroduction and sustenance of communal spaces and social infrastructures, as well as the civic networks and hosting organisations that bring them to life.
This kind of re-infrastructuring, which operates on a definition of ‘infrastructure’ that looks far beyond the physical, will empower our neighbours in the governance, decision-making, and investment processes involved in the transition. Community institutions and ways of organising can expand access and learning to those who may feel shut out of existing ways of participating, using digitally- and socially-enabled tools. Adapting our existing local infrastructures–our homes, streets and civic spaces–to play host to communal dining, caring, growing, and working is a fundamental shift for reducing further resource extraction and waste. At the same time, neighbourhood learning and upskilling programmes will ensure that our neighbourhoods and next generations are not left behind in future transition phases and crises, but rather are equipped with important skills for living and working in a 3ºC, or other, world.
This work and research is ongoing, and was written in collaboration with, and in support of, CIVIC SQUARE’s Neighbourhood Public Square initiative.
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This work forms part of the Neighbourhood Public Square publication by
CIVIC SQUARE
