🟦🟥 Show Your Stripes Day, celebrated every year around 21 June, is an...

EU Environment and Planet 24 days ago

🟦🟥 Show Your Stripes Day, celebrated every year around 21 June, is an initiative to raise awareness of climate change and the need for urgent action. 🌡 “Climate stripes” are a simple but impactful visual rendering of global warming. Each vertical stripe represents one year’s average temperature at a given location. Blue stripes indicate years which were cooler than the reference period, while red stripes indicate warmer years. 🛰 This data visualisation, based on #CopernicusEU Climate Change Service (C3S) ERA-5 data, shows average annual temperature anomalies for EU capitals from 1945 to 2025 vis-à-vis the 1961-2010 reference period. The progression from predominantly blue tones in earlier decades to increasingly red tones in recent years reflects the long-term rise in average temperatures recorded in the Belgian capital. C3S provides authoritative climate data and tools which support the monitoring of temperature trends at global, regional, and local scales. These datasets help public authorities, researchers, and citizens better understand climate variability and long-term change, and support evidence-based planning and climate adaptation. 🔗 Reach our #ImageOfTheDay album via the link in the bio!

layersDaily Sustainability Digest

Published about 5 hours ago



The UK concrete sector’s new circular economy in construction plan anchors a shift toward whole life carbon assessment as the benchmark for sustainable construction. By tracking both embodied carbon and operational performance, the industry aims to reduce the carbon footprint of construction and create low carbon building envelopes that support net zero carbon buildings. This initiative promotes circular construction strategies such as end-of-life reuse in construction, resource efficiency in construction, and the adoption of low embodied carbon materials to drive carbon footprint reduction across the supply chain. It signals the embedding of life cycle thinking in construction, where life cycle cost and building lifecycle performance become integral to design and procurement.

Revised BREEAM guidance, including updates anticipated in BREEAM V7, is intensifying scrutiny of climate resilience and environmental sustainability in construction. The integration of whole life carbon targets and eco-design for buildings aligns with the UK government’s commitment to adapt for 2°C of warming by 2050. Treating adaptation as a compliance requirement ensures that sustainable building practices are embedded within green construction codes rather than appended to them. Lifecycle assessment is now viewed as essential to ensuring net zero whole life carbon outcomes.

Urgency has also grown on the social side of sustainable building design. Rising heat mortality across vulnerable housing stock highlights the health imperative for energy-efficient buildings and equitable eco-friendly construction standards. Retrofit projects focused on insulation, passive cooling and low carbon design now contribute to both social resilience and decarbonising the built environment. At the same time, partnerships between public, private and philanthropic sectors are demonstrating how sustainable urban development can regenerate industrial zones into low carbon construction materials hubs and green infrastructure corridors that support carbon neutral construction.

Across all fronts, sustainable design has moved from concept to criterion: sustainability is now measured in tonnes of carbon, not words.

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