Environmental defenders are often on the front lines of conflicts over mining, oil and gas development, logging and agribusiness—making them especially vulnerable to retaliation from governments, businesses and other legal and illegal actors.
Colombia was the deadliest country for human rights defenders last year, with 165 killed, according to a report released last week by Front Line Defenders. That violence was caused by competition over land, resources and economic control in regions where armed groups, illegal mining and other extractive activities intersect—what the report called “economies of violence.”
“Defenders who challenge land dispossession, extractive industries, or illicit economies often confronted the same networks of power, regardless of whether those activities were formally lawful or criminalised,” the authors of the report wrote.
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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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