“The verdict is clear: the climate crisis is in overdrive (…) More coal, oil and gas will lead to a more combustible future.” – @unitednations Secretary-General @antonioguterres on the new August to October global climate forecast released today by the World Meteorological Organization.
El Niño is strengthening – adding fuel to a planet already on fire.
The Pacific waters driving it have never been this warm this early in an El Niño – and temperatures are still rising.
Today’s latest news from WMO indicates:
🔴 Sea-surface temperatures in key monitoring regions to average nearly 3°C above normal.
🔴 Nearly every land area on Earth is expected to be hotter than normal.
Taken together, that risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide. We are in uncharted territory.
El Niño does not bring heat alone – it profoundly affects the world's rainfall.
India’s monsoon is already running well below average. Forecasts point to worse ahead for a subcontinent where more than a billion people depend on the monsoon.
Hotter and drier conditions are forecast from Central America and the Caribbean to parts of South America, South Asia, the Southwest Pacific, Europe and Africa.
We need far more action on four fronts.
1️⃣ Protecting people before heat becomes deadlier.
2️⃣ Make work safer.
3️⃣ Protection from extreme heat must be designed into our cities, homes, schools and hospitals.
4️⃣ The world must stop fuelling the crisis.
The real change that is driving these events is the accelerating climate crisis driven by fossil fuels.
Every new fossil fuel project approved today makes tomorrow’s heatwaves more dangerous, and our world less secure.
The decarbonisation of the built environment is entering a tougher delivery phase, with UK policy implementation lagging and clean electricity supply still too constrained to support rapid electrification of buildings. The Climate Change Committee’s warning on weak delivery reinforces the need for whole life carbon, whole life carbon assessment and life cycle cost to sit at the centre of sustainable construction decisions, not as optional reporting layers. A proposed clean-power contract auction could reduce wholesale costs and save households and businesses £11bn by 2050, but renewable power shortages highlighted by RE100 show that net zero carbon buildings cannot depend on grid decarbonisation alone.
For developers, designers and contractors, the priority is shifting back to demand reduction, building lifecycle performance and verified low carbon design. Energy-efficient buildings will require better operational data, with pumps, plant and building services embedded into the digital DNA of assets so performance can be monitored and optimised. Sustainable building design, eco-design for buildings and lifecycle assessment must connect operational carbon with embodied carbon in materials, rather than treating design, procurement and facilities management as separate disciplines.
The continuing scrutiny of fire safety ten years after Grenfell underlines a critical point for environmental sustainability in construction: low carbon building strategies must be safe, traceable and maintainable. Retrofit, façade upgrades, green building materials and low embodied carbon materials need stronger evidence, environmental product declarations (EPDs), robust documentation and accountable specification. Net zero whole life carbon is not credible if products, systems and maintenance risks are poorly understood.
WRAP’s Recycle Week findings show that recycling habits are improving, yet valuable materials are still being lost. For the far larger material flows in construction, the circular economy in construction will depend on resource efficiency in construction, design for reuse, reliable segregation, end-of-life reuse in construction and viable markets for secondary materials. Circular construction strategies, low carbon construction materials and sustainable material specification are becoming central to cutting the carbon footprint of construction and reducing the environmental impact of construction.
Green construction is moving beyond broad sustainability claims towards proof, data and performance. Frameworks such as BREEAM and BREEAM v7 will be judged against measurable outcomes: lower embodied carbon, better carbon footprint reduction, safer retrofits, credible renewable building materials and long-term value. Sustainable building practices, eco-friendly construction and carbon neutral construction will increasingly be defined by whole life evidence, not marketing language.
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