When Duane Riley turns on his taps, they shudder loudly from the air flowing through the pipes. There's often no water trickling at all.
It's ironic, because Johannesburg, South Africa's biggest city, has plenty of water at the moment — authorities and water companies just can't seem to get it to where it's needed.
"There have been times where we've had no water, but I've had a river gushing down my driveway, because there was a leak at the top of our street," Riley told CNN. It took authorities 14 days to fix it, he said.
Joburgers — as residents here call themselves — are no strangers to water scarcity. South Africa is naturally dry, and the climate crisis has hit the nation many times with crippling drought.
Johannesburg is one of many of the world's big cities that are dealing with a perfect storm of crumbling critical infrastructure, lack of maintenance, corruption and insufficient planning for population growth.
Read more at the link in our bio.
📷: Jerome Delay/AP
A £400m UK government loan to the Tropical Forests Forever Facility tightens the link between embodied carbon and real forest outcomes. Bio‑based and renewable building materials will now be judged on credible, deforestation‑free supply chains as much as on glossy lifecycle assessment or whole life carbon assessment outputs, driving wider use of environmental product declarations (EPDs), green building materials and green building products. Expect stronger traceability, circular construction strategies and end‑of‑life reuse in construction when specifying low embodied carbon materials and low carbon construction materials to cut the carbon footprint of construction and support the circular economy in construction.
Updated damp and mould guidance from the Chartered Institute of Building and the Chartered Institute of Housing reframes indoor environmental quality as a health obligation, pressing social landlords towards whole‑house ventilation, insulation upgrades and continuous monitoring. The shift embeds sustainable building design and energy‑efficient buildings as compliance issues, with implications for life cycle cost, building lifecycle performance and net zero whole life carbon pathways recognised by BREEAM and BREEAM v7.
A new retrofit procurement guide uses public spending to expand capacity, create local jobs and tackle skills shortages by baking training and labour targets into contracts. This gives sustainable construction and decarbonising the built environment delivery teeth, promoting life cycle thinking in construction, resource efficiency in construction and eco‑design for buildings, alongside sustainable material specification and low carbon building upgrades that support carbon neutral construction.
Escalating climate risks—from European wildfires to transboundary smoke and cascading Himalayan floods—are accelerating environmental sustainability in construction and sustainable urban development. Design for resilience is becoming core to net zero carbon buildings and green construction, with fire‑hardening, smoke filtration, heat‑safe interiors and green infrastructure specified to reduce the environmental impact of construction, deliver carbon footprint reduction over whole life carbon and strengthen eco‑friendly construction and sustainable architecture.
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