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
Sustainable construction is shifting beyond carbon accounting towards resilience, circular economy delivery and measurable building lifecycle performance. UN warnings on displacement across South Asia from sea-level rise, drought and flooding reinforce the urgency of sustainable building design that treats adaptation as a core requirement, not a specialist add-on. UK fire services reporting escalating wildfire and flood risks point to the same imperative for energy-efficient buildings, low carbon design and sustainable urban development that can withstand climate volatility while reducing the carbon footprint of construction.
Material innovation is gaining momentum where waste streams become assets. Plans for a wind-turbine recycling facility in Inverness signal progress in circular economy in construction, giving physical capacity to end-of-life reuse in construction and resource efficiency in construction. Research converting plastic waste, including old CDs and packaging, into polymer networks able to absorb water from air shows how green building materials and low carbon construction materials could support moisture management, water harvesting and eco-design for buildings. The science remains early stage, but it strengthens the case for sustainable material specification, low embodied carbon materials and circular construction strategies.
Policy is becoming the decisive constraint. UK recycling rules that limit the repurposing of difficult plastic films expose a gap between environmental sustainability in construction and waste regulation designed around disposal rather than innovation.
For developers, contractors and product manufacturers, whole life carbon, embodied carbon and life cycle cost are now strategic measures of resilience, not compliance exercises.
Whole life carbon assessment, lifecycle assessment, environmental product declarations (EPDs), BREEAM and BREEAM v7 are set to shape procurement decisions as clients demand evidence of net zero carbon buildings, net zero whole life carbon and credible carbon footprint reduction.
The competitive edge in green construction will come from proving that buildings use fewer virgin resources, reduce embodied carbon in materials, perform under climate stress and deliver lower whole-life risk. Sustainable building practices, renewable building materials, green infrastructure and low-impact construction are moving from aspiration to commercial necessity as the weather, regulation and investment markets put greater pressure on decarbonising the built environment.
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