Housing the world without costing the Earth: reflections from the Built by Nature Summit

How can we meet the world's growing housing needs without compromising our climate and nature ambitions?

CEI-Bois recently attended the 5^th annual Built by Nature Summit in Barcelona, dedicated to “Housing the World Without Costing the Earth”. Our colleague Paul shares his reflections on the discussions, the scale of the challenge ahead and the opportunities for timber construction to be part of the solution.

Many are familiar with the African proverb ‘If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together’. It is often cited in the context of partnership working and is an upfront acknowledgement that working with others can slow everything down in the short term but in the long run a bigger impact can be achieved.

Built by Nature, based in Amsterdam and operating across Europe and beyond, is a network of pioneering developers, architects and engineers, asset owners and managers, investors and insurers, city leaders, academics, researchers, non-profits and policymakers who have come together and are now five years into a journey to decarbonise our built environment and protect nature.

The breadth of participation they have developed is impressive and clearly a strength. Partnership working is often more effective when the partners are diverse, bringing different experiences and attributes to the table rather than more of the same.

This year Built by Nature held their 5^th annual summit in Barcelona with the theme being ‘Housing the World Without Costing the Earth’. The gathering coincided with widespread demonstrations across Spain calling for affordable homes and with torrential rains, including the heaviest day’s rainfall in Barcelona since 1883.

The summit opened with a clear warning delivered by Built by Nature’s CEO Paul King: building the additional homes needed to house the world’s growing population – an extra 2 billion people by 2050 – could very easily break planetary boundaries.

That the majority of these additional people, who will take the global population to 10 billion, will live in developing and emerging economies was the reason for keynote speakers from both Brazil and Kenya. Their presence helped ensure that our focus must be global even if the emerging solutions are always in the first instance local. For instance Amsterdam until recently only had 0.5% new homes built in timber. Now a target of 14% has been set to be achieved before the end of the decade. While the Netherlands is thousands of miles away from Brazil or Kenya but it does help generate a sense of what is possible. This is crucial in the context of the global South were for the past 50 plus years construction in all their major cities has endeavoured to emulate the global North and hence has been focused on concrete and steel, two materials symbolic with development. Hence the positive message is if Amsterdam can do it, so can São Paulo and Nairobi.

King also reminded the attendees that housing is a human right and hence needs to be built. At the same time many of the homes already built are not fit for purpose, primarily due to inadequate insulation, and will need to be retrofitted. Taken together, building two billion new homes and renovating the existing housing stock, we find ourselves facing the biggest building project humanity has ever faced.

This context is both a threat and an opportunity. Can we build in such a way that the new homes are affordable for both people and the planet? Built by Nature believe we can but only if one billion of the new homes are built sustainably using nature-based materials. In turn this is the opportunity.

As a first step Built by Nature aim to secure commitments for 200 million homes by the end of this decade. That would represent a critical tipping point: one capable of accelerating adoption, unlocking investment and driving change at a far greater scale in the years that follow.  

Achieving this will require unprecedented collaboration. Leadership from governments and cities. Investment from public and private finance. Innovation from industry. And commitment from the growing community of organisations that recognise a simple reality: we can no longer treat housing, climate and nature as separate challenges. Watch the campaign video here: https://builtbn.org/news/housing-the-world-without-costing-the-earth/.

The Barcelona summit, like previous summits, managed to pull off the difficult task of not underplaying the scale of the challenge we face – it’s massive - while at the same time engendering a high degree of optimism  that collective we can rise to the challenge.

The summit was co-organised with Mass Madera, Built by Nature’s Spanish network hosted by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), a global leader in innovative timber construction.