Circular Economy, Pt 3: Are there circular solutions for global housing unaffordability and climate change?
Release Date: 12/03/2024
Circular Economy, Pt 3: Are there circular solutions for global housing unaffordability and climate change?
Mongabay Explores
According to UN-Habitat, a global housing affordability is underway, with 1.6 billion people currently in need of adequate, affordable homes. That number could rise to three billion in just a few years. Home prices in urban markets have reached "impossible" of unaffordability while temperatures continue to rise as a result of climate change. On this third episode of the Mongabay Explores podcast season on the circular economy — the effort to design goods to be less resource-intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling — Louise Dorignon, a postdoctoral research fellow and...
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Circular Economy, Pt 2: How Finland is leading the world in circular economy planning
Mongabay Explores
In 2016, Finland became the first nation to design a circular economy roadmap, in an effort to design goods to be less resource-intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling. Tim Forslund of the Finnish Innovation Fund (SITRA) was one of its architects and joins this episode of Mongabay Explores to detail his nation’s circularity plan and the challenges ahead. Over 50 nations now have such plans in development, and while Finland is years ahead of them all, it hasn’t yet seen a reduction in its economy's resource consumption so far. Forslund explains why, and how policies...
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Circular Economy, Pt 1: EV issues are about ‘more than just cars’
Mongabay Explores
The fifth season of Mongabay Explores dives into the circular economy: the effort to design goods to be less resource intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling. In this episode, we speak with circular economy researcher and policy expert Jessika Richter, associate senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, who discusses the environmental and social impacts of electric vehicles (EVs), and what we can do to mitigate them. As she says, any conversation about solving transportation emissions that only discusses cars misses the bigger picture: “We need to go back to, exactly,...
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Congo Basin, Bonus: Pollution & impunity in the DRC
Mongabay Explores
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), pollution from extracting minerals commonly used in the energy transition like cobalt and copper is on the rise, and miners generally ignore their legal obligations to clean it up. Cases of such pollution have killed and displaced people and caused major health problems, say residents and community organizations. The DRC is estimated to hold 64% of the world's cobalt reserves (3.5 million tons of cobalt, plus 31 million tons of copper) and could benefit from these metals by becoming a major player in the energy transition. But the...
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Congo Basin, Part 6: How the Congo Rainforest is shaped by elephants
Mongabay Explores
The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) plays a critical role in shaping the Congo rainforest, experts say. Though they represent incalculable and intrinsic value, there is much scientists still do not know about this critically endangered species of megafauna. On this final episode of the Congo Basin season of Mongabay Explores, Fiona "Boo" Maisels, a conservation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Andrew Davies, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, detail the 'irreplaceable' value of African forest...
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Congo Basin, Part 5: Where's the money for Congo Basin conservation?
Mongabay Explores
How much does it cost to protect the Congo Rainforest? The world's second-largest rainforest provides critical ecological services that millions of people and myriad species rely on. It is also a massive carbon sink, storing tens of billions of tons of carbon in its trees, soils and peatlands. One would think protecting it would be an international priority, and yet funding commitments have historically struggled to adequately finance forest protection in the region. Experts say many commitments end before funding can be fully disbursed, and efforts rarely translate to a better life for local...
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Congo Basin, Part 4: A 'just energy transition' requires justice in the DRC
Mongabay Explores
The global 'just energy transition' has increased demand for critical minerals – such as cobalt and copper – for products like lithium-ion batteries, solar panels, and other renewable energy sources. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which produces nearly 70% of the global supply of cobalt, has a poorly regulated mining sector that's fueled by demand for these natural resources and which has forced Indigenous communities off their land and otherwise done little to lift millions of Congolese citizens out of poverty. The DRC has now opened up land for oil and gas exploration, too, and...
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Congo Basin, Part 3: Big challenges and potential for ape conservation
Mongabay Explores
Recent research shows that great apes of the Congo Basin stand to lose up to 94% of their habitat due to climate change. In the world's only habitat of bonobos and mountain gorillas, time (and land) is running out to save them. Hunting, natural resource extraction, disease, and other human impacts threaten their prospects. On this episode of the Mongabay Explores podcast, we speak with Terese Hart, a researcher with the ICCN (the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature); Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, a wildlife veterinarian and founder of the NGO Conservation Through...
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Congo Basin, Part 2: Can we right the wrongs of fortress conservation?
Mongabay Explores
The debate about how to best protect the Congo Basin's rainforest increasingly finds experts and Indigenous leaders arguing that it's time for a change, one that brings local and Indigenous people into the conversation. Fortress conservation, a model exported to Africa during the colonial era, typically expels local people from land they once relied on for food, fiber and medicine, but experts argue the concept that this model uses – that of a 'pristine wilderness' untouched by humans – is a flawed construct. Many protected areas in Africa still use this conservation model, though, to...
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Congo Basin, Part 1: Second-largest rainforest in the world at a turning point
Mongabay Explores
The Congo Basin contains the world’s second-largest rainforest, a staggering 178 million hectares: containing myriad wildlife and giant trees plus numerous human communities, it is also one of the world's biggest carbon sinks. On this first episode of a new season of Mongabay Explores, we take you to the Congo Basin and begin with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which contains 60% of central Africa's forest, but which also aims to open up protected areas and forested peatlands to oil and gas development. We speak with Adams Cassinga, a DRC resident and founder of...
info_outlineAccording to UN-Habitat, a global housing affordability crisis is underway, with 1.6 billion people currently in need of adequate, affordable homes. That number could rise to three billion in just a few years. Home prices in urban markets have reached "impossible" levels of unaffordability while temperatures continue to rise as a result of climate change.
On this third episode of the Mongabay Explores podcast season on the circular economy — the effort to design goods to be less resource-intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling — Louise Dorignon, a postdoctoral research fellow and housing circularity expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, details this housing reform plan to address sustainability in the most unaffordable housing market in the English-speaking world: Australia.
Researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne have devised a framework for combatting this housing shortage, improving housing circularity, and reducing emissions from construction to help alleviate the housing sector's contributions to climate change.
"Our goal was to find out how implementing a circular economy approach can lead to a more sustainable housing system. And we didn't want to juxtapose sustainability and circular economy as two different things. But instead, we wanted to see how they work together," Dorignon says.
Listen to the first two episodes of Mongabay Explores the Circular Economy here and here.
Mongabay Explores is a podcast series investigating some of the biggest environmental issues of our time, and the people working to solve them. This conversation is the third episode of the fifth season. To listen to them all, simply subscribe to or follow Mongabay Explores wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Image credit: Die Sonnenblumenhäuser is a housing project in Vienna's Wildgarten neighborhood. The 11-building plan is an evolution of an award-winning project from the Europan 10 competition, which values "sustainable projects capable of creating urban intensity while taking care of the environment." Arenas Basabe Palacios built 82 units as commissioned by the Vienna city council, which owns the land. Image courtesy of Kurt Hoerbst.
Timecodes
(00:00) A more sustainable and affordable housing system
(02:18) How do we make housing circular?
(07:36) Curious case studies
(12:57) First pillar: Reappraising value
(18:23) Second pillar: Shaping markets with regulation
(22:06) Third pillar: Tilting investment flows
(23:57) Fourth pillar: Building capacity and skills
(27:38) Australia's housing affordability crisis
(34:54) The problem with using housing as an investment
(38:57) Addressing vacant homes
(40:53) Which nation is 'getting it right?'
(44:39) One thing to change right now