110: Adapting our homes and communities to a changing climate

When it comes to climate change in our homes and neighbourhoods, much of the focus has so far been on mitigation – reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. But with the impacts of climate change increasingly tangible, how can we adapt our buildings and infrastructure – as well as our culture and lifestyles – to make sure they're resilient?

Jen and Matt speak to Chris Carus, co-founder and Executive Officer of Loco Home Retrofit CIC, and Becky McLean, Director of Sustainability at Team Civic. As Chris and Becky explain, adaptation needn't be complicated or expensive – and it can have a huge range of knock-on benefits, too.

Links:

Team Civic: https://www.team-civic.com/

Loco Home Retrofit CIC: https://locohome.coop/

Loco Home CIC YouTube video – CASE STUDY Climate Breakdown in Glasgow – Nithsdale Road: https://youtu.be/ovWMJMc0Tp4 

Loco Home CIC YouTube video – Warmer, Wetter, Wilder: Adapting our Homes and Neighbourhoods to the Impacts of Climate Change: https://youtu.be/FXwsKbpVkH4

The Kelpies: https://www.scottishcanals.co.uk/visit/canals/visit-the-forth-clyde-canal/attractions/the-helix-including-the-kelpies

Past Local Zero episodes on related themes:

Episode 24: Retrofit for the future: Jobs, skills and training for zero-carbon homes

Episode 69: Whole person, whole place – social relations and energy retrofit

Episode 107: Climate change adaptation – a primer

Transcript:

Becky: I want a society that's fair, that's green, that people can thrive in. And if we focus on that knowing and all that we know about retrofitting design, I think we can decarbonise at the same time.

Jen: Hello and welcome to Local Zero. I'm Jen Roberts. 

Matt: And I'm Matt Hannon. And in this episode we are going to be talking about climate change adaptation for climate resilient communities. 

Jen: And we'll be exploring this topic with our guests, Chris Carus and Becky McLean. Chris is a co-founder and executive officer at Loco Home Retrofit, Glasgow's Retrofit Cooperative.

And Becky is Director of Sustainability at Civic, a company that designs and delivers structural and urban infrastructure projects that aim to have a positive impact on the environment and place. 

Matt: But before we dive into that, just a reminder that LinkedIn is the place to follow Local Zero. That's also where you can share all your feedback, questions and suggestions – we always love to hear from you. Just search for Local Zero podcast.

Jen: And wherever you listen, remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Matt: Hot in the heels of our, uh, water episode and climate adaptation episodes, I think all roads here are leading to what communities can do about climate change, outwith mitigation. The big question here is adaptation, and this is an episode and I guess a theme which is close to your heart and one that you really wanted to record.

So why don't you tell me and our listeners a little bit more about why this episode matters so much? 

Jen: Yeah, so I've been really keen to put a bit of a spotlight on what does climate adaptation look like in our local environment. I mean, I hope we'll do a future episode on rural or more distributed environments…

Matt: Yeah. 

Jen: But today is really about our urban environment. But really it's like, what does adaptation look and feel like? Because it's a concept – you know, a couple of episodes ago we had the kind of 101 on what is climate change adaptation, that was episode 107 with Emma Yule, and that was really nice introduction to the, the broader context of climate adaptation, where it sits with mitigation.

But I have a feeling, a sneaky feeling that our listeners will be much more comfortable about thinking about what are mitigation measures, um, and what they look and feel like and cost as well, but maybe not the adaptation measures. What do you think?

Matt:  Yeah. It's a really interesting one 'cause I, I guess I bring a lot of this back to my kids and ask, you know, getting them to draw things. So if I was to say, “Right kids, we've got 20 minutes. Off your pads. Over here. Right, grab a Crayola: what does a kind of low carbon or a climate change friendly house or landscape look like?” And they'd, they'd be drawing things like wind turbines uh, maybe an EV as well. You might get a solar panel in there, too.

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see any adaptation measures. And, and it does kind of speak, I think, to just the general discourse around this, that to be fit to tackle climate change, we've got to be doing both. We’ve, we've spoken about this at length. But, um, not just my, you know, 8-year-old kids, but I think most of our listeners would probably struggle to draw a before and after in terms of an urban landscape – let's just take that, or a peri-urban – and how that landscape, how our landscape, our local area, our backyard is gonna look different. So what do you think are gonna be some of the big changes? 

Jen: Well, actually, rather than answer that question, I'm gonna do a total political thing and talk about something related. 

Matt: “My honourable friend”. Yeah. 

Jen: But it was prompted or primed by your reflection there about asking, asking your kids to, to draw things. And, um, I mean, I also kind of asked that as a, as a little challenge to our listeners to, to think of what, what can they list, you know, count off these adaptation measures.

But I'm also thinking within the, the context in which I teach, and I teach, you know, within Civil and Environmental Engineering students, and that might be our Engineering and, undergraduates, also our Sustainability, Environmental Studies MSc students. And actually a lot of what engineers do currently is a lot of these adaptation measures that we're gonna see more in the future.

Not, not all of them, but I think our engineers are very used to, for example, managing and, and mitigating flooding and managing water in the environment, and designing out carbon. This is something that is really, really prominent in the, the, the things that we teach. And actually some of this isn't new. And I guess that's where I was leading to there, is that some of these adaptation measures that, that people might be struggling to think of, they're not new, they're not necessarily – there's certainly a role for innovation, but some of them aren't new.

They're just either doing things a bit different to how we currently do things, or – we’ve sort of touched on this before as well, Matt – kind of bringing things in from other climates and learning, like implementing things from elsewhere about what we might do in our local environment that's different because our climate is changing.

Matt: I'm, I'm getting strong, kind of my Business School teaching, you know, vibes through here, 'cause whenever I do classes on innovation and novelty, and you have to remember that a lot, a lot of these innovations are simply just transporting good ideas from different contexts into, whether it's different countries or different sectors.

Just before the, the recording, Jen, you know, you were saying a lot of this is just us taking solutions that, you know, maybe, for example, how we design our homes, taking those from say southern and central Europe and saying, right, what does that look like in Britain? You know, it's this sort of same idea, but then you've got to fit it to kind of like a, you know, a Victorian semi-detached home or 1890s terrace in West Yorkshire. So, yeah how you do that is, is, is – there's novelty and innovation in that.

Jen: For sure. And we'll hear a bit about that from our guests today I’m sure, particularly Chris. Um, but yeah, I mean actually, so I live in a 1930s build and as I say, everything about the flat that I live in is designed to, uh, heat up in certain places and stay cool in other areas. So we've got a lot of glass in my flats, a lot of, um… What's it called?

Matt: Solar gain. 

Jen: Thank you. Solar gain. A lot of solar gain. Um, but so the kitchen area is shaded by the veranda, so it means that never gets too hot in the area in which you'll be, you'll be cooking and, and so there's very sensible designs of the past that you definitely don't see in later housing.

And I am really interested to hear whether or not new housing and new, like, new environments are being designed with, uh, adaptation in, in mind. It's only relatively recently that we've seen design standards and planning get updated to consider climate change mitigation. But what's it gonna be in terms of adaptation? I, I just don't know. So I'm looking forward to learning. 

Matt: Yeah. And I guess I'm coming into this conversation maybe with the preconception that a lot of these solutions are pretty, I want to say kind of pretty basic technology. Like a lot of this is, it's not like sort of direct air capture, you know, of carbon or something or, or CCS.

We're not trying to do something that's really quite radical. It might simply be painting your house white or planting some trees. Or you know, I think we, we've talked also about, you know, these, um, what do you call, rain, rain gardens in the cities. And this is, you know, it’s, it's not going to require huge amounts of R and D.

You know, you're not looking to go to Silicon Valley to kind of plow billions of pounds into the next big idea. This is, this is stuff we can do. The question is how do we do it?

Jen: How do we do it, and who pays for it, I think as well. So it might be as simple as, so again, I, the last couple of episodes would been reflecting quite a lot on their practices in Australia, right?

And we, we talked in, in our last episode about managing water and water scarcity around the kind of cultural, behavioural practices, as well. Um, and in this case, it might be as simple as before you leave the flat in the morning to go to work, if that's what you do, then you close the curtains, you close the blinds to keep the sunlight out.

Um, and you know, the kind of, we might be used to or that the idea of having shutters and just, you know, just closing things off in the day and opening things up in the evening once it cools down. And that's just not part of kind of British activity in the home, at least not around the, the, the day-to-day.

Matt: Yeah. 

Jen: So some of this is also, there's definitely material considerations, but there, I suspect there'll be behavioural considerations as well here around expectations, around practices, but also around responsibilities. Who is responsible for some of these changes and who pays for them and, and I suspect might come up today as well, who maintains that infrastructure that's put in place? 

Matt: Mm. I mean it's in interesting, different behavioural practices. I, I'm grew up in the northwest of England, but you know, ended up living for a few years down in London and obviously got not just a, a warmer climate, but you've also got the heat island effect there.

And summers there are brutal. Um, and I think one of the first things we bought in our flat, there was a fan. I had friends around me who were also buying air conditioning units, but there was a whole practice, there was the point of keep your windows shut, because it's actually warmer outside than inside. Draw your blinds. At night, put the fan on, but you also need to basically soak your sheets. 

Jen: Yeah. 

Matt: And you know, again, these are practices I'm sure, being brought in elsewhere. I had to reenact some of this stuff when I was in Southern France last year. I had to remember how to do it.

Jen: Yeah! Tap into that memory.

Matt: Uh, I have to say Glasgow hasn't been an issue so far. Uh, maybe in the future, hopefully not. 

Jen: I guess that's also, um, I mean some, some people will be very familiar with this, I think some of our listeners might not be, is also we've often speak about kind of heat as a commodity, but also particularly in those urban environments you're speaking about Matt, like, um, central London and so on, we're also seeing the kind of emergence of coolth.

I don’t know how you feel about that word – it's very difficult to say. Um, but the kind of, the value of staying cool and different mechanisms and, and also my, my sort of geoscience background on the use of the subsurface in supporting and enabling cooling systems, not just heating systems.

Matt: Yeah. 

Jen: And that, when we think of ourselves as a relatively cold, wet country, this is just a real departure from our reputation, towards a hot, sticky, like country that's needing shutters and to be cooled down and wet sheets and everything that you're just describing there.

Matt: Yeah, and maybe if I can just add one more thing in, maybe before we, we bring our, our experts in, is I'm fascinated by interventions that can do both mitigation and adaptation. Um…

Jen: Yeah.

Matt: Or, or mentioned, you know, insulation is a good example where it can keep you cooler in the summer, but warmer in the winter, and also potentially save you valuable, not just pounds, but carbon emissions from cooling or heating. I think the other obvious one is trees – you know, you can sequester, sequester carbon at the same time as potentially cooling your gardens or your, your streets and roads.

Jen: Yeah.

Matt: And that feels like a major win-win. But – your point, going back to who pays and who benefits. Who pays isn't necessarily who benefits. Right? And vice versa.

Jen: Yeah.

Matt: So for these measures, what is the imperative, economically speaking, today and tomorrow, and how do we get these measures down, you know?

Jen: Yeah. And that’s where, coming back to trees is really interesting, or managing the kind of bio environment around us. Um, it is also really interesting because there's, you know, whatever adaptation measures you might take, whether it's about fitting a blind or, you know, you talked about putting in a water butt in, in your garden.

Those are adaptation measures – that's like investment now. And a particular, um, onus on, on the homeowner, I suppose. Um, when you're talking about the trees or gardenscapes or landscapes, you need to think ahead. If I wanna be having shade from a, let’s say a nice birch tree, into the future, then you need to plant that now so that when the, the worst of climate warming is taking place then that shade is there. It's really thinking about the different timeframes of action. And some of these require action now to really bring the full benefits for the future. 

Matt: I mean, how you can then place yourself in a future in 20 years' time and think, what do we need then?

Jen: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt: Which is really hard. But yeah, in terms of planting, you know, I mean, I, I took the opportunity a few years ago to plant some apple trees, basically – not, not many, sort of four or five just to one side of the, the garden. And you know, there's this kind of old adage that comes with these: you're not really planting it for this generation, you're planting it for the next.

Jen: Yeah.

Matt: You know, and, and that, that mentality, that's an old-school mentality, right? But not, not only will they bear fruit, I hope, one day.

Jen: Yeah.

Matt: But they offer shade. And I think that that same mentality of, I'm doing this for the future, it might not necessarily be for me, but it will be of benefit possibly to somebody I care about if – certainly if it's a farm, you know, and it's a family business – but there's also that, I don't know, bestowing a kind of benefit to a future generation, whoever they may be. And that's even more complicated. That's a lot about kind of cultural value and tradition, I think. 

Jen: I would love to dig into that in a future episode. So today's, I've kept it quite, um, urban focused. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Jen: We'll explore public realm, which, and the interaction with, um, people, place and, and adaptation. But I think I'd love to explore this in the future as well because those – think, thinking in, in multiple generations, that's something that land managers are very well practiced in. And also those land managers will be already taking action.

Matt: Yeah.

Jen: And will already have been implementing change for a number of years now. So I think there's definitely stories that we, we'd like to hear here on Local Zero, um, and that we'll try and do a deep dive in a future episode. But today, shall we…

Matt: Bring ‘em in.

Jen: Crack on.

Matt: I think bring the experts. Yes, definitely. 

Jen: Yeah, let’s bring in the guests. 

Becky: My name's Becky McLean. I am the Director of Sustainability for Team Civic and have been working in environmental and sustainability consultancy for over 20 years.

Chris: I'm Chris Carus, CEO and a founder of Local Home Retrofit.

Jen: It's great to have you both along today. Thank you so much for coming along to talk about climate adaptation in the local environment. So before we maybe crack into some of the nitty gritty, how about you just tell us a bit about climate adaptation in the sort of work that you or Civics do, and what shape that this might take in terms of public realms or building streets, parks and so on. Becky?

Becky: Sometimes I feel like the stuff I'm saying isn't very like rocket science-y about this, but it's, it's really about if you were walking down a climate adapted street, and it had been amended to make that town or city more resilient, you would see more greenery and you would see less space for cars and more space for people, and all modes of types of transport.

It really is as simple as that. So the key challenges that we are facing when it comes to climate change, particularly in our built environment, and I would just like to to put that point in, right? We call it the “built environment”. And we know that cities are where the majority of people live and are going to live over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

But when you walk around our cities, there's a real severe lack of environment. And we all know the environment regulates all the things that we need as humans, right? So clean air, clean water, regulates temperature, and we've developed and, and urbanised our areas, and we’ve kind of left it behind. So if you were walking down that climate adapted street, you would probably see greenery.

You would see kind of places – for a normal person, it would probably just look like green brushes and shrubs and trees and places where it feels a bit nicer and you get a bit of shade. But actually underneath all of that, from an engineering perspective, it will be able to hold a lot more water. It will be able to try and deal with that kind of deluge that we get with, um, massive rain events, et cetera.

And it'll also be trying to ensure that if we've got two huge buildings side by side, things like the air pollution, you would pick specific species, 'cause some actually make air pollution worse; some make it better. So for a normal person walking down, it'll just feel nicer.

And Paris is a perfect example of how they've done this recently. But actually underneath all of that, there's some clever engineering to make that street perform better when we're dealing with the challenges of climate change.

Matt: And so I guess if we take a, a walk down this, you know, this virtual climate adapted road, and we, we find our home on there. Chris, what does the sort of climate adapted home look and feel like? 

Chris: I'll just briefly introduce Loco Home first. We, we're a small sort of growing community-led enterprise seeking to accelerate the energy transition in our homes in and around Glasgow, and we are cooperative of households, so we prioritise community wealth-building approaches.

We provide this independent expert advice service, which is based on taking a holistic view of the home, and that started out being climate driven, but led from the household's needs, whether they're trying to address a comfort problem in winter or bills. Or they're trying to make the most of some, some renovations that, uh, they have planned.

So we're climate driven and in our origin, but led by the household's needs, and adaptation had started to creep into our service. We're starting to see that people were starting to ask us questions about wetter weather, about stormier weather or about warmer and longer heat waves in summer. So last year we were able to get some funding from the Scottish Government's Climate Engagement Fund to develop some resources around, you know, to, to add to our service and add to our sort of, uh, funded community engagement events.

To your question about what you might see walking past a climate ready home – the main things, like I said, to watch out for are about stormier weather, wetter weather and, and longer and warmer spells in summer. And, in Glasgow, winter rainfall is now 40% higher than it was in the 1960s. So much, much more rain. So drainage – surface drainage is, is, is a key issue.

So you would looking to make sure that the surface around a house is porous, it's permeable. So it's ideally, you know, green, uh, or at least gravel. It's sloping away from the home and it's, it's significantly lower than the, the damp-proof course in the home. 

So over time, the ground level around a home tends to creep up, as vegetation grows and dies, grows and dies, and we need to make sure that we're taking it back down to a level, that, where that's not gonna start affecting the building. So that started to creep into our service because we were having people come to us complaining about rising damp in their walls.

Or we would say, “Look, before you insulate that wall, because that ground level is quite high, there's an increased risk that when you add insulation, you're gonna have a bigger damp problem in that wall, because insulation makes walls colder when you add the insulation on the inside”. So there's a kind of a natural progression from thinking about how we insulate our homes to how we also make them resilient to wilder, wetter, and, and warmer weather. 

Jen: I feel like you've taken us to some of those changes on the outside of the home. Maybe as I, as I go up the path that leads me, I can see, okay, that a climate adapted home, you, as you described, I've got this sort of sloping away and so on, permeable.What about if I enter into that home, what sort of things might we see? Or, or is there anything different here and how does that interact with, um, the kind of retrofit activities? 

Chris: There's a tendency in especially newer buildings to put lots of glazing. So, an excessive amount of glazing. So the risk of overheating in summer isn't so much driven by outdoor temperatures – it’s driven by thermal gain from sunshine coming through the windows. So that's a problem we have today and it's obviously gonna be exacerbated by higher temperature outside. Less often will we be able to open a window to let in cooler air, 'cause the air isn't cool outside anymore. So glazing is a big problem.

So people tending to put up extensions with huge, south-facing patio windows or uh, you know, sort of full length windows. And that's, that's a problem and a particular problem in flats. So we tend, we tended to get people come to our service with the flats of too much glazing. It's the wrong kind of glazing.

We should ideally be putting glazing that’s, limits the amount of thermal gain, the amount of sunlight, sun, sun, sun-driven heat that can come in through the window. And so we want to, if, if we've, in the situation where we've got too much glazing and the window, the property's overheating, we need to make sure the windows can open enough, which is often a problem, and that ideally shade the windows from outside, either with shading above, for south-facing or externally for east and west-facing. And that even just planting a tree can help. 

Becky: Do you think, Chris, 'cause this is some something that always strikes me, that I used to go to Greece on my holidays in the eighties, 'cause my mum had been a chambermaid, uh, during her university summer holidays. So she knew how to find her way around Greece before there was, um, the internet, which makes me sound very old, but like when you'd get to Greece, right?

The houses are painted white, but they all had shutters. They all have shutters and actually you know, nobody opened their shutters until about four in the afternoon, really, to purposely keep the house cool inside. And then I presume in the wintertime, they almost had the reverse benefit of keeping the house warm as well.

And do you think there's some of those, kind of almost historic technologies that we used? I mean, growing up in Dundee, we lived in a Victorian house and it had inbuilt shutters, so you know, they got shut at like three o'clock in the afternoon in the wintertime to keep the heat in, and worked amazingly well and it, it was just wooden shutters really.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the technology does not need to be expensive and it can be passive rather than active. So just things rather than technology. And so yeah, shutters on the outside of the windows are best 'cause they stop the sunlight hitting the window. As soon as it hits the window that heats inside, basically. But, um, yeah, those traditional shutters that you get on pre-1919 houses are, are, are very good for keeping the sun out as well as the, the heat in in winter. 

Matt: I kind of have a question more broadly to the both of you. So when, when we look at our homes and trying to make these climate ready, my head is sort of firmly mitigation. But one of the big problems, and I'm gonna come to the built environment in a moment as well, Becky, that, the big problems with our, with our homes and the built environment, is many of these are, are very old, right? You know, we have some of the oldest, uh, building stock and, and some of the most historic streets, uh, you know, in, in the world.

Which is fantastic if you, uh, you know, like your Victorian architecture or like going along the, you know, the, rambles in York and um, you know, soaking that up. It’s a real pain in the bottom if you are trying to make our built environment, our urban environment and our homes climate ready. And I think there's, this kind of speaks to two different types of solutions you can, you can impose.

And caveat or spoiler, we're gonna need both. But one is things we can do around the edges that which are effective but can kind of slot in quite quickly into our homes or our built environment. The other is actually a fundamental kind of rebuild, and that's a lot more expensive and a lot more painful. So maybe if I come to you, Becky, just initially. How much can we do without digging up and starting again, you know?

Becky: Part of the difference working for a company like Civic, right, is they see that all of this is a system. Everything is absolutely connected, right? And I think we are obsessed with technology and shiny new things, right? We are where we are, and this is what we've got. So we have to work with it. And actually it's doing small bits, like, constantly, to keep moving the dial, rather than trying to eat the elephant in one big bite. So if you are in some of the most historic streets in Edinburgh or Dundee or whatever these places are, there are small things you can do.

And some of them are really, really simple, right? So: curtains. And under floor insulation and heating, if you are looking at it as a street, and I always use this analogy, but I used to live in a tenement, and the girl at the top of the tenement text us all one day to say, I'm having to use the umbrella to go to the toilet because the roof is leaking.

Now, I was on the first floor, so I wasn't having to use the umbrella to go to the toilet. However, if we didn't all pay our money together to get the roof fixed, eventually our whole flat, block of tenements would've got damp and dry rot and, and bad things would've happened.

I think we've got very much into an “I'm all right, jock” kind of approach to life. So developers own a certain plot of land, residents buy a certain house, and if they're not flooded, they're all right. But actually we need to be looking this in a, uh, either a city or probably much smaller – so it may be a street scale, a couple of streets, a neighbourhood. And if we know that, like Chris said, there's 40% more rainfall in this certain community than there was previously, what can everybody do to take 2%?

Because two percent's nothing, right? Rather than leaving the people that might be at the bottom of the hill to deal with the 40. So I think this calls for collective but quite achievable actions. Where if we know that our sewage treatment system was built for far less volumes of water than it's got currently, let alone when we add climate change on, then what can everybody do to redirect the rain that falls onto their kind of areas around them or on the roof?

Can we use green, blue roofs? Can we use rain gardens? Can we redirect that water into green spaces so that it's not having to go in the sewage? But it, it requires everybody to be at the table to really make a difference. But it's not, it's not rocket science. 

Matt: I think that's a powerful, that's a powerful point. These can be simple solutions, but collectively, uh, and, and maybe in a more coordinated fashion that they can have a big impact. Chris, if I may come, come to Chris just briefly – in the home, how much can we do here? I mean, I'm sitting in a 1920s, 1930s, semi-detached. Chris, you know, 'cause you did the energy performance certificate for it.

Chris: Yeah. 

Matt: Very well, I might add. Um, but so you know exactly what I'm dealing with. How, how much can I do without really starting to think actually is, is this gonna be climate fit? 

Chris: Yeah. So the primary defence against, um, climate impact on the home is, is maintenance. So making sure our, our building is functioning the way it should. So that means, you know, are gutters fitted correctly, are downpipes, are the drains blocked? Um, if you, you are on a slope, so if rainfall is flowing down the slope towards your building, is there some kind of french drain or something that's gonna direct water away from your house before it gets there? So just the basic function of the existing things is, is the number one thing.

'Cause in, in Glasgow right now, the problem is, is rain in winter, that's where we're getting damage, and storms. We have, um, on our YouTube channel, some videos – this was actually two years ago, climate engagement, uh, project, looking at flooding in a street in Nithsdale Road. And we'll soon be releasing a follow up where we asked Scottish Water and the council to respond to, well, what are we, what are we doing systemically about these things?

But in, starting from the home, it's about, it's about maintenance. And then another part of that film from two years ago was that, there was a top floor flat, like Becky was saying, where the water was flooding in through the ceiling and dropping in through the, the ceiling rose. And the issue there was, it wasn't maintenance.

Everything was as it was functioning as it should. But because the rainfall's so much more intense, we needed the, um, the gutter, there was a parapet. So the gutter was behind the parapet, above the ceiling, and it was, it was built for the rainfall of 120, 150 years ago, and it simply couldn't carry the capacity.

So they needed to expand their gutters and install fatter downpipes. So those are things that are doable. But it starts with having a plan to know where to direct your attentions, and that's why we, in our whole home plan, the first thing we do is we spend quite a long time looking at maintenance, ground surface, drainage.

People get a bit frustrated. They say, why am I paying for this? I wanna talk about energy and bills and comfort. They say, well okay, this is important because if you go and retrofit a building and then it gets flooded. Yeah, well you've wasted some money.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: We don't want wet insulation. So, um, there are simple things that people can start with so long as you have a bit of guidance on, on, on where to start. But what I'm really interested is when you start building it out from the home and thinking about, okay, well look at the street. It'd be much more cost efficient if we could start helping the whole street to make appropriate, um, interventions on their home. Um, but then there's spaces between the homes.

These provide, um, potential for a surface, drainage, trees. And then you start to think, well actually there's a community benefit story. If we could bring in some external finance, how do we get that whole street involved? And then we can say, well, there's this story about place making, it’s about thriving places.

If we can say that okay, we want you on board with the retrofit plan. We're gonna give you some help and assistance to get your heat pump and so on, get you off fossil fuels. And here's the benefit story. It's gonna be about a drainage zone, which is actually a park. You know, there's a ways to join these things up.

Becky: There's a great example actually, where the Glasgow Metropolitan District something something something – projects I worked on in my previous job. They actually redirected all the rainwater from the roofs and the, the roads in some quite challenging areas in Glasgow in terms of, you know, people having economic power, and they redirected it onto parks. Because the other thing we know is that there's a huge biodiversity crisis at the same time.

So we talk a lot about net zero, but actually we are in the same position with biodiversity, if not worse. So you can use all this water that would've caused flooding and caused a lot of harm to potentially people in buildings to create these lovely biodiversity-rich areas and also support local wildlife.

And that, the park I'm thinking of, now has the greatest population of waterfalls in Europe, right? So like, there's really, I want to say quick wins. This is all, has to be engineered and designed and agreed and consented and everything else, but a lot of this is quite simple if you get a kind of collection of the willing round the table.

Jen: Tell me about that. So I'm really, I mean, I've been scribbling questions down, um, as you've been speaking, but I think, I mean, longtime listeners of the pod will be very used to us thinking about, or, or talking, or guests talking about the importance of kind of connecting up and the, and this kind of the bigger picture.

So there's the, there's the individualistic, but then there's the broader context in which this sits. And quite recently we've heard this also from a kind of biodiversity net gain perspective, thinking about these patchwork of habitats and, um, habitat strips – what they called? Habitat tunnels and, and things like that.

So tell me a little bit about you, you know, whose responsibilities does this lie, when you're talking about this kind of connecting up? Like Becky, you just gave an example of the coalition of the willing, and I'm sure Chris, you can also speak from this. Let's talk about street level action. I mean, can you give us examples of that? And what's needed to be able to get all the relevant people talking in the room?

And I guess I'm thinking that I live in a tenement. I'm also thinking about operating decision making within a close. For people outside of Scotland or, or Glasgow in particular, a close as a kind of a shared hallway, entranceway, to a series of flats in these tenement buildings. So can you give me some, some stories of these kind of connected up parties for decision making for climate adaptation and wider benefits?

Becky: I think the kind of project I mentioned there was, I suppose, led by Glasgow City Council and I think just like I would've called it a closey, but that's because I, I'm from the east coast of Scotland. But just like if you want a closey to operate in the way that it should, you need all of the parties to really be involved, or at least 70 or 80%.

Right? You need a kind of a majority number so that everybody's putting money in or is willing to take their turn to clean it or you know, whatever, whatever the thing is. And it's no different when we come to talk to this, so there's quite a few pilots that are going on around Scotland just now. A lot of them, it tends to be best if they're led by somebody like the local authority, because they have that much wider, either regional, like the, the kind of the wider regional metropolitan ones are.

They kinda had contact in with a lot of people. But you need the utilities there. You need Nature Scot, you need SEPA, you need Scottish Water and, and you do need to get everybody to agree on what that vision is going to be. And I think the really key part, and where you see projects – like the Kelpies, I think is a great example in Scotland. The whole reason the Kelpies are there is because Scottish canals had to clean up the canals. And fix them.

Matt: Uh, and I'm sorry, Becky, we should say for our listeners, I know the Kelpies but for our listeners who haven't had the opportunity to visit them, um, if you just paint a little picture please. 

Becky: So the Kelpies are these two beautiful metal sculptures that you can see as you're driving, uh, I think it's past Falkirk, isn't it? If you're on the M9. But they are a beautiful kind of figurehead for a country park and the end of a canal with little kinda cafes, but a huge play area for kids, and a really safe space for them to learn how to cycle. So a real, like, visitor attraction. But the reason the Kelpies are there is 'cause scotch canals had to fix and, and clean up the canals and nobody was interested.

Right? So they were kind of like, "How do we do this?” But they actually went and they, they spoke to the community in Falkirk, really, like, engaged with them and said, “What is it that you would like here?” And they said, well, you know, Edinburgh and Glasgow are kinda key places for tourism, as well as Stirling, but like we want a kind of figurehead destination where people will come to visit our area and that will generate economic spend in our area, et cetera.

And the whole design and the concept, I think, came from consultation with people, and the local children. And the lovely story I heard was now if you go and ask the school kids, they're like, "Well, that's our project". So the money that's been generated from it have meant they're able to clean up the canals.

So they've achieved the objective they had right at the start. But in doing so, they've created a beautiful space that attracts in people from the local area. So I think as well, we can get so focused on carbon, can't we? Like counting carbon and decarb… And I think we always need to like put it to the side. I want a society that's fair, that's green, that people can thrive in. And if we focus on that, knowing all that we know about retrofit and design, I think we can decarbonise at the same time. But I don't think it should be our main… You know, when you're talking to normal people. 

Matt: I think that's really interesting example of the civic realm. Okay? But Chris, you're often operating behind somebody's front door. Okay? Initially, so that's, that's either owner-occupied, it could be private sector rented. I don’t know whether you do work with social housing, but obviously there's a different landlord there. And we're not talking ordinarily, although tenements and mansion houses, these are a really interesting place because there are shared spaces.

So I am cognisant of that, but often we're, we're not talking about the civic realm in the broader sense, and the decision making shifts – it’s actually maybe an individual or individuals at this point. So do you recognise what Becky's saying though? Or do we need to take a different tack when we're talking about people's homes?

Chris: Oh, oh, I completely agree with the vision. Like we should be talking about this, this energy transition as a way to build thriving places, more prosperous local communities as a way to build and retain wealth within, within communities, all, all that kinda stuff. And that's absolutely fundamental to what we are about as a co-op, as a community interest company.

But you're right. Where we are now is that it's about individuals. You know, the number of people taking action on their homes is tiny in terms of decarbonisation, which is like a route into thinking about adaptation. So it's very difficult to even get two people in a street talking about this, uh, and taking action at the same time.

Um, never mind the whole street or, or two people in a neighbourhood or anything like that. But I think it's always gonna be an individual issue to a large extent, because it's your own home. Uh, what you do in your own home is your individual choice, or your landlord's perhaps, but we don't have, and perhaps we never will, and perhaps we should never have politicians that are gonna tell us what to do in our homes.

Um, so it's very difficult to see how those scaled projects are going to arise without first some strong municipal leadership and a good wedge of money to sort of grease the wheels and facilitate it. 

Matt: Very brief reflection on that is I wonder whether we would have as much pushback from kind, again, this sort of Trumpian quote, “mainstream media”, but around heat pumps being put into people's homes versus water butts into people's gardens. And I think if we just leave that question hanging, it's a really interesting one.

Jen: You covered that point at the very end there, Chris, around the money, you talked about it being an individual's choice and actually some people don't have that choice because they don't have that immunity to make that investment, I suppose. But I also wanted to ask here about the role of the factor. And I'm not gonna name and shame my own factor, but they do absolutely nothing to maintain the, the, the house or the, the tenement building in which I live.

Um, I might report that once again, the, the gutters are blocked and, uh, you know, in three months’ time, and they might come along and empty my specific guttering above my specific roof, but they won't do my next door neighbours either side. And there's a real issue here, and I just feel like the factors have, okay, I'm, I'm, this is a leading question, but my, my feeling is that the factors are actually allowing negligence of my environment and they're not doing their duty as well in supporting, um, my street as a whole.

Um, and I just see when you've got these, you know, individual decision makers in, in, in streets, and I just see you talked about strong municipal leadership, like what other sorts of leadership can you see or envisage that can bring together this street level or neighbourhood level uh, action.

Chris: Yeah. On this topic of tenements, and for people outside Scotland, tenement means means flats, basically. A house split into two flats, one above the other is a tenement. 

Matt: And Chris might be worth explaining factor as well. 

Chris: Oh, and factor means it's, it's like a slightly outdated term really in the law is called a, a property manager or a property agent. So it, commonly in, in Glasgow, certainly, but less so in other cities like Edinburgh, the owners of the flats in the building. Uh, another thing to know about Scotland is that it's all freeholds. We don't have leaseholds in Scotland, but interestingly England is looking at this, which I think is a really interesting opportunity for England to look at what Scotland has learnt and where it's made some missteps, and hopefully avoid those missteps.

We've got maybe eight freeholders in a block of flats, and they may choose to appoint an agent, a property manager, who is simply an agent of their wishes, someone who will do what they collectively agree needs to be done. So this is where we hit the shortcomings of the legislation, is, in that there is a code of conduct for factors, some sort of duty of care.

I'm not, I couldn't tell you the details of it, but what's missing is some enabling legislation that puts some obligation on all of the owners to, to deal with repairs proactively. So there are proposals for three main changes around owners’ associations, about sinking funds, like reserve funds and periodic condition surveys, which will be more robust and, um, more in the interests of the building than, for example, conveyancing home reports, which are more in the interests of the seller.

Matt: And, and, and maybe if, if we abstract Becky, you know, maybe above that, and we're looking more at the street or the community.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: I mean, some, some of the, the, the examples you, you gave before, Becky, about these sort of relatively simple measures that are taken collectively could be very powerful. What ingredients need to be in the mix here to make this, you know, happen?

Becky: It's, it's like any successful community initiative. It's led by passionate people who have got the time to do it. Um, but there's an education piece here I think as well, that we're not taught in schools kind of what what society's going to expect of you as a homeowner, or what your obligations would be as part of a flat, or also in terms of being able to interpret legislation and policy and, and be or, or even a contract to say to the factor, “You promised X and you're not delivering".

So, you know, Jen, in your, in your case, like if that's happening, where do you go? Right? There, like, Citizens’ Advice? But we're not, we're not educating, I don't think people about their rights in these cases either, and some people just aren't interested. So I think to be able to get this kind of street movement, it’s going to have to be kind of championed by a person or a couple of people.

But I think this is where making it as simple as possible is gonna mean that you've got far more chance of success. Because I think a lot of the discussions that go on, um, at government level, so in the media level, about how are we gonna adapt to net zero, it feels very here.

And people feel very like, well, well that's lovely, but this is my life here. So even if we could just pick a thing – so going back to Chris's point about like, water's probably gonna be our biggest challenge after energy, but there's, there's maybe not as much that you can individually impact apart from your own house and that requires money, et cetera.

But water is possibly, uh, a kind of quick and easy win. And like we were saying about putting rain butts in, if you were able to calculate that and said, if every house in the street gets a rain butt, that's going to reduce the amount of water flowing into the street by blah.

Yeah. And I think sometimes we end up with these plans and strategies and they're 60 pages long, and I think I'd prefer just like, “This year we're doing water butts” and just doing them really well, “And next year we're tackling curtains and everyone's getting curtains” or whatever it is, and I just, I think we'd get a lot further that way, whereas just now there's so much being discussed. But very little action. 

Matt: We've talked quite a lot about sort of informing people. I think there's also, uh, part of that is informing of, as to the benefits. We've talked also about who has control to do this. What I think the elephant in the room here is sort of, you know, legislation and regulation, which I think is really hard to do with the existing building stock we have. Much in theory, easier to do with the new stuff we're about to build.

Um, but yeah, just maybe just a reflection maybe from Chris initially, just, you know, if we're gonna bring, if we're gonna bring in a big stick, where should that land? And on whom? Because unless there's that incentive, I do worry we're just gonna keep building the same stuff, which is not climate fit, not even for 10 or 20 years’ time. It's not climate fit today.

Chris: I'd first like to just sort of build on what Becky said, because it was really great to hear. So Becky's working on public realm projects, which is mostly working with clients that are, you know, public, you know, public sector, local government, central government. Um, but what she was talking to was about the importance of the grassroots, which is, which is where we are coming from.

And grassroots are important because, you know, like local authorities are really stretched. If you listen to “our fiscal strait jacket” and all that stuff, it's not gonna get better anytime soon. But the problems faced by local authorities are going to get better. So not only are they obliged to deal with all the statutory services, like social care and so on in an aging population and deal with mitigation, but they're also going to be dealing with disaster recovery after climate impacts, and increasing food prices.

Um, food poverty, increased discussion around accepting climate refugees and so on. So there's pressures on the public sector are gonna get higher and higher and higher. We need to use the civic capacity that's out there, but people are stuck. So you can inform people, like you said. But what we are trying to do as, as a community energy group, is actually turn, uh, motivation and information into, I need an alliteration here – into action.

Uh and that, so that means about ease. How do you make it as easy as possible to take action? And the easiest thing you can do is you join a local climate group, a local community energy group. So even if you can't get a heat pump or an EV or a build a rain garden, you can at least join a group and create some peer support for others that want to take action.

And it's simple things that build up. And I think that's the big gap between where we are now and the massive projects that government is trying to get off the ground is like some, we need somewhere in between. Yes so to, so back to your question, Matt. Um, I think really regulation should at least stop the problems getting bigger.

So we now have regulation, um, in north and south of the border that says that you can't build a new house with polluting heating. You can't have a gas boiler in a new home. So we've stopped making the emissions problem bigger. The newbuild standards are still quite poor. 

Matt: But is is, is that, is that, is adaptation in that, Chris? I mean, like the Future Home Standard for example, you know, is, is that – is adaptation in some of the heart of that, that new regulation?

Chris: Yes. In part of the building regulations and standards, there is now an overheating standard, and I think there are also requirements around drainage in housing or all construction developments. Newbuild isn't my thing, obviously. 

Matt: No, no, I understood, yeah.

Chris: We've got to the point where we're stopping making the issue bigger. 

Becky: I think the challenge we've got, right, so my view on this is that we need something pretty quickly, because houses that are being built now got consent in 2013 or earlier. 

Matt: Wow.

Becky: Now, when they were designed, back then, there'll be things that are being built now that, like you said, Matt, they aren't fit for what we know is coming over the hill at us. But that's a very difficult problem to have because developers have their planning consent. So who's, who's gonna be able to go in and enforce it? But I, I just think we need to have a kind of uh, uh, an adult discussion about this here to be like that “This just isn't going to work”.

So what can we do? And it doesn't have to be massive big ticket items, but what can we do so that we don't end up building housing stock now that's only going to be fit for purpose for the next five, 10 years before quite significant retrofit's gonna have to be done to it, which isn't great for decarbonisation of materials and waste and circularity and everything as well.

Jen: Chris, I feel like when you opened up, you talked to us about how adaptation was coming onto your agenda through the clients that you're working with, and I'd quite like to hear Becky from you about your experience around when did adaptation start coming on the agenda. And I think what was really nice when you walked us down and, and feel free to walk us down some more of that climate adapted street, if, if that helps with your answer.

Um, but when you walked us down that street, you also talked about kind of climate change and mitigation, enabling, uh, uh, decisions. So you talked about having, uh, you know, wider spaces to walk and to wheel. And when I think of a climate adapted street, I think of one which has drop curbs and it doesn't have puddles, so I don't go outside and get my feet wet instantaneously.

Um, so I guess like when did this start coming onto the agenda as a, as an engineer, as as an engineering company? And, and how much of it, of a big thing is it now, like in terms of this kind of, uh, mitigation adaptation or? Uh, community wealth building and like, what's the loudest story here? 

Becky: I think from my perspective, it was something that people started banding about, you know, the way the words start getting banded about probably about four or five years ago, if I'm honest, because there was kind of a climate that, and it was very much linked to the climate emergency. So as much as I feel that we've maybe chased carbon a bit too hard and forgotten about the other bits and bobs, it has allowed this conversation to take place. And I think we have to recognise that it's allowed people to kind of focus on something.

I think from a like, if you're, if you were walking down that adaptation, resilient street, this is all linked to people. And this is all about how comfortable people can be in our built environment when climate change is hitting us, right? So as engineers and people working in policy, we're always looking for solutions at what's gonna face us.

And we know that some of the nicest places where people want to be is where there is greenery and it's not too hot, and you've got shade. And your feet don't get wet 'cause you've got a brand new pair of suede shoes on. I think the, the key here is making this very, very human.

And when we're talking about it, rather than talking about how many units of carbon we've reduced or how many materials we've saved, I think if you talk to people about their health – so, you know, in Paris one of the biggest things they've found is the improvements in people's health because air quality was particularly bad in Paris, and it wasn't long ago in COVID that the science was showing that the areas that were worse hit with long COVID or the, the kind of the highest cases of COVID deaths were the ones that had the highest air pollution in the UK.

So where you've got poor environmental conditions, people are also then faced with greater instances when there's illness and uh, and pandemics and things like that. And we know as a society, going back to Chris's point, the public money isn't growing and growing and growing. In fact, we've had to borrow so much to be able to deal with lots of things that I think we've got a bit of a civic duty on us all to help and support a bit.

So Perth and and Kinross Council, they published this thing called The Offer, and they set out to everybody in Perth and and Kinross, everyone that lives there, we want to still be able to deliver all these critical services to you, but we don't have the budgets to do absolutely everything. So how can you help and contribute?

And it gave lots of good instances of community groups and things that people could join along. And sometimes when we look at homes or we look at the built environment, the biggest common denominator in all of this is people. And like, why are we doing it? We're doing it for people, so that people can, can thrive and live and have nice lives here.

So making sure they're at the middle of any decision making I think is really, really important. But showing all of the benefits that comes with it, right? Like it's not just about carbon, it's about biodiversity. And then if we've got good biodiversity, then there's cleaner air, there's cleaner water, people can live better. You know, it's, it's all of, I suppose, that whole system thinking piece.

Jen: Quiet, quieter public spaces, but with lovely quiet noise of children playing rather than big, you know, HGV.

Becky: Yeah. And I think the, the big difference is back in the old days, really rich people would, like, donate a park, but the park tended to be, sometimes it would be in poorer areas, but it might be in the kinda richer places where people could promenade.

This needs to be everywhere. We can't leave people behind. And just now, if you walk through certain parts of Edinburgh, it's very leafy and green and lovely. And if you walk through others, it's not, and I suppose my ask would be, can we focus on those areas where it's not just now and, and put them as a priority? ’Cause those people probably need it the most.

Matt: So Chris, Becky, thank you for that tour de force across a really varied space and, and something I think probably relatively new to lots of our listeners. Um, I'm gonna come to both of you with this and I'll begin with Chris, if that's okay. Is if there's any sort of top tips that you have for our listeners, whether it be about what they do in terms of integrating some of these ideas around climate adaptation in the home or in their community on this climate adapted street, Becky, that we've been walking down?

What might they be? This might be changes they can make or changes they can encourage others to do. It might be where they invest their money or how they vote. Uh, Chris, any top tips that we can give our listeners to take away? 

Chris: Well, I think probably my, my top three would be before you embark on improvements to your home or your garden, get a whole home plan from Loco Home, or there other organisations like us. Have a holistic plan where you think consider the interactions between these different measures.

Second thing is talk to your neighbours. Talking to our neighbours and knowing our neighbours is one of the key sources of resilience. And it's also a great way to learn about what works and spread good, good stories. Um, and the third thing is join, join a community energy group if, if you, or – like Loco Home or another one.

Matt: Brilliant. Thank you Chris. So, Becky. 

Becky: Can I just say ditto? No, I'm only joking, but I think, um, I think what Chris has said is absolutely right. I think try and, try and consider if, if we're talking about the built environment, and much larger master plans, and plans and policies, take the time to connect all the dots. So if you're doing something, what else could you maybe slightly do? So if you are focusing on a particular topic, don't think about it in that siloised area. Maybe try and work out how you could design that street to improve biodiversity, reduce flood risk. You know, make it nicer for people and provide somewhere lovely for the kids to play.

You know, could you do all of those, but you also deliver – a bit like the Kelpies example – you also deliver the outcome that you wanted, but you have all these amazing benefits wrapped around it. I think speaking to people is massively important, like the more you just speak to your friends, your family, your colleagues, whoever it is, the more you learn.

But also the more this becomes like a discussion about what are we going to do about this? And if you can do even just really small things, do them, be proud to them and tell other people about it doesn't have to be really big and fancy. 

Matt: Thank you Becky, and I think what is certain is this isn't the space that can be ignored, so I'm sure we'll have you along both of you again to update us on, on how things have progressed. So thank you for your time. 

Jen: Yes, thank you so much. Really interesting.

Matt: Well, another great episode on climate adaptation in the can, Jen. We're really starting to build this stable of adaptation episodes. A lot to learn, uh, a lot to take away.

Jen: And so recent as well, like hearing from Becky there that she felt like it had just just been the last five years or so – that chimes true with what we were hearing from Emma in previous episodes, as well. So I think this is really interesting, the, the growth of interest in this or the importance of this. But also the intersection with not just mitigation, but also all these other initiatives. I think this is a theme that's running across our, our recent, um, pods in particular. 

Matt: Definitely. That kind of climate adapted street is, as she said, a greener, happier, friendlier place. Uh, so yeah, lots to unpick here and I'm sure, we will in future episodes, but for now, thank you for listening. If you enjoy the podcast and find it useful, please do tell your friends and colleagues. Hit the “share" button and send someone else a link to this episode or another. 

Jen: You heard from the two guests about how important that connecting and sharing is. So yeah, you could do that just there, right there. And if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment directly on the episode. We'd love to know what you think. And if you're on Apple Podcasts, please leave a review. It really helps other people to find the podcast. 

Matt: And if there's something you think we should be exploring on Local Zero but haven't yet, we want to know all about it. Get in touch with us at localzeropod@gmail.com or send us a message on LinkedIn. Just search for Local Zero podcast and do your thing. 

Jen: All right. Otherwise, we'll see you next time. 

Matt: See you then. Bye-bye.