Extreme events – from Rio to Birmingham

Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods are increasing in frequency and intensity. An online conference in April places a welcome spotlight on responding to extreme events

It’s all too easy to make statements like “the world has reached a tipping point” or to announce that global warming, pollution and the destruction of nature form a triumvirate of doom.

 Perhaps they are unhelpful. Such warnings, which have become amplified in the decades since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, encourage both denial and inaction. We could simply give up, go back to our duvets and sip a sugary drink through a plastic straw. But we’re not going to, right?

A timely online conference Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events, to be held in April, has attracted a buzz and speakers and interest from all over the world.

Organised by the Healthier Housing Partnership and hosted by Birmingham University, the conference will include 32 speakers and case studies from 14 countries. Focused on community-based solutions, it is aimed professionals and civil society organisations and academics worldwide.

The whole planet is affected by extreme events and they are coming to more of us, more often. In wealthy countries, we’re being lashed by storms and hurricanes with increasing frequency. The cities that we live in, or go to on holiday, may be unbearably hot at certain times of year – or in, some cases, subject to cyclones or actually surrounded by burning forests. The messages couldn’t be clearer.

Last year, torrential rain in East Spain brought over a year’s worth of precipitation in eight hours. Floods caused 232 deaths. This year, cities in Southern California were struck by devastating wildfires. 

Community empowerment

Rightly, the Californian fires were well reported. Most people weren’t told, however, by the same news channels, that Chile, in South America, had suffered the country’s worst ever wild fires in 2024 or that Canada’s national conflagrations that year produced the global warming effect of a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions in India.

Preparations and adaptions for extreme events can be relatively low-cost and low-tech. Those are the ones that will endure when the relief has ended and international NGOs have left the scene. They are also the most sympathetic with improving biodiversity and local capacity building.

Nusrat Nasab, CEO of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) Pakistan, will tell the conference that in Pakistan the agency produces village disaster risk management plan, involving talking to elders.

Local solutions are being adopted – for example, using large boulders to reinforce river banks and planting schemes that protect slopes from flash floods causing landslides and soil erosion.

Nusab says: “Empowered communities are more resilient. The west always looks to the government for help. Here, it’s more about the people themselves.” 

This great example and many more, will be showcased at the Building Resilience conference.

Register for Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Exreme Events

For more information contact Will Hatchett. E-mail wahatchett@gmail.com

Pic: The Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants is improving resilience to climate change in Senegal. World Habitat

Birmingham conference leads international fightback

Pic: The Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants is improving living conditions and resilience to climate change in Senegal. World Habitat

An international online conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham, places a welcome spotlight on responding to extreme events that threaten housing and health worldwide. Its focus is on community-based solutions.

Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods are increasing in frequency and intensity. The United Nations estimates that 90 per cent of disasters are related to weather. 

It's the job of academics to record such occurrence, so that we can learn from them. Sadly, they are easy to ignore. For two decades following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 their messages were fogged by denial and obfuscation. Now national exceptionalism is being used as a reason for inaction.

Increasingly, those working in the fields of construction, environmental sciences. international development, planning, public health, and energy, water and transport infrastructure are fighting back. It’s now recognised that strategies must work across multiple fields and that they are only sustainable if they are owned by the people affected most.

An international online conference in April, Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events has attracted speakers and interest from all over the world. Organised by the Healthier Housing Partnership and hosted by Birmingham University, it will include 32 speakers and case studies from 14 countries.

From Rio to Birmingham

The conference usefully re-frames ‘disasters’ as extreme events – predictable phenomena that we can plan for. It will draw lessons from events as diverse as ex-tropical Cyclone Ellie in Australia, the aftermath of an Indonesian earthquake, Spain’s worst flooding for decades and the needs of displaced populations in Nigeria.

Opening the conference will be Prof. David Hannah, UNESCO chair of water science and it will include speakers from Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia and DARAJA, providing early warning service Kenya and Tanzania.

One of the key messages of the conference will be that the extreme events that destroy houses and entire cities and displace millions of people do not fall into discreet categories. They frequently combine or are causally linked.

Melting ice in the world’s highest mountains should cause us as much concern as the shrinking polar ice caps. In Asia, it’s estimated that up to two billion people in eight countries are threatened by increasing glacial melt in the Himalayas. But that’s only part of the problem.

Nusrat Nasab, CEO of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) Pakistan will tell the conference that, in 2022, the combine effects of heavy monsoon rains and glacial runoff following a heat wave, led to Pakistan’s worst ever flooding, killing up 1,739 people. A third of the country was affected. She says: “I call Pakistan the ‘house of hazards. In the mountains, floods wash away everything. In the coastal areas it stays for months.”  

Millions displaced

Dr Jamila Wakawa Zanna will explain that war, civil conflict and climate change often interact, in a deadly nexus. A UK-based academic at the University of Birmingham, she also works for Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA).

Globally it’s estimated that 72 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to extreme events. In Nigeria alone, up to four million people are internally displaced. In the north, it’s caused by conflict driven by religious extremism. In the south, it’s primarily flooding, ethnic clashes and land disputes. 

Government camps are often over-crowded and unsafe. Even those run by international NGOs are often culturally insensitive, especially to the needs of women and the elderly, who are especially represented among internally displaced people.

Zanna comments: “External aid organisations don’t ask us what we need. They give us what they think we need.”  

Eureka moments

In the poorest countries, people and assets are not generally insured. Consequently, the financial costs of an extreme event will be estimated as far lower than those of an equivalent in a wealthy country.

Health impacts and fatalities are hard to measure in countries lacking primary healthcare, epidemiological statistics and death certification. It’s common, in such parts of the world, for bodies buried beneath concrete rubble never to be recovered. Consequently, in the west, victims and consequences in low and middle income countries are often invisible.

We tend to ignore what happens a long way away. it’s all too easy to assign yet another extreme event to a dusty, seldom visited part of the brain – a third of Pakistan underwater, another earthquake somewhere in Asia, a savage, record-breaking cyclone devastating a Pacific paradise. A eureka moment, comes when we acknowledge that Gaia, our living, breathing planet, is out of whack and trying to throw us off, burn or drown us.

Such revelations are coming to more of us, more often. In the global north, we’re being lashed by storms and hurricanes, with anthropomorphic names with increasing frequency. The cities that we live in, or go on holiday to may be unbearably hot at certain times of year – or in some cases, subject to cyclones or surrounded by burning forests. The messages couldn’t be clearer. 

Closer to home

This year, Californian cities were encroached by wildfires that seemed to have been designed by Evangelists concerned by the Biblical ‘end times’, with the help of Hollywood’s finest CGI technicians. 

Rightly, the ‘disaster’ was well reported. Most people weren’t told, however, by the same news channels, that Chile, at other end of the continent had suffered the country’s worst ever wild fires in 2024 or that Canada’s national conflagration that year produced the global warming effect of a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions in India.

Closer to the UK, Paloma Taltavull de La Paz, a professor of applied economics at the University of Alicante, will tell the conference that, last year, torrential rain in East Spain brought over a year’s worth of precipitation in eight hours. Floods caused 232 deaths.

Planning and work to protect low-lying land around Turia Riiver in the Valencia region, begun following the deadly floods of 1957, had been abandoned long before the current generation of politicians took control. Flood victims have launched legal actions. They are calling for resignation of regional president Carlos Mazón for failing act promptly on meteorological warnings.

Local is best

Adaptive solutions can be simple, low-cost and low-tech. Those are the ones that will endure when the relief phase has ended and parachuted-in NGOs have left the scene.

They are also the most sympathetic with improving biodiversity and local capacity building. In Pakistan, the world’s most climate affected country, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat produces village disaster risk management plans. They involve talking to elders, who can remember which areas are prone to flooding.

Local solutions are being adopted that are being duplicated across Asia and Africa – for example, using large boulders to reinforce river banks and planting schemes that protect slopes from flash floods causing landslides and soil erosion. In 2020, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat Pakistan and the government of Gilgit-Baltistan in north-east of the country launched a $4.2 million project to plant 50 million trees across the region.

This great example of protecting human settlement from extreme events, and many more, will be showcased and discussed at the Building Resilience conference in April. Nusab says: “Empowered communities are more resilient. The west always looks to the government for help. Here, it’s more about the people themselves.”

Regiser for Building Resilience: Housing, Health and Extreme Events

For more information contact Will Hatchett. E-mail wahatchett@gmail.com

“Climate change is the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced. These threats should unite us no matter from which part of the world we come.”

David Attenborough, speaking to the UN Security Council, 2021

“Professional fragmentation needs to be reduced if we are to better prepare for and respond to extreme events. The Building Resilience conference is a welcome contribution to that process.” 

David Jacobs, Chief Scientist National Center for Healthy Housing

 

Wicked problems of the private rented sector

Improved renters’ rights are coming closer. Landlords predict a shrinking private rented sector. One thing is certain, new legislation gives councils a raft of new duties and responsibilities at a time when they face unprecedented demands.

Royal assent for the Renters' Rights Bill, which was announced in the 2024 King's Speech is moving closer. Now in the House of Lords it could become law by Easter, or the summer. The new law contains a change that has become a talisman for housing campaigners and that the last Conservative government resisted.

So-called no fault or retaliatory evictions, made under Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988, will end on day one of the act coming into effect. Private landlords, in theory, will no longer be able to ‘get rid of’ tenants who have the temerity to complain about poor conditions or rent increases.

The bill, when passed, will extend the Decent Homes Standard from social housing to the private rented sector and prohibit the use of rent increase clauses, requiring landlords to issue a Section 13 notice to increase the rent. Rent increase will be limited to once per year, capped at market levels. Tenants on benefits and those with pets should find it easier to rent.

The new law will create a digital Private Rented Sector database, which, again, campaigners have sought for many years, and a new ombudsman service. Councils will be able to extend property licensing schemes, which impose additional responsibilities on landlords, without approval from the secretary of state – a change that many will welcome as a useful tool for levering up standards over large areas.

Paul Oatt, FCIEH, a local authority private housing regulation expert welcomes the abolition of Section 21 eviction, which has already been implemented in Scotland. He notes: “When a tenant receives a Section 21 eviction their landlord does not have to give a reason. From a human rights perspective, it’s very difficult fort them to go court to defend their tenancy.”

The new law will allow a landlord to evict because they want to sell their property or for a family member to move in – but, in these cases, it will prevent them from re-letting for a year, or face a potential financial penalty. Civil enforcement penalties, available to councils since the Housing and Planning Act of 2016, whose receipts they can recycle into enforcement services, will be increased.

Housing law is a mess

Oatt admits that housing legislation is a mess. To the benefit of lawyers, sections of the Housing Acts of 1985, 1988 and 2004 will still apply when the Renters’ Rights Act comes into force. The act, he notes, will give significant new responsibilities to already over-loaded local authority regulatory services, many of which are facing the simultaneous prospect of merging with their neighbours, to become unitary councils. Local authorities  have been suffering from skills shortages, and difficulties in recruiting good staff for years now. Having to spend large sums of housing budgets on temporary accommodation is bringing some to the verge of bankruptcy.

The Renters’ Rights Act will extend Awaab’s Law responsibilities to act promptly on damp and mould to the private sector – which is laudable, he says, but an enormous responsibility. Just as councils struggle to eliminate hugely costly issues of damp and mould and flammable cladding to their own housing stock, the new law may stimulate solicitors to pursue no-fee class actions to an enormous group of new claimants, private sector tenants.

Commentators fear that landlord tenant disputes resulting from the new legislation will swamp an already overloaded legal system. Oatt sympathises with landlords who, he acknowledges, may now face costly delays. He says: “I think that’s a fair concern. I’ve literally just finished off a tribunal case that’s been dragging on since 2020. Tribunals are in an absolute mess.”

The application of a ‘pass or fail’ test on the presence of mould in privately rented properties, he says, contradicts the risk assessment basis of the housing health and safety rating system. More seriously, a much-needed exercise to update HHSRS has been delayed.

The intention of the new legislation is certainly to reduce injustices for tenants. But lawyers, he notes, are inventive and housing law is like an enormous piece of knitting – pull on one thread and you’re going to make hole somewhere else. Oatt says: “whenever you enact a policy and try to resolve an issue you create other issues – this is the nature of housing legislation because the housing market is so volatile.”

In particular, he fears the return of no fault eviction by the ‘back door’, through landlords’ invoking Section 6B of the Housing Act 1988, allowing them to seek vacant possession of property for which a local authority has served a notice requiring major works.

Lawyers and landlords

Tenants’ campaigners have generally welcomed additional protections offered by the new law. It evolved from the Conservatives’ Renters (Reform) Bill, introduced in 2023 and was considerably strengthened by amendments introduced by housing minister Matthew Pennycook.

The private rented sector has doubled in size since the early 2000s. It now houses almost five million households and is the second largest form of tenure after owner occupation. The sector is dominated by small landlords. According to government figures, 43% of landlords own one rental property, representing 20% of tenancies. Social housing stock has plummeted over the last few decades, while owner occupation, an obsession of both major parties, has never have been a suitable tenure for those who require mobility or whose income is uncertain.

We have ‘worst of both worlds’ housing, which has evolved through market forces. The “buy-to-let boom’ housing, which swelled the private rented sector from the late 1990s, is subject to economic cycles. The current situation places some of the neediest people in society in the hands of amateur landlords, to the detriment of both, and means that millions of families with children are living in housing whose physical condition is often poor and face the sword of Damocles of frequently being required to move.

The Law Society has welcomed the ban of no-fault evictions and an end to rental bidding wars. But it says: “The government must outline how it intends to equip courts with adequate resources to handle rising demand, while dealing with existing backlogs.”

It has also called for expanded grounds for landlords to repossess properties using Section 8 eviction notices, for penalties against rogue landlords to be strengthened and more funding for recruitment and training of council enforcement teams.

The National Residential Landlords Association, the UK's largest landlord association, supports the application of the Decent Homes Standard to the PRS, the extension of Awaab’s Law and measures to tackle discrimination.
But it has warned of the “potentially devastating” consequences of the Renters' Rights Bill on the supply of homes to let and rent levels.

Oatt notes that in the 1960s and ’70s, when Labour passed legislation to protect tenants’ rights, private landlords claimed, erroneously, that increasing security of tenure and controlling rents will lead to a meltdown of the PRS. He doubts that the sector’s size, 19% of UK housing stock, will, in reality, decrease but he concedes that the new law could lead to a churn in ownership, so small landlords are replaced by larger ones.

He observes that there are ‘tame’ and ‘wicked ’problems’. The tame ones (like fixing a broken car engine) have clear -parameter and known solutions, wicked problems (solving climate change) are complex and multifaceted, with no clear solution, involving multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests. Housing problems, he says, are wicked ones.