Climate-proofing Social Housing Landscapes (LIFE Housing Landscapes)

The LIFE Housing Landscapes project aims to develop climate change adaption solutions for existing social housing landscapes. It specifically hopes to demonstrate a holistic package of measures, based around the retrofitting of blue and green infrastructure, and increased local stakeholder engagement. Ultimately, it hopes to demonstrate an integrated approach to addressing climate-related and wider socio-economic challenges in vulnerable urban environments.

The project will retrofit green and blue infrastructure covering the whole housing management cycle, such as Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), rain gardens, drought-resilient planting and micro green roofs supported by rainwater harvesting. This will provide effective, affordable and socially acceptable alternatives to heavy engineering approaches and achieve environmental and economic goals, such as reducing freshwater demand.

The project will implement the new measures in three selected sites that will reflect different social housing contexts, such as different property types and estate sizes. However, they will all be in areas characterised by high levels of multiple deprivation, including poor quality environments and consequently higher exposure to climate-related risks.

The project is targeting in-depth community engagement and awareness-raising of climate change adaptation opportunities. This aims to result in local residents’ buy-in to the measures, and their involvement, wherever possible, in long-term maintenance activities. The project thus hopes to develop the local institutional and individual stakeholders’ adaptive capacity and resilience.

An important additional aim is to demonstrate different mechanisms for resourcing the delivery of adaptation measures that can achieve multiple objectives for local communities. This is expected to include combining implementation with employment and accredited training programmes for long-term unemployed people, thereby creating local jobs. The project will deliver transferable training modules for grounds maintenance contractors and social housing staff.