The provision of ‘affordable’ homes is an issue of profound international importance. It is estimated that 1.6 billion people live in substandard housing and that 100 million people are homeless. The problem is particularly acute in relation to the growing urban sector where every week more than a million people are born in, or move to cities in the global South. Approximately 1 billion people (32% of the global urban population), live in urban slums. If no meaningful action is taken, the United Nations reports that the number of slum dwellers worldwide will increase over the next 30 years to nearly 2 billion. Responses to this problem have to be holistic, multi-level, and interdisciplinary and must acknowledge local cultural, economic, legislative, and environmental factors. Sustainable housing should be seen as a comprehensive process accounting for environmental, social, cultural, economic, and institutional considerations (UN-Habitat, 2012a). There is an urgent need to find housing solutions that do not impact adversely on housing affordability and enhance urban livelihoods. Moreover, there is an imperative to find sustainable housing solutions that address the growing carbon footprint of the built environment, and which do not raise more households to levels of carbon emissions that are unsustainable in terms of operational and embodied carbon burdens (as is the current situation with the majority of housing performance in wealthier countries).

Within this context, the purpose of this research is to develop a practically-oriented publication linking the social housing sector of countries with green building interventions which also include instruments for promoting the greening of the social housing sector at the legislative/ policy, institutional, financial and technical levels. The study is implemented in the framework of UN-Habitat and UNEP collaboration on Sustainable Buildings and as a part of the activities of the Global Network for Sustainable Housing (GNSH). The GNSH has been created to contribute to the development of sustainable and affordable housing solutions in developing and transitional countries, with a specific focus on improving the social, cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability of slum upgrading, reconstruction, and large-scale affordable housing, and social housing programs. T his report defines the rationale for green building intervention on social housing, details international examples of legislative and regulatory frameworks for enabling green social housing and identifies global and regional forms and approaches to green social housing. A range of technical measures for new social housing and environmental retrofitting of social housing are explained, along with the assessment of case studies, and best practices.

More….