Habitat For Humanity Advocates For Inclusive, Resilient Housing At COP26

Habitat for Humanity International is calling on delegates at the world's premiere climate change conference to ensure efforts to reduce carbon emissions don't raise the cost of housing while also helping the most vulnerable families adapt their homes to withstand rising seas, extreme temperatures, and increasingly intense weather events. The 26th Conference of the Parties meeting, or COP26, is the latest in a series of UN climate change conferences for countries that have signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. COP26, which opened Sunday and runs through Nov. 11 in Glasgow, Scotland, is the first such conference in which Habitat for Humanity International is an official participant. Earlier this year, Habitat for Humanity established an official organizational position on housing and climate change, recognizing that the building sector has a particular opportunity to reduce its carbon footprint, as it alone accounts directly and indirectly for 38% of global energy-related carbon emissions. Habitat has dozens of projects around the world that involve climate change mitigation and/or adaptation, from building climate-adapted homes in Nepal and the Philippines to helping increase the energy efficiency of Soviet-era apartment buildings in Eastern Europe. Habitat helps neighborhoods in Paraguay assess climactic risks and, in the United States, we are developing a model for charting the embodied energy of several forms of residential construction to help identify cost-effective ways to reduce emissions quickly.