England’s housing target would blow entire climate budget

The target to build 300,000 homes a year would use up England’s entire carbon budget, a new study has warned. Building new homes under a business-as-usual scenario, coupled with current trends on making existing homes more efficient, would use up 104% of the country’s cumulative carbon budget by 2050, the paper says. It adds that radically retrofitting existing houses, cutting the number of second homes, stopping people from buying houses as financial investments and making people live in smaller buildings would be more sustainable ways to address the housing crisis. “In the long run, we argue that England can’t go on building new houses forever,” said lead researcher Dr Sophus zu Ermgassen from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent. The Guardian