A Business Continuity Plan is a plan to ensure your organisation can continue to operate through severe disruptions.

In the first article in this series I summarised the reasons we should take environmental sustainability seriously in our governance, while in the second I provided a short outline of the state of climate governance in Australia. In this article I want to talk about the most widely used framework for doing this work – what is called Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). A quick disclaimer. Like all frameworks adopted from the for-profit sector, ESG can be an awkward

Below the radar there is a steady shift towards company directors and regulatory bodies taking climate change seriously and working on ways to both manage their risks and make the most of the opportunities presented by decarbonisation.

I’ve been slow to populate the governance section of this website. It’s not out of any sense that governance is unimportant. I’ve spent a lot the last twenty years helping organisations with things like strategic planning, policies and procedures and compliance. Ten years ago I even wrote a governance manual for smaller community housing organisations, although sadly it was never kept up-to-date and fell out of use. Nonetheless, when I read documents about governance I of

Sea-level rise is one of the inevitable and inexorable results of climate change. Melting ice and increased ocean temperature mean a...

We’ve all seen the images of bushfires, especially over the past few years. In the Spring and Summer of 2019-20 fires devastated almost...

Following on from my post about cyclones , it makes sense to follow up by talking about floods since the two often go together. I’ve...

Cyclones are generally considered a tropical weather phenomenon. However, as I write this series South-East Queensland, where I live,...

None of us will be able to escape increasing heat, but we can make our tenants’ homes more heat resistant to help them live comfortable...

In the Christian Book of Revelation (Chapter 6) there is a famous scene in which four horses and their riders are released into the world: white, red, black and pale horses. They are interpreted in various ways, most popularly as Plague, War, Famine and Death. Some might consider it overly dramatic to talk about the ‘climate apocalypse’ and I hope they are right. Nonetheless, updating the horsemen might provide a memorable framework for climate adaptation. Of course clima

Last week I spent a bit of time reading Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet by Clive Hamilton and George Wilkenfeld. ...

In my previous post I summarised AHURI’s set of interlinked research on circularity in housing. They found that there is a long way to...

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) recently completed a series of linked research projects on the subject of...

You might see transport and travel as peripheral to the business of a housing and homelessness agency. However, both tenants and staff have to get around somehow, and if they don't need to drive petrol cars to do so this can reduce your footprint significantly. EVs are part of the solution to this but they are expensive and have their own impacts, both in the carbon embedded in their manufacture and in the fossil fuels currently used to make the electricity that charges them

The recent article on transitioning away from gas provided an overview of the reasons to transition, some of the challenges involved and the ways to address them. While I was researching that article I came across an interesting Australian case study of the transition process: Esperance, a town of about 12,000 people in the Goldfields region of Western Australia. In September 2021 the Infrastructure Capital Group (ICG) gave its customers notice that it would stop supplying r

One of the major issues in household energy use at the moment is how quickly we can, and should, wean households off gas for cooking,...

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has recently put more of its resources into investigating the intersections...

One of the things we know about climate change is that it leads to more frequent and more intense extreme weather events – droughts,...

Like everyone else, I've been following the Commonwealth Budget closely. We are in the middle of a housing crisis and I was really...

A quick shout-out to the team at The Fifth Estate , who do a great job of spreading the word on zero carbon and environmentally-positive...