Resources
Here's a list of helpful publications, websites etc. It's far from complete, if you know of something that should be included here, drop us a line using the contacts at the bottom of the page.
Climate Science
If you want to know more about climate change, there’s literally millions of web pages, reports and books you can refer to. Here’s a few that we’ve found helpful.
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Climate Lab is a great set of resources explaining basic climate science, put together in the UK.
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The Campaign Against Climate Change, also in the UK, has another good set of resources.
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The Royal Society in the UK has a very simple, clear explanation of climate science.
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If you’re looking for something more detailed, the World Bank has been producing a series of reports for some time called Turn Down the Heat. These reports summarise the global impacts of climate change – if you need motivation to act, these will sure provide it!
​If you’re a real science nerd, you can have a go at reading the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official UN body made up of scientists and diplomats that pulls together the overall picture on climate change to inform international action. Their detailed reports are highly technical but they also provide simplified Summaries for Policy-Makers which ordinary humans can understand with a little bit of effort.
​No field is more subject to misinformation than climate change. If you’re looking for help in sorting myth and misinformation from science, Skeptical Science is the place for you. Managed by Australian climate scientist John Cook (lead author of the famous ‘97% of scientists’ paper) and with a large number of contributors, this site provides accessible information and correction of a wide range of popular climate myths.
​Another great myth-busting site is Desmog Blog, a primarily US based site that tackles climate misinformation head-on.
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Housing and Climate Change
If you want to read the analysis behind the impact of housing on climate change, you can read the report prepared for the UN Environment Program. This provides a fairly accessible analysis of the sources of housing and building-related greenhouse gas emissions, and is updated each year.
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Curbed, a USA housing site, has this great introduction into how buildings contribute to climate change.
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Here in Australia, The Fifth Estate is a fantastic resource for anyone in the housing industry who takes their environmental responsibilities seriously. Check them out, you won’t be sorry!
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Green Building
The Fifth Estate has recently published an e-book entitled Extreme Green Buildings which looks at a range of issues in making buildings (commercial and residential) 'nature-positive'. Download the book free from here.
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The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) is the Commonwealth body dedicated to providing finance for clean energy projects. Included in their portfolio is a number of loans for various green housing projects including some for community housing - check out the summary page here and follow the links to the specific projects.
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Built is an Australian construction company that has positioned itself as a leader in developing green buildings. They have produced resources on Taking Action on Embodied Carbon, Creating Net Zero Developments and transitioning to a circular economy in the building industry. A lot of their projects are 'high end' commercial developments but many of the learnings and principles apply across the board.
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The World Green Building Council is a UN sponsored network of regional and national organisations devoted to promoting and developing sustainable building practices. They have published a number of regional plans as well as a set of case studies. Check them out here.
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In 2023, AHURI produced a series of reports on circularity in the housing economy. The summary report from the AHURI project is:
Horne, R., Dorignon, L., Lawson, J., Easthope, H., Dühr, S., Moore, T., Baker, E., Dalton, T., Pawson, H. and Fairbrother, P. (2023) Informing a strategy for circular economy housing in Australia, AHURI Final Report No. 403, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne. Download here.
The report above is the summary report of the project which also includes four more detailed research reports.
Baker, E., Moore, T., Daniel, L., Caines, R., Padilla, H. and Lester, L. (2023) Sustainable social housing retrofit? Circular economy and tenant trade-offs, AHURI Final Report No. 397, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne. Download here.
Dühr, S., Berry, S. and Moore, T. (2023) Sustainable housing at a neighbourhood scale, AHURI Final Report No. 396, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne. Download here.
Easthope, H., Palmer, J., Sharam, A., Nethercote, M., Pignatta, G. and Crommelin, L. (2023) Delivering sustainable apartment housing: new build and retrofit, AHURI Final Report No. 400, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne. Download here.
Dalton, T., Dorignon, L., Boehme, T., Kempton, L., Iyer-Raniga, U., Oswald, D., Amirghasemi, M. and Moore, T. (2023) Building materials in a circular economy, AHURI Final Report No. 402, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne. Download here.
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Renewable Energy
If you're thinking about installing rooftop solar on your housing, Choice has a handy guide on purchasing a solar system and the Clean Energy Council (the peak body for the Australian renewable energy industry) has a more detailed guide.
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If you don't have control of your property to this extent, another way around is to buy your power from a retailer with a strong commitment to renewables. Greenpeace Australia ranked every Australian electricity retailer against a set of five criteria and published these in their Green Electricity Guide, although they have been struggling to keep up with movements in the market brought on by the recent energy crisis so it may not be 100% up to date.
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One of the most important preliminaries to powering homes with renewable energy is to electrify them, since gas can't ever be made renewable and emissions free. Converting homes from gas to electric has been a big focus of efforts to decarbonise housing in the past couple of years. Here's some resources to help get your hear around that.
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A lot of information on costs and the imperative to switch to gas comes from The Climate Council’s report Switch and Save has a lot of information about costs and other reasons to switch. The Climate Council have a lot of other resources on switching from gas to electric, like this explainer.
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One of the extra benefits of switching away from gas is that it creates a much healthier home environment. Check out this brief from UNSW and also this ABC report of some of the same research.
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Renew Economy’s Switched On site provides a while lot of analysis and resources for making the switch. Some specific information on disconnection fees is here, and you can find a lot of other handy information via their home page.
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Saul Griffith’s Rewiring Australia also has a lot of ideas and insights about making the transition – check it out here.
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Renew has done a series of videos on Getting Off Gas - check them out on their Youtube channel.
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The Victorian Government's is among the most proactive in driving the shift away from gas - their Gas Substitution Roadmap is here.
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In Esperance, WA, the gas company decided to cut off reticulated gas supply. Read what happened in our blog, or check out Horizon Power’s detailed evaluation report here.
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Energy Efficient Homes
Rewiring Australia is the organisation set up by engineer and inventor Saul Griffith to promote his ideas about electrification and energy efficiency. There's lots of great resources and ideas on their site.
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Healthy Homes for Renters is a coalition of Australian NGOs working towards better energy efficiency standards for renters across Australia. They have released a detailed blue print for mandating minimum energy efficiency standards in rental housing across Australia - you can download it from here.
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Energy Consumers Australia has recently commissioned a piece of research alongside Renew on the views of Australians on energy-efficient housing. It involved a survey and a series of focus groups made up of people from various perspectives - home owners doing or planning major renovations and those not, landlords, tenants. You can see their report here.
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Renew also did a piece of work back in 2018 called the Renters Guide to Sustainable Living. It outlines how renters can make their homeless more energy efficient, with a mix of things tenants could ask their landlord to do and things they can do themselves without permission and at minimal costs. Download it from here.
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The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has conducted a few different pieces of research into energy efficiency in housing - there is a short summary here with links to various more detailed research reports.
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Energy Consumers Australia and Renew combined in 2022 to commission a research report into improving energy efficiency in Australian housing, discussing energy efficiency issues in housing with a series of focus groups around the country as well as an online survey completed by over 2,000 people. You can see the report here.
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The Energy Efficiency Council is a great source of information on all things energy efficiency across the board - electricity generation, housing, commercial, transport, industry. Their most recent publication, Clean Energy, Clean Demand, published in April 2023, sets out the crucial role energy efficiency plays in the transition to zero-emissions energy, reducing stress on the clean energy transition by reducing peak demand and managing demand over time. Download it here.
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The National Construction Code contains minimum standards relating to energy use in new buildings. The most common way of measuring compliance with these standards is to use the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS), a scheme administered and overseen by the Commonwealth Government. NSW, which always likes to be different, has its own home energy rating scheme called The Building Sustainability Index (BASIX)​
There is also a broader-based scheme, the Green Star Rating Scheme, which has been administered by the Green Building Council of Australia since 2003. Unlike NATHERS and BASIX, this scheme rates both commercial and residential buildings and focuses on a wider range of environmental sustainability questions. It involves four types of ratings – for buildings, whole communities, interiors and existing buildings – and rates projects on a six-star scale, with four stars and above being granted ‘Green Star’ accreditation.
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While it was still active the Low Carbon Living Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) produced a number of resources on low carbon housing. There was one on Mainstreaming Low Carbon Retrofits specifically focused on social housing, and two guides on housing more generally - on on Retrofits and one on New Builds.
AHURI has also more recently examined what tenants think bout sustainability refits in their homes. Baker, E., Moore, T., Daniel, L., Caines, R., Padilla, H. and Lester, L. (2023) Sustainable social housing retrofit? Circular economy and tenant trade-offs, AHURI Final Report No. 397, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne. Download here.
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Climate Adaptation and Resilience
There are a few different resources that can give you an idea of what the climate future of your property is likely to be.
The Climate Council has the Climate Risk Map of Australia which provides a suburb-by-suburb guide to level of risk of particular climate -related events by 2030, 2050 and 2100 under high, medium and low emissions scenarios. It provides estimates of the number of properties at risk overall, and of specific events including riverine flooding, bushfire, surface water flooding, coastal inundation and extreme wind.
For something more thorough and nuanced, but less local, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have collaborated on a resource called Climate Change in Australia. This provides a detailed look at the drivers and impact of climate change on our country, and includes projection tools that divide Australia into four ‘super-clusters’ (essentially, north, south, east and central), eight clusters and fifteen sub-clusters. It allows you to look at projections for a range of variables to do with temperature, rainfall and coastal changes based on the outcomes of different climate models.
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If you're near the coast (and lots of us are!) Coastal Risk Australia has a mapping tool that enables you to look at projected tidal inundation in 2100 for different projected rates of sea level rise.
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In 2018 the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee presented a report entitled “Current and future impacts of climate change on housing, buildings and infrastructure”, the result of a long-running inquiry. This report contains a detailed analysis of the likely impacts of climate change on buildings around Australia.
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The Australian Government’s has a National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy covering 2021-25 - you can access it here.
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Your Home: Australia’s Guide to Environmentally Sustainable Homes is an Australian Government website devoted to sustainable housing. It contains a number of detailed resources on home design with climate change in mind, including Adapting to Climate Change, Design for Climate (with varying advice for eight different Australian climate zones) and Bushfire Protection.
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Renew (formerly the Alternative Technology Association) is an Australian not-for-profit focused on technology and design for sustainable living. It has a number of guides related to building climate-resilient housing. After the 2019 bushfires it published the Green Rebuild Toolkit which provides a step-by-step guide for people considering rebuilding after a bushfire. It includes expert advice on design for bushfire risk zones, as well as designing with increased heatwaves in mind. Renew also has a number of other useful publications on energy efficiency and renewable energy and publishes two high quality magazines (https://renew.org.au/what-we-do/publications/ ), Renew focused on sustainable technology and Sanctuary focused on green building.
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The Queensland Reconstruction Authority has published a series of highly detailed guides in its Resilient Homes series. While these are specifically written for the Queensland context and contain some specifics about planning and regulatory codes and environmental factors which may differ in other locations, a lot of the material is likely to be relevant anywhere in Australia. Separate guides cover flood resilience, cyclone and storm surge resilience, bushfire resilience and insurance-related issues.
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In early 2022 a number of communities in South-East Queensland and Northern NSW were impacted by severe floods. In the wake of these, both the Queensland and NSW Governments have initiated Resilient Homes Funds in partnership with the Commonwealth. These funds assist people to adapt their homes to be more flood resilient, or to relocate out of flood-prone sites. You can read about the Queensland one here, and the NSW one here.
AHURI has done an examination of Australian adaptation strategies in the light of some international case studies, Perugia, F., Rowley, S. and Swapan, M. (2023) Improving Australian climate change adaptation strategies: learning from international experience, AHURI Final Report No. FR 411, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/FR411.
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Sustainable Organisations
The Community Services Industry Alliance in Queensland has an extensive set of resources aimed at helping organisations become more resilient. They include guides nd checklists and a number of stories of how individual community services organisations built resilience in the face of various challenges. Their resources include an organisational self-assessment tool that any organisations can use to assess its own resilience and use to plan improvements.
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The Australian Securities and Investments Corporation (ASIC) now expects companies to be aware of and report on their climate risks. Their main focus is on companies listed on the stock exchange but the principles are relevant to any listed company. This Corporate Governance Update provides a quick summary of their approach. There's a more detailed guide here for listed companies, so only partly relevant to most NGOs. The Australian Institute of Company Directors has a reall helpful, and more general, guide called the Climate Risk Governance Guide.
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There's a number of ways to measure your impact as a way of starting to manage it and lower your emissions. The Carbon Trust, an international NGO originating the UK, has a handy guide which you can download from here. Climate Clever is a free online platform run by an Australian social enterprise that provides an online tool for organisations to calculate their impact and plan for reductions. Carbon Neutral, is mainly a business for selling carbon offsets but it also provides some free tools for calculating your footprint which are comparatively easy to use. If you have more resources to put towards this, another option is to work towards Climate Active certification as a carbon neutral organisation. Climate Active is an Australian Government supported scheme which supports organisations to measure their emissions, develop strategies to achieve carbon neutrality, and provides independent certification of this status.
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Emergency Preparedness
The Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience has a detailed Emergency Planning Handbook you can download free.
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For individuals, there are a couple of handy resources. The Queensland Government has a set of short, accessible tips for individual/household preparedness and some of these are also applicable to organisations. The Australian Red Cross also has an easy-to-use set of resources.
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The Community Services Industry Alliance has a suite of resources on disaster preparedness, including resources on disaster management and preparedness, business continuity, scenario planning, cross-disaster planning and preparedness, and planning for people with disabilities.
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Collaborating 4 Inclusion has been working on inclusive disaster preparedness over the past couple of years, including focusing on disability and homelessness. Their work on homelessness has included detailed input from people with lived experience, service providers and emergency management agencies, and they have short course called Person-Centred Emergency Preparedness (PCEP) which you can do free at least in some jurisdictions. You can find all their materials here.
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The Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) also has a resource along similar lines, called Resilient Community Organisations.
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Transport
The Queensland Government has recently published a simple-user friendly guide to becoming a bike-friendly business. They report research that indicates people who travel by bike will visit local businesses on their way and even go out of their way to do so. Some of being bike friendly is about having good transport infrastructure more generally, but at sites an organisation controls it can provide secure, well-located parking and a culture of welcome towards people who ride. Download the Guide here.
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