What, exactly, does it mean to be a sustainable housing organisation?
When we have thought about sustainability in the past, the focus has tended to be on our homes. As a housing sector, we have taken significant steps towards making our existing homes warmer and less expensive to heat, as well as reducing their energy demand and the amount of carbon they emit. We also increasingly build new homes to be ‘zero carbon ready’, fitted with heat pumps, solar panels, and other similar technologies.
However, sustainability extends beyond the retrofitting of existing homes and the construction of new ones. More recently, housing providers have been thinking - and acting - more holistically about sustainability, asking questions such as:
- How do we contribute to increasing the amount of biodiversity and high-quality green spaces in our neighbourhoods?
- How do we begin to understand, and tackle, the carbon emissions produced by our supply chains?
- Can we use electric cars and vans, instead of petrol or diesel vehicles?
- And critically, what can we do to embed the values and ideals of sustainability across our organisations?
These are among the questions CIH began discussing with some of our members in summer 2024.
We learned that housing providers are striving to be more sustainable and have a positive impact on the planet but sometimes aren’t sure where to start. Members asked us for examples of organisations and leaders that they could learn from, as well as practical suggestions for how they could begin their own sustainability journeys.
This led to a series of articles that were released in CIH’s member-exclusive publication, CIH Unlocked. This page collects these case studies together in one place and makes them freely available to all, and more case studies will be added in the future.
