Podcast Recommendation: 39 Ways to Save the Planet (BBC Sounds)

Year 12s and 13s looking to find out more about practical strategies to address climate change and its impacts might be interested in BBC Radio 4’s 39 Ways to Save the Planet.

A recently re-aired episode about insulating Britain’s homes caught my attention. It focuses on a project in Nottingham which uses Dutch technology and know-how from Energiesprong (‘Energy leap’) to reduce the leakage of heat from homes owned by social housing landlord Nottingham City Homes. The project attempts to address a couple of important questions with regard to the mammoth task of insulating Britain’s ageing housing stock:

• How do we go beyond reducing the carbon footprint of a house (key to the success of any insulation initiative), to a design-led process, in which retrofitting insulation, in some cases ‘building a house around a house’, creates not only warmer homes but also more desirable properties?
• How is such a huge investment in housing to be funded? Clearly, properly-insulated housing will be cheaper to heat – pertinent to today’s cost of living crisis, driven by the rising price of gas – but how can homeowners or landlords afford it?

There is also some discussion about how quickly, or not, housebuilders are adapting their approach to ensure all new homes are designed to new environmental standards.

This Insulate the Nation episode would be particularly useful for sustainable urban development, for those studying the Contemporary Urban Environments optional topic (AQA A Level Geography). Here is an article from the Nottingham Post about the now £9 million project.

More generally, the 39 Ways series, available via BBC Sounds, provides an upbeat, practical answer to the question ‘What do we do now?’ so often asked in Geography lessons about the climate crisis, and reflects the work of those getting on with the dual tasks of mitigation and adaptation.