This section provides a thematic cross-sectional analysis of the trends that emerged from the research in the eight cities and responds to research question 1.
Research question 1
Discovering and describing the status quo
To what extent are climate actions in the built environment considering human rights? How do local climate policy and actions reflect or consider the basic needs of inhabitants?
Right to housing
Housing is a right, not a commodity
Housing is a fundamental human right and a key enabler for the fulfilment of other rights. Secure housing is crucial for an individual to be able to turn their attention to other aspects of life, such as education and work. Most governments around the world have recognised the right to adequate housing through the ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and other international human rights treaties. Some countries have explicitly enshrined this right in their constitutions.
Too often violations of the right to housing occur in part because, at the domestic level, housing is rarely treated as a human right. The key to ensuring adequate housing is the implementation of this human right through appropriate government policy and programmes, including national housing strategies.
Even when the right to housing is formally recognised, there is a clear gap between recognition and action. This study found that the right to housing is violated or not being implemented, to varying degrees, in all of the eight cities examined. Housing unaffordability was the most prominent issue. While there were variations in its acuteness, the ubiquity of this issue is evidence of a global, structural failure to uphold the human right to adequate and affordable housing.
Extensive literature is available on the underlying causes of these issues, from post-colonial resource extraction to a lack of affordable public housing options and the increasing privatisation of land in some places, which, combined with expanded deregulation of the real estate market and the mobility of global capital, leads to the commodification of housing. This is particularly noticeable when corporate landowners, whose business models often rely on rent extraction and profit maximisation, become major players in local markets, often enabled by government initiatives such as golden visas, which are now banned in some countries like Portugal but still available in others such as Greece.
In Prague, publicly owned social housing has been privatised and replaced with housing allowances for those spending more than 35% of their income on housing costs. This is a regressive, direct transfer of public tax-payer funds to landlords that, in some cases, are corporate, global companies. This is part of a wider socio-economic phenomenon of rising income and wealth inequality in many countries, with stagnant wages and a growing gap between the middle class and the wealthiest 10%. This power imbalance is clearly visible in the housing sector:
The development lobby is incredibly small, but well organised and powerful. The community sector is incredibly large, disorganised, fragmented, and not very powerful.
This study found that these issues are being exacerbated by climate change and the ongoing dependency on fossil fuels. These contribute to migration from rural areas into cities, which therefore must accommodate an increasing population, as well as higher energy bills and energy insecurity, leading to energy poverty and decreasing tenants’ ability to pay rent, with the potential for displacement.
Where built environment decarbonisation initiatives are taking place, research carried out for this project found a mix of positive and negative impacts on the right to housing.
Decarbonisation actions strengthening the right to housing
Copenhagen
Home.Earth is a Danish evergreen real estate company that builds low-carbon homes. Its governance model includes tenants as shareholders, giving them a return on investment that effectively means their rents are approximately 20% below the market rate.
Melbourne
The Retain, Repair, Reinvest Framework by OFFICE assesses the refurbishment potential of existing public housing, by seeking to reduce carbon emissions from building processes without demolishing homes and displacing communities.
Athens
Antiparochi is a mechanism, used in the past, to increase housing supply and attempt to lower prices through mutual exchange. In this case, individuals exchanged land or existing houses with developers who built blocks and reimbursed the owner with several apartments in return. A similar initiative, led by the public or private sector, could help address unaffordability whilst minimising urban sprawl.
Jakarta
Indonesia’s Green Affordable Housing Programme aims to provide affordable and environmentally-friendly housing for low-income communities. It supports green housing adaptation and mitigation, certification, and green housing finance to deliver 100,000 green housing units by 2024, 1 million Green-NetZero Ready units by 2030, and ultimately aims for 100% NetZero Carbon Housing by 2050. Whilst the ambition is impressive, rollout has been slow and impact hampered by illegal brokerage.
Decarbonisation actions putting the right to housing at risk
Athens
The government-led Exoikonomo programme offers financial incentives for energy-saving renovations. It has been successful in reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, but it predominantly benefits property owners with sufficient financial means to invest in renovations. The programme does not appear to benefit owners with less means, along with renters, who may experience further rent increases, particularly when public funding is used to improve ageing buildings. A local architect stated: “Development in Athens has climate justice as a pretext, but just leads to price increases which aren’t mitigated by policies to protect housing rights. Where green renovations happen, apartment prices increase.”
Prague
The EU-funded New Green Savings programme provided incentives for building retrofits. Many landlords benefited from the public incentive but transferred the costs involved onto occupants through increased rents, which they often cannot afford. This leads to evictions as well as the direct transfer of public funds into the hands of landlords. A local association representative stated: “There are tendencies to save costs, but people complain that landlords try to transfer the costs [of retrofitting] onto occupants. In Czechia [...] the tenant is protected only for a year. Then the landlord says, ‘I’ve done the insulation, I want more. Take it or leave it’”.
Lisbon
In an attempt to increase foreign investment and improve its ageing building stock, in 2011 Portugal introduced a “golden visa” programme for those spending over 500,000€ to buy property or 350,000€ on renovating it. However, in 2024, an assessment of the scheme’s impact concluded that it “may have exacerbated affordability issues for middle- and low-income households”.
Workers’ rights
Workers’ rights are recognised by most governments around the world through international labour standards agreements, ratification of human rights instruments, as well as national laws and constitutions.
However, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that over 2.3 million people around the world die from work-related accidents or diseases each year, with 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million victims of work-related illnesses annually. Exposure to unsafe working conditions includes injuries and environmental and toxic hazards that affect construction workers’ long-term health.
Approximately 220 million people work in construction, which ranks among the most precarious and dangerous sectors in many countries, accounting for one in five work-related deaths across the EU. Hence, this is not only an issue for workers but also a substantial liability for developers, construction companies, and investors.
The research found many other human rights concerns across the construction sector. For example, gender disparity was a common trend, with males dominating the sector across all eight cities and widespread sexism, harassment, and discrimination. In many cases, complex sub-procurement led to high degrees of informality, with rampant wage theft. Construction workers were found to be living in substandard housing arrangements, with many unaware of their rights and employers’ obligations.
In this context, it is unsurprising to see construction sector labour shortages of 100,000 workers in Australia, 80,000 in Portugal, and 200,000 in Greece. The sector heavily relies on migrant workers, many of whom have a higher vulnerability to abuse by employers, in part because they are in a foreign country and have limited proficiency in the local language. The power imbalances between workers and employers were most visible in countries with low unionisation rates. Evidence from Lisbon and Valparaíso suggests that workers openly stating their affiliation to a union could trigger discrimination or even layoffs.
Climate change poses escalating risks for workers, notably through rising temperatures that significantly impact outdoor construction labour. While worker representatives acknowledge the potential of the green transition to offer improved wages and safer employment, the absence of comprehensive transition plans from governments and employers sparks concerns that new job opportunities may not benefit those displaced from carbon-intensive industries.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has projected a demand for 6.5 million jobs in green construction to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. However, without clear outlines of these roles and without robust initiatives from businesses and governments to train and re-skill existing construction workers, many remain sceptical of and resistant to embracing the green transition.
Decarbonisation actions strengthening worker's rights
Athens
The Greek government has announced plans to regulate the status of up to 300,000 undocumented migrants to address labour shortages, particularly in the construction and agriculture sectors. However, decent working conditions must also be ensured to effectively address these labour shortages. The proposed legislation is not exempt from criticism as it does not grant family reunification rights, and is limited to three years, but the International Organisation for Migration and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees have welcomed it as a positive first step.
Copenhagen
The Human Rights Due Diligence Guide for the Danish Construction Sector, grounded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the EU’s Environmental Taxonomy, and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, helps construction companies uphold human rights in their supply chains, from material extraction through the construction site to the people living in the newly-constructed buildings.
Decarbonisation actions worker's rights at risk
Copenhagen
Data from the Danish construction unions indicates that 15-20% of construction assignments contain some abuse of workers’ rights. Breaches are particularly common in construction projects with opaque supply chains and in smaller jobs. With the Danish construction sector’s urgent need to shift focus from large new builds to smaller retrofit jobs, there is a risk that the green transition may therefore exacerbate workers’ rights violations.
Prague
The current lack of assessments quantifying the impact of the green transition on construction workers means public and private actors are unable to re-skill and fill the jobs needed, as well as organise to ensure new jobs are decent. As a result, businesses will struggle to recruit, and governments may miss their climate targets. A local ministry official stated: “We are concerned about the impacts on the economy and people. If these [impacts] were more understandable and calculated, people would have a better attitude. Personally, I think that decarbonisation is a huge benefit, but it is hard to explain to people without more concrete information. Unions have been asking for impact assessments since 2020, and we still have nothing”.
Participation
Meaningful participation is one of the fundamental principles that underpin the human rights-based approach, as it enables the advancement of all human rights.
Decision-making in the built environment is profoundly influenced by power relations, often rooted in local context and history. These influence governance structures, mechanisms, and channels for citizen engagement, the range of stakeholders with a voice at the table, and even the culture of participation in a city: whether civil society is dormant, suppressed, or demanding and outspoken.
This project investigated the key actors shaping decision-making in transition processes in the built environment. The image below can be taken as the starting point: the basic configuration of city actors that interplay in the making of the built environment, in climate actions and policies, and on how just and inclusive these are.
In the eight cities analysed, climate action predominantly stems from government and private sector initiatives, side-lining or excluding local communities, including construction workers. In extreme cases, this exclusion can result in greenlash – pushback against green initiatives, now visible in various European countries.
Across all cities, there was a clear sense of tension between the speed at which decisions need to be made, legislation passed, and climate actions undertaken, and the time that meaningful citizen participation processes can take. However, there was also a recognition that poor engagement is a risky business decision, as it can result in widespread opposition, with the potential for greater delays further down the road and even in projects being cancelled.
Participation was the area in which promising initiatives were observed in all eight cities. Online tools are enabling large-scale, city-wide engagement at relative speed. Bespoke participatory and co-creation processes are also providing local insights that can improve and ultimately expedite projects. However, allowing such forms of community participation does not necessarily mean citizens can influence outcomes.
Moreover, it's crucial to acknowledge that communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and climate action often encounter numerous systemic barriers. These may encompass language obstacles, geographical isolation, limited internet access, time constraints, and lack of a permanent address, that hinder their ability to participate in even the best-designed engagement processes. From Copenhagen to Lagos, marginalised residents, lacking a voice and decision-making power, are frequently excluded from shaping the development of their built environment, which perpetuates their marginalisation.
Decarbonisation actions strengthening participation
Athens
The synAthina platform is a government-led hub for civic engagement launched in 2013 “geared towards problem identification, problem-solving and political reform”, filling a civic engagement gap and launching hundreds of projects across the city, from litter-picking to the inclusion of marginalised groups. One of Europe’s first municipal platforms for participatory decision-making, synAthina has been commended as a pioneering example of public sector innovation by the OECD.
Lagos
Spaces for Change was created as a platform for young people and women to participate in decision-making around the built environment through citizen-led advocacy initiatives and capacity-building programmes. It has also created the Community Alliance Against Displacement, which brings together the leaders of marginalised communities to improve security of tenure and prevent forced evictions.
Lagos
When developing the Ajegunle-Ikorodu Community Resilience Action Plan, the University of Lagos’ selected and trained women from Ajegunle-Ikorodu to act as citizen scientists to undertake asset mapping. Their involvement broadened the range of residents who took part in participatory workshops, where they developed initiatives to make the local community more inclusive, resilient, and prosperous.
Jakarta
ProKlim (Climate Village Programme) is a government initiative that combines local wisdom, community capabilities, climate impact exposure potentials, and interactive community participation in crafting adaptation plans to climate change., The Jakarta Government’s Ikhtiar Jakarta initiative developed interfaith guidebooks to tackle climate change, recognising the crucial role of religious leaders and the potential of eco-preaching to reshape people’s mindsets.
Copenhagen
The Municipality partnered with schools to encourage children to express what they would like to see more of with regards to biodiversity, with the ideas compiled in a report titled Children’s and Young People’s Recommendations for The Biodiversity Strategy 2050.
Valparaíso
The local government has opened a binding public consultation to update its Communal Regulatory Plan. This plan aims for “territorial planning with social and gender justice (including the voice of indigenous groups), protection and reduction of the degradation of environmental heritage, and local economic development, integrating its three urban areas: Valparaíso, Placilla, and Laguna Verde”.
Decarbonisation actions putting participation at risk
Lisbon
When consulting on its Mais Habitação (More Housing) initiative, the government received 2,700 submissions. However, the plan was voted on and approved in Parliament just one week after the consultation period ended, with no significant changes to the initial text, raising questions about the meaningfulness and effectiveness of the entire public consultation.
See IHRB and The Shift recommendations on the Mais Habitaçao Programme, submitted to the Government of Portugal in 2023.
Spatial Justice
The principle of non-discrimination is, like meaningful participation, a cross-cutting human rights principle.
The extent of its realisation in the spatial context of a city can usually be explained by historical patterns of investment and disinvestment across different neighbourhoods by both the public and private sectors.
This study found spatial inequalities in all eight case studies, with variations in severity depending on the local socio-economic context. Valparaíso’s case highlights the tension between competing forces: the port is a key economic driver in the city, but its operations impact residents’ quality of life by dominating public space, creating noise and environmental pollution, and blocking public access from most of the city’s waterfront.
With the exception of Athens, low-income communities in the cities studied were mostly residing in peripheral areas, living in lower-quality housing or informal settlements. In some cities, mixed-use planning and high-quality transport infrastructure enable residents to conveniently access goods and services, but in places like Jakarta and Lagos, these can often be hours away.
Another common spatial justice issue is access to green space, which is crucial for mental and physical health and the main antidote to the growing urban heat island effect. The lack of green spaces is particularly severe in Athens, Jakarta, Valparaíso, and Lagos, especially in low-income neighbourhoods, which often experience the highest temperatures.
In Jakarta, glittering skyscrapers sit alongside the 16% of the city categorised as slums. This disparity is shockingly visible in neighbourhoods such as Penjaringan and Kamal Muara, where high-density settlements by polluted canals are a far cry from the affluent areas like Menteng, where lush gardens surround luxury homes
Extreme spatial inequality recognised through aerial photography in Jakarta.
This research reinforced that capital, including green investment, generally flows along historical power lines: towards property owners rather than tenants, more affluent neighbourhoods rather than deprived ones. Green initiatives at the local level therefore have to intentionally take an approach based on equity and non-discrimination to ensure that they do not exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities.
Given that all the cities analysed have largely deregulated housing markets, it is unsurprising to see decarbonisation efforts result in green gentrification. Small-scale renovations, large-scale redevelopments, new transport infrastructure, or parks make homes more desirable, attracting higher prices and displacing marginalised communities. Cities like Copenhagen, with a healthy and distributed public housing stock, can try to mitigate against this, but others like Athens have no social housing at all.
Decarbonisation actions strengthening spatial justice
Prague
After the end of communist rule, Prague’s Municipality sold almost all its housing stock and stopped building new homes, leaving that task to the private sector. In 2020, facing growing housing unaffordability, the Municipality established its own Prague Development Company, with the aim of developing 6,000-8,000 public, affordable housing apartments by 2030. The company has already been handed 70 hectares of land previously owned by a mixture of public agencies, and it has developed a pipeline of ten projects to deliver high- quality, energy-efficient rental units available at affordable prices for key workers, single- parent families, and independently-living seniors. This is an example of how a public development company, by not sacrificing location nor sustainability standards to offer affordability, is able to benefit people across the city.
Lisbon
The Portuguese government recognised that touristification,, unregulated short-term rentals, and golden visas exacerbated socio-spatial inequalities. In January 2023, it created a new Housing Ministry and, only five months later, launched its new housing plan, Mais Habitação, supported by 2.7 billion euros in investment from the EU Recovery and Resilience Plan. The plan aims to solve the housing crisis by increasing housing supply, simplifying licenscing procedures, combating speculation, and protecting families. If successfully implemented, such measures would help address housing unaffordability, and cushion gentrification, displacements, and spatial inequalities.
Decarbonisation actions putting spatial justice at risk
Copenhagen
Green investments in areas like Vesterbro, Christianshavn and Nørrebro have developed and supported cafes and restaurants, but they have also increased prices (land and cost of living). The result has been limiting access to public spaces, fostering a sense of exclusion, and displacing people who can no longer afford the cost of living in these areas, a process known as green gentrification.
Lagos
The Eko Atlantic project sets out to protect Lagos from coastal erosion by building a new, eco-friendly city. However, it is doing so by displacing a community of 80,000 traders, cleaners, waiters, and clerks, mostly living in stilted homes above the water, servicing the nearby wealthy Victoria Island. For the project, public land was handed over to a private investor, with large-scale evictions. Today, it’s being turned into a privatised green gated community for the ultra-rich.
Underlying factors
This section seeks to answer the second research question by analysing why, in certain contexts, built environment climate action is resulting in positive social outcomes, whilst, in others, such actions exacerbate human rights issues.
Research question 2
Explaining the status quo
What are the political conditions that allow or hinder a just transition in the built environment?
When analysing the factors influencing transition processes, it becomes apparent that political, economic, and social conditions are interconnected. These conditions are shaped by complex global inequalities, rooted in history. Hence, it is crucial to recognise that contemporary urban issues are the ice on the surface of a deeper iceberg of global structural disparities.
Historical factors include colonial extraction and exploitation that yielded unequal and asynchronous industrialisation processes in different countries. More recent factors include neoliberal capitalism, injustices in international trade, foreign debt (including the associated financing conditions like high interest rates and ‘strings attached’ such as conditional austerity programmes), ecological debt, and more, all of which have been exacerbated by globalisation. It is also essential to note that there are additional determinant factors that stem from within individual countries, adding layers of complexity to the task of explaining the status quo.
Within this historical, geopolitical framing, this study identified a series of underlying political conditions that are playing a major role in hindering or enabling a just transition in the built environment.
Hindering political conditions
Low public trust in government and high levels of corruption, among other challenges, erode democracy and reduce governments’ and businesses’ ability to address urban (environmental, social, and economic) problems. They therefore present structural barriers to a green transition that respects the rights of individuals and communities.
In Indonesia, Nigeria, Chile, Greece, and Portugal, limited job opportunities have resulted in large-scale brain drains, which reduce the local human resources, innovation, and productivity needed for the transition. Another common challenge, especially in Global South countries, is foreign debt. This pressures governments to pursue GDP growth, often by selling off assets such as land, housing and infrastructure, which could otherwise provide the bedrock for a just transition.
Limited social dialogue has also been identified as an obstacle to decent employment and a missed opportunity to increase climate action legitimacy. Similarly, insecure or informal tenures, and the prevalence of major debts (rent, loans, utilities) make marginalised communities particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of decarbonisation initiatives, such as rising prices.
Both the public and private sector have a key role to play in delivering a just transition, but in balance. By relying too heavily on private sector-led strategies, some countries have reduced public ability to protect citizens from extractive market forces. In Melbourne, Prague, and Athens, where public housing is almost non-existent, governments help households with housing subsidies to make units more affordable. By doing so, they behave like a market actor rather than as a market shaper. Market-shaping alternatives like rent caps, taxation, redistribution mechanisms, and the use of regulation were not as predominant as the use of incentives.
Enabling political conditions
Political international efforts were seen as a key factor for success. The Paris Agreement and Nationally Determined Contributions are clearly key drivers for global climate action. In Athens and Lisbon, EU climate funding has been instrumental in kick-starting the Renovation Wave, and its related requirements have also led to greater community participation in decision- making.
In Europe, policies such as the EU Taxonomy, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and European Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) are key drivers in aligning climate and social outcomes, and can unlock more socially responsible business models. Furthermore, clear sightlines into future social regulations allow businesses to mobilise capital, reduce risk, and develop innovations to maximise pre-competitive advantages.
Land ownership is another important enabler. Countries that have retained greater public ownership of built environment stock have greater agency in urban planning and can plan and design for equity. This project investigated land ownership patterns across four of the eight cities in the study. In Copenhagen, land ownership data iswas available for free. In Prague, Lisbon, and Athens the data is also available, but the pricing structure makes large-scale searches prohibitively expensive. In each city, the research identified the ten largest landowners. Most of these were large multinational investment companies, an unsurprising finding given investor-owned housing in Europe has reportedly increased by 700% since the global financial crisis. The rankings also included public or state agencies, although the total amount varied significantly between cities. Across the world, cities like Paris, Leeds, Eugene, and many others are buying land and homes from private owners, including through right-of-first refusal mechanisms, in an attempt to grow public housing stock.
Another key factor in determining whether the green transition upholds human rights is the strength of welfare protections and social safeguards in each city. Across the cities studied, these seemed to be stronger in countries with unionised workforces and tenants. The presence of collective bargaining agreements, minimum durations of tenancy agreements, caps on rental increases, and constraints on evictions were key to avoiding adverse impacts on people during the green transition. As external reference, the existence of rental caps in Belgium has allowed the Flanders region to introduce regulations prohibiting landlords from increasing rents on poorly-insulated flats. Rents on even the best-performing flats can only be increased in line with inflation.
From this project, it can be deduced that economic and political stability is essential for the long-term, cross-sector planning required to implement just transitions. In an unjust transition where residents are losing homes and workers are losing jobs without any alternative, the result is increased political polarisation, instability, and insecurity, with adverse consequences for governments, businesses, people, and the climate. Conversely, the protection of human rights is associated with stability and security, which are required for governments and businesses to plan and invest in long-term, equitable climate solutions.