In Kenya’s Laikipia County where temperatures can reach as high as 30 degrees Celsius, a local building technology is helping homes stay cooler while supporting education, creating jobs and improving the livelihoods and resilience of community residents, Climate Home News found on a visit to the region.
Situated in a semi-arid region, houses in Laikipia are mostly built with wood or cement blocks with corrugated iron sheets for roofing. This building method usually leaves the insides of homes scorching hot – and as global warming accelerates, the heat is becoming unbearable.
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, lived in these harsh conditions until 2023, when the Laikipia Integrated Housing Project began in his community.
The project uses compressed earth block (CEB) technology, drawing on traditional building methods and local materials – including soil, timber, grass and cow dung – to keep buildings cool in the highland climate. The thick earth walls provide insulation against the heat.
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, stands in front of classroom blocks built with compressed earth blocks (Photo: Vivian Chime)
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, stands in front of classroom blocks built with compressed earth blocks (Photo: Vivian Chime)
“Especially around the months of September all the way to December, it is very, very hot [in Laikipia], but as you might have noticed, my house is very cool even during the heat,” Muthui told Climate Home News.
His school has also deployed the technology for classrooms and boarding hostels to ensure students can carry on studying during the hottest seasons of the year. This way, they are protected from severe conditions and school closures can be avoided. In South Sudan, dozens of students collapsed from heat stroke in the capital Juba earlier this year, causing the country to shutter schools for weeks.
COP30 sees first action call on sustainable, affordable housing
The buildings and construction sector accounts for 37% of global emissions, making it the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). While calls to decarbonise the sector have grown, meaningful action to cut emissions has remained limited.
At COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates and Canada launched the Cement and Concrete Breakthrough Initiative to speed up investment in the technologies, policies and tools needed to put the cement and concrete industry on a net zero-emissions path by 2050.
Canada’s innovation minister, François-Philippe Champagne, said the initiative aimed to build a competitive “green cement and concrete industry” which creates jobs while building a cleaner future.
Coordinated by UNEP’s Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, the council has urged countries to embed climate considerations into affordable housing from the outset, “ensuring the drive to deliver adequate homes for social inclusion goes hand in hand with minimising whole-life emissions and environmental impacts”.
Homes built with compressed earth blocks in Laikipia (Photo: Julián Reingold)
Homes built with compressed earth blocks in Laikipia (Photo: Julián Reingold)
With buildings responsible for 34% of energy-related emissions and 32% of global energy demand, and 2.8 billion people living in inadequate housing, the ICBC stressed that “affordable, adequate, resource-efficient, low-carbon, climate-resilient and durable housing is essential to a just transition, the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the effective implementation of the Paris Agreement”.
Compressed earth offers local, green alternative
By using locally sourced materials, and just a little bit of cement, the compressed earth technology is helping residents in Kenya’s Laikipia region to build affordable, climate-smart homes that reduce emissions and environmental impacts while creating economic opportunities for local residents, said Dacan Aballa, construction manager at Habitat for Humanity International, the project’s developers.
Aballa said carbon emissions in the construction sector occur all through the lifecycle, from material extraction, processing and transportation to usage and end of life. However, by switching to compressed earth blocks, residents can source materials available in their environment, avoiding nearly all of that embedded carbon pollution.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), global cement manufacturing is responsible for about 8% of total CO2 emissions, and the current trajectory would see emissions from the sector soar to 3.8 billion tonnes per year by 2050 – a level that, compared to countries, would place the cement industry as one of the world’s top three or four emitters alongside the US and China.
Comparing compressed earth blocks and conventional materials in terms of carbon emissions, Aballa said that by using soil native to the area, the process avoids the fossil fuels that would normally have been used for to produce and transport building materials, slashing carbon and nitrogen dioxide emissions.
The local building technology also helps save on energy that would have been used for cooling these houses as well as keeping them warm during colder periods, Aballa explained.
Justin Atemi, water and sanitation officer at Habitat for Humanity, said the brick-making technique helps reduce deforestation too. This is because the blocks are left to air dry under the sun for 21 days – as opposed to conventional fired-clay blocks that use wood as fuel for kilns – and are then ready for use.
Women walk passed houses in the village of Kangimi, Kaduna State, Nigeria (Photo: Sadiq Mustapha)
Traditional knowledge becomes adaptation mechanism
Africa’s red clay soil was long used as a building material for homes, before cement blocks and concrete became common. However, the method never fully disappeared. Now, as climate change brings higher temperatures, this traditional building approach is gaining renewed attention, especially in low-income communities in arid and semi-arid regions struggling to cope with extreme heat.
From Kenya’s highlands to Senegal’s Sahelian cities, compressed earth construction is being repurposed as a low-cost, eco-friendly option for homes, schools, hospitals – and even multi-storey buildings.
Senegal’s Goethe-Institut in Dakar was constructed primarily using compressed earth blocks. In Mali, the Bamako medical school, which was built with unfired mud bricks, stays cool even during the hottest weather.
And more recently, in Nigeria’s cultural city of Benin, the just-finished Museum of West African Art (MOWA) was built using “rammed earth” architecture – a similar technology that compresses moist soil into wooden frames to form solid walls – making it one of the largest such structures in Africa.
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New data on international climate finance for 2023 and 2024 suggests that wealthy countries are highly unlikely to have met their pledge to double funding for adaptation in developing nations to around $40 billion a year by 2025 amid cuts to their overseas aid budgets.
At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, all countries agreed to “urge” developed nations to at least double their funding for adaptation in developing countries from 2019 levels of around $20 billion by 2025. Funding for adaptation has lagged behind money to help reduce emissions and remains the dark spot even as the data showed overall climate finance rose to a record $136.7 billion in 2024.
A United Nations Environment Programme report warned last year that wealthy nations were likely to miss the adaptation finance target and the data released on Thursday by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that in 2024 adaptation finance was just under $35 billion.
The OECD, an intergovernmental policy forum for wealthy countries, said the increase between 2022 and 2024 was “modest”, adding that meeting the doubling target would require “strong growth” of close to 20% in 2025.
More cuts likely
The OECD’s figures do not go up to 2025, but several nations announced cuts to climate finance last year. The most notable was the abandonment of US pledges to international climate funds by the new Trump administration but the UK, France, Germany and other wealthy European countries also pared back their contributions.
Joe Thwaites, international finance director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said developed countries were “not on track” to meet the adaptation funding goal.
Power Shift Africa director Mohamed Adow said adaptation finance is needed to expand flood defences, drought-resistant crops, early warning systems and resilient health services as the world warms, bringing more extreme weather and rising seas. “When that money fails to arrive, people lose homes, harvests and livelihoods – and in the worst cases, their lives,” he warned.
Imane Saidi, a senior researcher at the North Africa-based Imal Initiative, called the $35 billion in adaptation finance in 2024 “a drop in the ocean”, considering that the United Nations estimates the annual adaptation needs of developing countries at between $215 billion and $387 billion.
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If confirmed, a failure to meet the goal is likely to further strain relations between developed and developing countries within the UN climate process. A previous pledge to provide $100 billion a year of total climate finance by 2020 was only met two years late, a failure labelled “dismal” by the UAE’s COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber and many other Global South diplomats.
Missing that goal would also raise doubts about donor governments’ commitment to meeting their new post-2025 adaptation finance goal. At COP30 last year, governments agreed to urge developed countries to triple adaptation finance – without defining the baseline – by 2035.
African and other developing countries have pointed to lack of funding as a key flaw in ongoing attempts to set indicators to measure progress on adapting to climate change.
Speaking to climate ministers from around the world in Copenhagen on Wednesday, Turkish COP31 President Murat Kurum stressed the importance of climate finance. “It is easy to say we support global climate action,” he said, “but promises must be kept.”
He said the COP31 Presidency will use the new Global Implementation Accelerator and recommendations in the Baku-to-Belem roadmap, published last year, to scale up climate finance – and will hold donors accountable for their collective finance goals.
He noted that developed countries should this year submit their first reports showing how they will deliver their “fair share” of the new broader finance goal set at COP29 in 2024, to deliver $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035. They are due to report on this once every two years.
Broader climate finance
The OECD data shows that the overall amount of climate finance – including funding for emissions cuts – provided by developed countries grew fast in 2023 before declining in 2024. In contrast, the amount of private finance developed countries say they “mobilised” increased in both 2023 and 2024, pushing the top-line figure to a record high.
While the OECD does not say which countries provided what amounts, data from the ODI Global think-tank suggests that the 2024 cuts to bilateral climate finance were spread broadly among wealthy nations.
Thwaites of NRDC welcomed the fact that overall climate finance provided and mobilised by developed countries exceeded $130 billion in both 2023 and 2024. He said that this was “well above earlier projections” and “shows that when rich countries work together, they can over-achieve on climate finance goals”.
But Sehr Raheja, programme officer at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, said these figures are “modest” when set against the new $300-billion goal.
“While the headline total figure of climate finance remains alright,” she said, “declining bilateral climate spending raises important questions about the predictability of high-quality, concessional public finance, which has consistently been a key demand of the Global South.”
She also lamented that loans continue to dominate public climate finance and that mobilised private finance is concentrated in middle-income countries and on emissions-reduction measures rather than adaptation projects. “Private capital continues to follow bankability rather than climate vulnerability or need,” she added.
Ritu Bharadwaj, climate finance and resilience researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said the figures painted an outdated picture as climate finance has since declined as rich countries shrink their overseas aid budgets and increase spending on defence.
Last month, the OECD published figures showing that international aid – which includes climate finance – fell by nearly a quarter in 2025. The US was responsible for three-quarters of this decline. The OECD projects a further decline in 2026.
With Thursday’s climate finance report, the OECD is “publishing a victory lap for 2023 and 2024 at almost the same moment its own aid statistics show the funding base eroding underneath it,” Bharadwaj said.
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