The consequences of climate change are now being felt across the planet: increasingly severe droughts, floods, sea level rise and excessively hot weather.
Also...
there is a huge shortage of housing in the UK - especially affordable housing - for which the total has been estimated to be around 4 million.
This shortage does not just affect towns and cities. The CPRA believe there is a significant shortage of housing in the countryside as well. This is made worse by the number of properties in rural areas being sold off as second homes.
One solution to the housing crisis is to construct prefabricated PassivHaus homes. Heavily insulated, these require little or even no energy input. They would be even more economical if they were covered in living vegetation...
i.e. to be built as HedgeHouses!
Currently, nobody seems to know the number of farmsteads in the UK.
There have been at least 29,000 barn conversions, and there are 30,000 listed buildings sited on farms.
88,000 farmers claim government subsidies, and it has been estimated that there are 100,000 farming enterprises.
A farmstead comprises of a farmhouse, with its barns and sheds. Many farms have more than one farmstead within their boundaries, so there are potentially many, many farmsteads and many, many spaces that would suit Hedgehouses.
If every farmstead was given automatic development rights (except those within National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) for at least four new Hedgehouses within its curtilage, that could allow the construction of anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 dwellings - and possibly a lot more.
As farming operations change with the need to conserve the landscape more intensively, farm buildings becoming redundant could provide more sites for Hedgehouses too.
Hedgehouses within their land boundaries would also greatly benefit the farmers, providing rental incomes and greater security for farming land as a whole, with the greater number of eyes and activity - even though the building themselves very much blend into the landscape. With rural crime at its highest level in decades, security is a major issue. The rural population is much lower than it once was, and this is possibly a reason the crime rate is so high.
