With 2.8 billion people living in inadequate housing, the global housing crisis shows mainstream solutions cannot deliver inclusive, resilient homes at the scale required. With the right financial and technical support, incremental, climate-resilient self-built housing can provide dignity, safety, and long-term resilience rather than perpetuating exclusion.

Across the Global South, self-construction is already the dominant form of housing production. Formalizing support for these processes unlocks a powerful and accessible sustainability opportunity: upgrading existing informal homes to be climate and disaster resilient costs about 23% of new construction and can avoid up to 18 metric tons of embodied carbon per home.

This session will present evidence-based research and practice demonstrating how supporting self-built housing and basic services can expand access to climate-adaptive homes, particularly in informal and hard-to-reach communities. Bridging policy and practice, speakers will share proven, locally led approaches and outline the policy frameworks and resource mobilization needed to scale resilient, low-carbon housing solutions worldwide for equitable communities across regions and income contexts.

Given that self-built housing typically evolves incrementally over time, the workshop will highlight the opportunity to integrate incremental resilience strategies, where each stage of construction or upgrading improves safety, thermal performance, and climate adaptation. This perspective can help bridge technical solutions with the realities of how housing is actually produced in many contexts.

This workshop utilizes a World Café format consisting of three 20 minute break out sessions. To ground the theoretical in the practical, every table will showcase case studies centered on the topics Policy, Finance and Technical Assistance. Following the breakouts, participants will reconvene in a plenum session. Findings from each table will be shared to discuss and find collaborative solutions identified during the World Café sessions. The session will conclude with final remarks by a Brazilian Government Representative, providing a strategic perspective on how these findings align with national priorities and international cooperation.