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Using cork to clad an extension – inside and out – was a speedy, sustainable and affordable choice for this family home

When Dan Barber and Hat Margolies bought a two-bed Victorian terrace house in 2013, the entire building needed an overhaul. It had leaky pipes, asbestos and rattling windows; and it needed rewiring, new radiators and a new boiler. Wind whistled through the front room floorboards. “The light and proportions made it really special but there were no original features – the fireplaces had long gone,” says Margolies, a photographic agent with an eye for vintage furniture.

But the couple saw it as a chance to make their new home, in south London, as eco-friendly as they could: to conserve energy, and recycle and reuse as much as possible. They lived with the house as it was for five years, during which time their second daughter was born, and then employed NimTim architects to transform it on a tight budget.

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Does a late conversion somehow void the finance minister’s previous statements and the Coalition’s decade of shame?

The window for attaining net zero emissions by 2050 and holding temperature increases to safe levels is “rapidly closing”. Evidence is mounting that the world is closer to abrupt and irreversible changes, “so-called tipping points”, than previously thought. Without further action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, “the planet is on course to reach temperatures not seen in millions of years, with potentially catastrophic implications”.

This commentary is not from the annual general meeting of the Wild-Eyed Leftists Association, or the board minutes from the Suspicious Progressives Cooperative of Lower Bermagui. It’s from the International Monetary Fund, a fortnight ago, in the World Economic Outlook.

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Maria devastated Dominica. But the islanders’ connection to the natural world gave them a resilience the west can’t match

In June 2017, I packed up some basic tools, religious texts and my camera gear, and headed back home to the Caribbean island of Dominica. A year earlier, while living in New York, a simple question had started to dominate my thinking: what if the life we humans were happiest in was back in the so-called ‘“Garden of Eden?’” When we lived in sync with nature and were not on the brink of destroying it.

I decided Dominica would be the perfect place to test this hypothesis. Known as the Nature Isle of the Caribbean, it is sparsely populated, boasts crystal clear rivers, and a mountainous terrain, and is heavily cloaked in tropical rainforest.

Related: Drought, plague, fire: the apocalypse feels nigh. Yet we have tools to stop it | Art Cullen

Related: Hurricane Maria's legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims

The outgoing finance minister in 2016 said Australia’s economy was ‘in better shape because we scrapped Labor’s carbon tax’

The outgoing finance minister, Mathias Cormann, has talked up the importance of pursuing “a green recovery with an increased reliance on renewables” in remarks to a business conference organised by the German government.

Cormann – who publicly celebrated the repeal of Labor’s carbon price as part of the incoming Abbott government – is serving out his last weeks in politics before focusing on a campaign to be the next secretary general of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Related: Mathias Cormann nominated for OECD top job despite its criticism of Coalition’s climate change policy

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