Actions speak louder than words

At the end of last month, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) published their 2022 Progress Report, charting the UK Government’s progress so far in reducing emissions. It’s a sobering read. It was always going to be a massive ask to reach the pledge of Net Zero by 2050 – one of the most ambitious climate pledges of any major economy – but just how far behind we are, is startling. Viable plans to achieve the target currently only exist for around a third of the emission reductions necessary during the 2030s.

What was interesting for us at HIES, was that the focus of the report was on delivery and how we actually deploy as a country to make these things happen. While progress has been made in areas of electric vehicles and renewable electricity, others are lagging, in particular when it comes to renewables and home energy products for retrofit and refurbishment. The CCC report cites glaring gaps in policies towards decarbonising homes and helping to cut household energy bills. In fact, the CCC has singled out the UK’s housing stock as a source of emissions that will derail net zero progress without policy interventions soon. We can’t just rely on new build or decarbonising the grid. We need to improve the energy performance of the existing housing stock which means retrofitting circa 26 million homes in just under three decades. The sheer scale of this challenge is daunting, but we need to start somewhere. And the sooner we start, the more chance we have of even remotely getting close to Net Zero 2050.