CREDS researchers from UCL recently hosted a briefing, organised by the Edge, that brought together representatives from the main construction industry professional institutions.
On 19 September, CREDS researchers from UCL hosted a briefing, organised by the Edge, that brought together representatives from the main construction industry professional institutions. These institutions had agreed to collaborate on an urgent and concerted response to achieving the 2050 net-zero target.
The Committee for Climate Change (CCC) net-zero report is an ambitious plan to move the UK from a high emission economy to a net-zero position by 2050. It requires, over the next 30 years, everything relating to the built environment to be progressively decarbonised – heat, electricity, steel, concrete and the processes of construction, refurbishment and demolition. While the end-state is fairly clear, the path that we must follow is extremely challenging and involves multiple players acting rapidly in concert to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions.
The briefing reviewed and considered:
- The assumptions behind the report that Element Energy and UCL produced for CCC on energy use in residential stock.
- The political, social, economic and technical challenges of delivering a zero carbon outcome.
- The wider impacts of some of the future strategies for decarbonisation and the complementary roles of demand reduction and decarbonisation of supply.
The event was chaired by Robin Nicholson, Senior Partner at Cullinan Studio and Convenor of The Edge.
Speakers were:
- Rokia Raslan, Senior Lecturer, Bartlett Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, UCL.
- Foaad Tahir, Element Energy.
- Tadj Oreszczyn, Professor of Energy and Environment and CREDS Building Theme Lead at UCL Energy Institute.
- Robert Lowe, Professor of Energy and Building Science and CREDS Decarbonising Heat Challenge Lead at UCL Energy Institute.
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