Net Zero begins at home
How ‘green’ is your home, and is it fit for climate change? Britain needs to retrofit 2 homes per minute if it is to decarbonise homes by 2050, 5 million homes in England (one in six) are at risk of flooding, and one in five already overheats.
The climate emergency is a global one but how it plays out across the planet, and what we need to do to address it, varies enormously at national and local levels. In Britain, the age of our housing stock — around a third of our homes were built before the Second World War — creates huge challenges but, somehow, we must find a way to mitigate the impacts of climate change while also investing to deaccelerate it. The stakes are high. Half of our emissions come from home-based heating and electricity and the Climate Change Committee has forecast a trebling of the death toll from heatwaves by 2050.
A new survey by Ipsos MORI as part of the Future of Home project for Nationwide, found 61% of homeowners expressing an interest in making changes to their property to reduce their household’s emissions but just 38% are concerned about this (inflated by higher levels of concern among generations less likely to own their own home). While half say they have made green improvements, the extent of what’s been done is usually very limited.
This lack of urgency comes despite a very real incentive to do something. The same survey found 43% of the view that energy efficiency has become more important to them during the pandemic, and improvements in energy efficiency feature towards the top of wish-lists in surveys we’ve run for developers. At the same time, other studies have found very low awareness of EPCs (Energy Performance Certificates) and people will certainly not know that most homes built before 1990 achieve less than a C grade.
Knowledge is a ‘consumer blind spot’ with a quarter of those who have made green improvements saying it was difficult to find out information about the options and support available. People say cost matters too. The housing crisis means that enough people can’t get housing they can afford, many are in ‘debt peril’, and any sort of up-front costs or rent rises to fund retrofitting will be unwelcome.
This means that any policy designed to green our homes will need a strong, tailored ‘retail offer’, appealing to people’s pockets as well as their principles. There is a strong sense that tackling climate change is the right thing to do but also question marks about ‘what’s in it for me?’, especially when it comes to bricks and mortar; remember that Britons spend more of their income on housing than any other developed nation.
You really wouldn’t start from here. But start we must. Improving the sustainability of our housing will become an ever more urgent part of our housing crisis, but the crisis will make turning things around that much harder.
