The Infrastructure Podcast: Episode 70

Guest:  Sara Edmonds, co-director, National Retrofit Hub

Retrofitting our built environment

In the podcast today we talk about the opportunities and challenges of retrofitting our built environment to make our homes, offices, industrial buildings and infrastructure more energy efficient but also more resilient to a changing climate.

To meet our vitally important and hugely challenging target to become a net-zero carbon emitter by 2050, we urgently need to decarbonise the UK’s real estate. Our homes, our offices, our commercial buildings, our schools hospitals and public buildings. 

And given that some 40% of our carbon emissions come from the built environment, from heating, powering and operating these buildings - we need to prioritise retrofitting. 

Retrofitting is known to be one of the best ways to address this challenge, as around 80% of the buildings that we will be using in 2050 already exist today. We just need to make them perform better. 

But right now we are not on track – retrofitting our existing building stock is certainly still sitting in the too difficult basket when it comes to meeting the UK’s ambitious net zero targets. 

Yet there are so many examples of how easily it could change.

So to discuss this hugely important topic, and the routes to success, my guest today is Sara Edmonds, who wears many hats but one is as co director of the National Retrofit Hub so should be able to give us plenty of though provoking detail.

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