How do we tackle this?


Whatever you choose to do with your future, decarbonisation will be part of your career. Retail, travel, industry, construction, agriculture, business, manufacturing and entertainment are all built on fossil fuels, and that means they will have to change.


An example of this is, according to the UK’s Climate Change Committee, around 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions come from our homes and how we live in them. About a third of those emissions come from the energy used in homes directly (14% of the total), whilst aviation makes just 7%. So, a big focus of work in the future will be on the 28 million homes across the UK. Electricity for most homes comes from the National Grid and most homes probably have gas or oil central heating, so are certainly using fossil fuels to keep warm, to cook and to power our entertainment habits. Each year, the typical UK home emits somewhere around 8 tonnes of carbon dioxide and “equivalent” gases. Even newly built homes emit more than 1 tonne; every home needs to emit zero carbon or even ‘beyond’ zero to balance out those old homes that can’t quite get to zero.


That means 28 million homes need to be converted to have no carbon emissions. We’ve got to decarbonise every single home in a city the size of Swansea every five weeks, and do it


continuously for every five weeks from now until 2050. Achieving this huge task is going to take lots of skills, some that exist and some that have yet to be invented.


There will be a need for skilled installers to fit the Zero Carbon heating systems for our homes, improved insulation, energy storage and intelligent controls. Behind them we need IT technicians, developers and programmers to create firmware and software, and designers to help make it work well for us. We need product designers and engineers to build the components, innovators to improve them, and managers to organise and deliver them. We need scientists to understand the houses’ performance and psychologists and behaviour experts to help us understand how to work with the people in the homes. We need medics to understand the links of Zero Carbon homes to our health, and researchers to evidence them. We need designers and contractors to conceive and transform each individual home, and we need bankers and financiers to help us all pay for it, with help and oversight from those working in government.


And that’s just to tackle the 14% that comes from the energy used in our homes. The good news is that there are a growing number of training courses and opportunities to start your career in decarbonisation.


36 Make The Future Yours! Issue 1


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