CoP 26 & Climate Change & Zero

Climate Change

The way we live, work and consume today is putting pressure on our environment in a way that will place a disproportionate burden on our children to resolve, if indeed they are able to do so.  

We pump billions of tonnes of Co2 in the global atmosphere year on year, the majority of which will take hundreds, if not thousands of years to dissipate.

Climate change is already here, and its effects can already be seen from Australia to the Antarctic. It’ll place pressures on our resources and infrastructure, within our own lifetime, in a way that we probably don’t fully understand right now.

We need to reduce emissions as soon as possible so that our children don’t have to put technology in place (that hasn’t really been invented yet) to extract carbon from the atmosphere during their lifetime, to clean up the mess we’ve left them in ours.

Zero Carbon

However, the good news is that both the UK and Scottish Governments have committed to becoming Zero Carbon countries, societies, and economies by 2045 and 2050 respectively. Hopefully, a global consensus, and plan, can be reached at CoP26, in November for how we can mitigate the worst effects of climate change and limit warming to 1.5 degrees if indeed that’s still possible.

Here in Scotland moving towards a zero-carbon society and economy will be challenging, but essential, as part of that global plan. We will need to look at the practices and processes across a range of sectors including agriculture, manufacturing, and transport but importantly within housing. For how we move domestic heating and hot water from fossil fuel to renewables and how we improve the energy efficiency of our homes to manage that transition in a way that is sustainable. 

So how do we make our homes green, how do we ensure our homes are sustainable for the future that is coming down the track?