The UK's experience in mitigating climate change: a planned strategy or a learning curve?

Bennadji, Amar

Abstract

Reducing the CO2 emission by 80% from 1990 level by 2050 is a challenging operation for the UK. This challenge has embarked the whole nation in a national exercise that involves professionals in all sectors, corporations, SMEs, families and individuals. The nation meets every day with new tasks, initiatives and incentives designed to meet that target. The built environment is one aspect of this multi-faceted exercise and within the built environment itself many aspects are being tackled. This paper evaluates the current legislations, initiatives and incentives introduced in the UK to reduce the energy demand in the Built Environment and how they contribute to meeting the UK's international obligation in cutting CO2 emission. Incentives such as feeding tariff for renewable energy, Green Deal for upgrading buildings and many other initiatives; have been withdrawn, revised or replaced after their excessive success or unexpected failure. These actions reflect the lack of clear plan and strategy. This paper won't examine the reasons of these success or failures but will use these disruptions as a call for the establishment of serious tools and mechanisms as a platform for discussion in mitigating climate change. Although the theme of this conference is dedicated to developing world, we believe that exchanging our experiences will benefit developing countries in avoiding our mistakes and follow successful steps. There is certainly no benefit in re-experiencing same failures as the world is embarked in the same climate change mitigating exercise.

Citation

BENNADJI, A. 2014. The UK's experience in mitigating climate change: a planned strategy or a learning curve? In Proceedings of the 30th Passive low energy architecture international conference (PLEA 2014): sustainable habitat for developing societies: choosing the way forward, 16-18 December 2014, Ahmedabad, India. Ahmedabad: CEPT University press [online], volume 3, pages 35-42. Available from: http://www.plea2014.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/PLEA2014_Proceedings_Vol_3.pdf

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 30th Passive low energy architecture international conference (PLEA 2014)
• Start Date: Dec 16, 2014
• End Date: Dec 18, 2014
• Acceptance Date: Dec 16, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Dec 16, 2014
• Publication Date: Jan 31, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 3, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 3, 2018
• Publisher: CEPT University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 35-42
• Keywords: CO2; Reducing; Emissions; Built environment; Climate change
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/2988
• Publisher URL: http://www.plea2014.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/PLEA2014_Proceedings_Vol_3.pdf
• Contract Date: Jul 3, 2018