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Foresight report launched: Sustainable Energy Management and the Built Environment

The Government ‘Foresight’ think-tank report outlining how human spaces can be adjusted to provide a greener environment was the product of intensive work conducted between 2006 and 2008 by a group of Lead Experts chaired by Professor Yvonne Rydin, Professor of Planning, Environment and Public Policy at the UCL Bartlett School of Planning and Co-Director of the UCL Environment Institute.

The study, entitled ‘Powering Our Lives: Sustainable Energy Management and the Built Environment’, looked at how the buildings and spaces will need to evolve to help cut carbon emissions. It concluded that the UK is stuck with using certain forms of energy, not because they are better but because they have historically dominated other options. The report proposed a number of behavioural and regulatory changes which could help the UK to overcome this inertia and which could be introduced over the next 50 years, including the upgrading of buildings and spaces to provide greater carbon neutrality, a move towards de-centralised energy systems, and improving human behaviour in the built environment.

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