On Wednesday 20th January 2020 Gravity, a leading smart campus development, hosted a virtual round table ‘Powering the UK’s Green Recovery’. It brought together industry and thought leaders from across the private and public sectors and was Chaired by Gravity Director & CGLN founder, Lord David Triesman.
As the UK faces its biggest economic downturn in generations, and concerns over climate change intensify, there appears to be a dearth of information around the realities of bringing the Green Revolution into fruition.
The discussion sought to fill this gap between the Government’s ideology of a Green Revolution and how it can be achieved since it is short on detail around topics including preparing the electricity grid for renewables; energy storage; tidal power and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the all-important stimulating Clean Growth enterprises to create jobs.
The roundtable sought to clarify three lines of thought.
What will the delivery of a Green Recovery look like?
How do we transform vision and rhetoric into concrete action?
How will a Net-Zero focused stimulus work in practice?
The outputs were practical next steps for how the UK can achieve the government set targets for Net-Zero, and with COP-26 on the horizon, the UK has a unique opportunity to set both climate targets and a detailed roadmap towards stimulating Clean Growth companies to achieve them.
Attendees addressed the strategic issues around the funding of emerging clean growth sectors. It was broadly agreed that the delivery of innovation should be supported by the government but led by the more adaptive and less budget-restricted private sector. It was mentioned that COP-26 has the potential to deliver a blueprint toward decarbonisation and if successful could inspire young minds to join these emerging sectors.
Other key areas discussed were;
how companies and financial institutions can be motivated to decarbonise their operations and portfolio’s, highlighting the shift towards carbon focused financial reporting frameworks.
how these new standards have created a culture of accountability but warned against an overreliance on a bottom-up approach from consumers which could and has led to ‘Greenwashing’.
the value and confidence in current metrics used and how granular they would have to become to reduce carbon emissions
how to invest and how to best decide which emerging technologies deserve those funds
The Green Recovery report can be found here.
