We’re not here to save your soul and we don’t care why you’re doing it, so long as you’re doing what needs to be done
- Douglas Crawford-Brown
A landmark energy-efficiency initiative which aims to reduce the carbon emissions from buildings in Cambridge by 30% before 2050 through a massive, city-wide retrofit scheme, has been launched.
The Cambridge Retrofit Project will function partly as a social enterprise, and partly as a professional delivery service, and is being run by representatives from organisations and businesses across the East Anglian city.
It has set itself the formidable task of supporting the retrofits of approximately 20,000 private homes, and another 20,000 non-residential properties, before the mid-way point of the 21st century. These will include Victorian terraces, modern shopping centres, and the medieval college buildings of the city’s 804-year-old University.
The aim is to make a decisive contribution to the UK’s carbon reduction target of 80% by 2050 in a single move focused on the energy-efficiency of buildings. In the process, the project will also seek to make Cambridge the first city to hit that national objective. From today, businesses and residents are being urged to sign up through a newly-launched website, www.cambridgeretrofit.org, where a full list of the many organisations already involved can also be found.
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Image: The wide range of building types in Cambridge, ranging from modern structures to medieval college buildings, make it a natural community in which to test the feasibility of city-wide retrofits to cut carbon emissions.
Credit: SirCam
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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