Policy and strategy challenges for climate change and building stocks

Issues raised by the papers in the Building Research Information special issue titled 'Climate Change: National Building Stocks' (2007) include the need for an explicitly engineering vision of low-energy and low-carbon futures, the need to develop detailed, dynamic models of the interactions between building stocks and energy supply systems, the importance of data in supporting both the development and the implementation of roadmaps to low-carbon futures, the likely role of micro-generation in low-carbon futures, and the phenomenon of rebound and its implications for energy-efficiency technologies. There appears to be consensus on all but the last two. This paper proposes three alternatives to Saunders' formulation of the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate, based on the view that rebound is only likely to be a problem if energy-efficiency improvements are implemented in the absence of a carbon cap. The paper ends by reviewing the interactions between regulatory and economic environment, culture and technology, and their potential impacts on energy use and carbon emissions.