Experts call for transatlantic green housing reform

Experts on both sides of the Atlantic have called for major green housing reforms designed to make it easier to upgrade existing buildings and ensure that home buyers can select the greenest houses available.

Led by President Obama's secretary for housing and urban development Shaun Donovan, officials in the US last week set out demands for an easy-to-understand metric for rating energy efficiency in residential homes.

Donovan used an interview in the Washington Post to call for a metric that would make it easier for home buyers to know how energy efficient their homes were.

"When you buy a car, you know very clearly what the energy efficiency of that is because there's a number on the window. It says: Here's the gas mileage," Donovan said. "We don't know that for housing."

He explained that ultimately, the metric could be used as leverage for home buyers hoping to get mortgage relief.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Economic and Social Research Council last week issued a joint publication with the Technology Strategy Board calling for a major effort to make the UK's existing homes more energy efficient.

The report, which was published following a seminar held in January that looked at building use in the UK, said that while the UK government has a target to make all new UK homes "zero carbon" by 2016, that will not solve the problem of existing housing, much of which still has very low levels of energy efficiency.

The report called for a refurbishment plan for domestic buildings on an even larger scale than that already planned by the government to help the UK meet national and international emissions targets.

Professor Kevin Lomas at the University of Loughborough - who took part in the January seminar - said that reducing the emissions of the UK's 24 million buildings by 40 per cent would mean refurbishing the equivalent of a Cambridge-sized city each month.

According to presentations made during the seminar, the UK's buildings use 45 per cent of the country's energy, which is the equivalent of the combined emissions from transport and manufacturing. The report said that over a quarter of the UK's carbon emissions come from domestic buildings.