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UK FIRES: Locating Resource Efficiency at the heart of Future Industrial Strategy

UK FIRES is a research programme aiming to reveal and stimulate industrial growth in the UK compatible with a rapid transition to zero emissions.

Living with zero emissions by 2050 means electrifying everything and using only nuclear or renewable electricity. However, it takes time to expand our generation and, in reality, we’re facing a period in which we’ll be short of energy. We raised this in our ground-breaking report Absolute Zero and our programme is now focused on revealing the business growth opportunities that will occur in a period of energy restraint. We’re designing new material processing techniques, new decision-making tools and new approaches to design, while revealing opportunities for entrepreneurship, finance and policy to accelerate our move to zero emissions. At the same time, we’re exploring new communication channels to share these ideas with many publics.

Every year since 1990, the reference date of the Climate Change act, the cars on the roads of the UK have become heavier, internal temperatures in winter have risen, the rate at which we discard goods and buildings has increased and the number of flights we’ve taken has increased. This makes no sense. With fewer than thirty years left, UK FIRES is revealing the lowest risk path to zero emissions prosperity in the UK by 2050.