Net Zero Living

About the programme

Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme is a £60 million, three-year programme that aims to help places and businesses across the UK to accelerate the delivery of the transition to net zero.

Many of the immediate solutions needed to transition places to net zero already exist. However, challenges are often encountered when trying to deliver these solutions at scale. There are often barriers to overcome including coordinating many stakeholders, engaging with citizens, attracting finance or navigating procurement and governance processes.

We recognise that local authorities can directly address or influence up to 30% of the UK’s total carbon emissions, and help facilitate the reduction of emissions across a place even more, through their influence in planning decisions, policy setting and defining local goals.

Aims and objectives

The Net Zero Living programme aims to help places to open markets by:

• Removing the non-technical barriers to demand, including skills, organisational capacity, citizen engagement, financing, procurement and governance processes, which can all create barriers to the rapid scale up and adoption of net zero solutions.
• Driving widespread business growth and innovation across the economy.
• Unlocking significant additional private investment to enable true levelling-up both between and within places.

To understand what is meant by non-technical systemic barriers, please watch this short recording.