Suchergebnisse

In the UK, the sustainability agenda for housebuilding is now over ten years old, dating from the 2006 launch of the Code for Sustainable Homes as the benchmark for the reduction of carbon emissions in all new housing. The government's 2015 decision however, to dismantle the Code for Sustainable Homes and remove the 2016 Zero Carbon targets, has meant that with little warning, the sustainability industry has had to start fending for itself. Without the incentive of tariffs to focus the minds of the developers, the sustainability industry is now looking vulnerable, and the realities of having to be financially viable are coming home to roost. But our statutory requirement to reach an 80% carbon reduction by 2050 has not changed, and neither have the reasons for achieving it.During that time, the sustainability agenda was a key driver for innovation within the housebuilding industry. However, rather than focusing on the many benefits that innovation can bring, in this paper the authors look at the barriers to adoption of innovation and asks whether these barriers have been fully understood by those who are accusing the housing industry of complacency for its failure to reinvent itself. The main method used for investigating what these barriers might be was a series of industry interviews, carried out across all the sectors defined as being part of that decision-making process, in order to better understand how their motivations might differ, and if so whether this disconnect could be preventing the progress that all individually profess to want but none appear able to deliver. The findings suggest that a more informed approach to promoting or considering any innovative product within the housebuilding industry could avoid many of the barriers currently being confronted head on.

Introduction & BackgroundPrevious literature has found that financially vulnerable households often make involuntary spending trade-offs between necessities, particularly energy and food. This effect is especially pronounced during winter, when homes require greater energy expenditure to maintain an adequate temperature. Despite frequent colloquial and journalistic references to the "heat-or-eat dilemma", there remains limited recent empirical evidence of this phenomenon in the UK. This is a considerable knowledge gap, given recent economic hardship and rising energy costs.
Objectives & ApproachThis study uses survey data (n=2877), collected during winter 2022 in London, UK, to analyse the sociodemographic and behavioural characteristics of respondents affecting self-reported heat-or-eat trade-offs. The survey was deployed via users of the food-sharing app, OLIO, and quota restraints were enforced to ensure the socioeconomic representativeness of the sample (based on Index of Multiple Deprivation). The survey question of interest (i.e., the dependent variable) was ""in the past year, how frequently did your household reduce or forego expenses for basic household necessities, such as medicine or food, in order to pay an energy bill?"" and responses were recorded using a discrete, ordinal scale: never; 1-2 months; some months but not every month; almost every month.
Given the nature of the dependent variable, the Random Parameters Ordered Probit (RPOP) model, a statistical modelling framework used in the case of discrete, ordered outcomes, was considered suitable. The RPOP approach allows the effect of various independent variables to be explored, which in this case, are sociodemographic and behavioural characteristics of respondents.
Relevance to Digital FootprintsThe relevance to the digital footprints theme is embedded in the study's aim: to draw insights into social issues through the analysis of sociodemographic and behavioural data retrieved from the users of a mobile app.
ResultsInitial results show that a considerable proportion (~37%) of the sample made heat-or-eat trade-offs at least one month of the year. Interestingly, this is several times higher than the official rate of fuel poverty in London (11.9%), suggesting that the government's fuel poverty metric fails to capture many homes that display signs of energy unaffordability. The RPOP model estimation results show that a broad range of sociodemographic variables (including features of household composition and disability), as well as several behavioural features derived from the respondents' use of the OLIO app, including the frequency of app usage and food requests, significantly affected the likelihood of heat-or-eat trade-offs.
Conclusions & ImplicationsOur results can be used to guide remedial food and fuel poverty policies. It may be particularly useful to focus on the sociodemographic variables that lead to heat-or-eat trade-offs, given that the English fuel poverty metric places arguably unjust focus on a home's energy efficiency, rather than occupant characteristics.

This paper was accepted for publication in International Journal of Ventilation in Aug 2016, and published online in Nov 2016. ; This work was also funded and supported by the European Union's Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No 314283. ['HERB': www.euroretrofit.com/]; and the Innovate UK programme for 'Scaling Up Retrofit' under project No: 101609. ['PULSE': www.pulseairtest.com/]