Loft insulation may seem an odd subject for a call to arms. But your loft, possibly your least exciting room, is critical to tackling climate change. That is because efficient insulation helps us use considerably less energy heating homes, which in turn means less fossil fuels will be burnt. But your current insulation material, if you have any, will most probably have both contributed to climate change as well as help prevent it.

The market for building insulation is already huge, worth ￡1.38 billion in the UK alone, and it will become even bigger as we endeavour to achieve net zero emissions from the built environment by 2050. This is because both the UK and the EU are way behind targets for retrofitting existing building stock with a high standard of insulation. Additionally, in most cases, our new builds also fall well short of the level of insulation necessary to help us achieve net zero and will themselves need to be (expensively) retrofitted with better insulation.

Most household energy use goes on heating our homes during the colder months (see Table 3.1). The quickest, most effective and cheapest way of reducing this consumption of energy is to better insulate our homes. That means the warm air we have expensively created for ourselves does not simply leak away, creating a need for yet more warm air, which means burning yet more gas, oil or coal. Our homes are no different to our bodies. Feeling cold? Put a jumper on. House feeling cold? Insulate your loft and walls. Homes in the UK are on average older than homes in the rest of Europe and therefore tend to have poorer insulation. So, they need more heating and use more energy. Shockingly it is not only old homes that are badly insulated. New homes are as well.