Last June, in the Green Futures supplement The Future is Retrofit, we referred to the existing housing stock as 'the elephant in the room'. It feels like we’ve come a long way since then.

Domestic energy demand and its associated carbon emissions are breaking into our news media, and the government is mid-way through three consultations on increasing the energy efficiency of our homes. While insulation still isn’t exactly sexy, it is becoming a dinner party discussion, rather than a conversation killer.

Nationally, we’re still working out the best way to deal with this enormous pachyderm in our midst…do we push or pull it, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century? Considering the size of the beast (our homes are responsible for 27% of the UK’s carbon emissions) it’s going to take a lot of both, but we’ve got to be careful which bits we push/pull, and how hard, to avoid the law of unintended consequences. We don’t want to bolt on ‘eco-bling’ before we’ve increased the thermal envelope of the building.

We’ve taken on this challenge as part of our project to help make Bristol the UK’s most sustainable city-region.  ‘Refit West’ is a consortium of local housing experts and specialist delivery partners coordinated by Forum for the Future. The scheme aims to overcome a number of the main barriers: raising demand through a savy marketing and PR campaign; providing loan finance to encourage uptake; and building a strong coalition of trusted surveyors and builders to do the works to a high standard with minimum disruption.

Projects will prioritise demand reduction and efficiency before the installation of low- or zero-carbon energy generation. With the aim being to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the scheme will also offer opportunities to reduce water consumption and waste sent to landfill.

We’ll pilot the scheme this summer by refitting 10 demonstration homes for the main housing types in the area. Then from the autumn onwards, as the heating season returns, we’ll be scaling up our activities. We aim to have completed works on the first 1,000 homes by the end of 2011.

There are people out there who have reduced the CO2 emissions from their homes by 60% or more (27 of them are part of the Old Home Super Home network), which shows that this is technically possible. However, these trail blazers represent just 0.000001% of our 27 million dwellings in the UK.

Our current housing stock represents one of the simplest and most cost-effective approaches to carbon abatement.  Government is currently proposing that all of our homes will have received a ‘whole house’ package of energy efficiency measures by 2030 and that domestic carbon emissions should be approaching zero by 2050.

It’s a massive project, and one that will affect every single person in the UK, as our homes are made fit for the future.  However, one thing is increasingly clear - if we don’t tackle home energy efficiency at large scale that elephant won’t just quietly slip out the back door but will become increasingly dangerous, trampling any chance we have of hitting our national carbon targets.