Garden Office Blog

Report aims to tackle eco perceptions

By Steven Willis on 17th February, 2010

A new report from the Zero Carbon Hub and Energy Saving Trust is calling for the construction industry to develop a way to promote green homes and sustainable housing features among buyers without presenting them as experimental. The report, "Marketing Tomorrow's New Homes", outlines a general wariness among the public of political motivation in green developments, and a sense that environmentally-friendly technologies are expensive and unproven.

The report also goes on to highlight the importance of creating a positive perception of low carbon homes by looking at the language used to market them.

The apparently growing scepticism of climate change science in some quarters has been accelerated by recent revelations that the prestigious IPCC's major report in 2007 contained a number of dubious claims - particularly regarding the degradation of the Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest - that were later proven to be based on unsubstantiated or less than reliable research. In addition to this, the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit e-mail hacking scandal further muddied the waters.

The incidents - although disparate - appear to be the opportunity that many media sceptics had been waiting for, the chance to dismiss climate science as a whole and in effect, tar decades of sound research with a broad, indiscriminate brush of uncertainty and fallacy. In reality, both cases were simply soundbites that formed small parts of much wider research efforts and represented little more than straight-forward miscommunication that has since been explained.

Whether the reported scepticism manages to develop into something that will derail the work of climate scientists remains to be seen, but the re-configuring of how low carbon homes are presented might be the start of a new approach in green industries. Moving away from the almost elitist status symbol, 'eco bling' associations may well be an opportunity to sell green on its performance merits and, as the Zero Carbon Hub and EST are attempting, to "drip-feed" eco-features into the market.


Category:  Company Updates

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