The Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) latest supplementary analysis of the Seventh Carbon Budget must influence the way the UK talks about net zero. Too often, decarbonisation is still framed as a cost burden – something environmentally necessary, but economically painful. The CCC’s conclusion is much sharper. Continued reliance on fossil fuels is the expensive path.
Its analysis found that the total additional cost of a single fossil fuel price spike on the scale of 2022 is likely to be as large as the total net additional cost of meeting the UK’s pathway to net zero through to 2050. It also found that, for every pound spent on net zero, the benefits outweigh the costs by 2.2 to 4.1 times, while energy losses in a net zero system would be worth around £30 billion a year, compared with £60 billion in today’s system.
This makes decarbonisation an affordability argument, a productivity argument and, increasingly, a business resilience argument.
Energy demand is now a strategic risk
Recent global fuel shocks have shown that energy security now depends on the ability to manage demand as well as supply. When markets tighten, governments look for ways to reduce demand quickly alongside efforts to secure more fuel.
That is already visible across parts of Asia, where recent emergency measures have included remote-working policies, cooling restrictions, limits on government travel, public campaigns to reduce demand and measures to encourage public transport. The International Energy Agency’s policy tracker lists, for example, Friday working from home for civil servants in Indonesia, remote work for civil servants in Malaysia, remote work and video conferencing across public and private sectors in Thailand, and remote work encouragement in Vietnam.
Even the International Energy Agency (IEA) has placed “work from home where possible” at the top of its immediate demand-side options for easing oil price pressures, ahead of measures such as lower speed limits, public transport use and car sharing.
For the UK, the lesson is clear: energy demand has become a point of vulnerability. Organisations that understand, manage and flex their demand will be better placed to withstand geopolitical shocks, volatile fuel markets and climate pressures than those that do not.
In this sense, the built environment has a significant role to play. When governments turn to remote working, cooling rules or travel limits during energy shocks, they are recognising that workplaces are part of the energy system. Offices influence how much energy is used, when it is used, and how easily demand can be reduced without disrupting productivity. The UK has an opportunity to move from emergency demand response to planned resilience by making commercial buildings cheaper to run, easier to optimise and better able to cope with changing climates and conditions.
Offices are strategic energy assets
Viewed through that lens, UK offices and commercial buildings should sit much higher up the resilience agenda.
The buildings and product uses sector accounted for 22% of UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2025. Of those emissions, 16% came from commercial buildings and 11% from public sector buildings. That figure also excludes emissions linked to electricity used in buildings, which are counted under electricity supply rather than the buildings sector.
The non-domestic estate is also highly concentrated. In England and Wales, offices account for 15% of non-domestic electricity consumption and 7% of gas consumption. Just 7% of the highest-consuming electricity sites and 4% of the highest-consuming gas sites are responsible for 80% of overall consumption. Buildings over 1,000 square metres make up around 7% of non-domestic buildings, but account for 60% of electricity consumption and 70% of gas consumption.
That concentration matters more than ever as meaningful progress can come from targeted action on larger, higher-consuming commercial and public buildings, delivering outsized benefits for energy security, operating costs and emissions reduction.
Heat is turning comfort into business continuity
At the same time, the climate reality facing UK workplaces is changing.
The Met Office confirmed that summer 2025 was the UK’s warmest on record, with a mean temperature of 16.10°C. Its analysis also found that a summer as hot or hotter than 2025 is now around 70 times more likely than it would be in a natural climate without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
The CCC’s adaptation assessment points in the same direction. By 2050, the UK’s average summer is projected to be around 1.6°C warmer and 13% drier than the 1981–2000 average, and a summer as hot as 2018 is expected to become an average summer.
For businesses, landlords and public bodies, this is now a direct operational risk. Buildings need to remain safe, comfortable and productive during hotter summers without driving up energy bills or placing avoidable strain on cooling and ventilation systems.
The productivity stakes are real. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has estimated that hot days in Great Britain caused £28.6 billion of lost gross value added between 1998 and 2021, in 2022 prices, even assuming some level of adaptation. The average annual loss was £1.2 billion, while modelled losses reached £5.3 billion back in 2020.
Building performance has become part of the UK’s economic infrastructure.
The opportunity is to cut waste while protecting productivity
The UK can reduce energy demand while keeping people productive. The real opportunity lies in cutting waste from buildings, systems and operations. The challenge is not just how buildings are designed, but how they actually perform in operation. There is still a long-recognised ‘performance gap’ that continues to drive unnecessary energy use, cost and emissions.
Many organisations know what they pay for energy. Far fewer know precisely where that energy is being wasted, how their buildings behave under changing occupancy, or whether heating, cooling and ventilation systems are working efficiently together. That knowledge gap is where unnecessary cost, carbon and operational risk accumulate.
Combining predictive simulation with live operational data of buildings allows organisations to understand not just how buildings should perform, but how they actually behave, and to continuously optimise that performance over time. For example, with this approach, organisations can test retrofit options before committing capital, understand how buildings will respond to hotter conditions, identify when systems drift away from optimal performance, and optimise cooling and ventilation in ways that protect comfort rather than undermine it. This enables more confident decision-making, allowing organisations to prioritise interventions based on real performance impact rather than assumptions.
This is already moving beyond theory. A UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) case study of IES Live at the University of Liverpool’s Foundation Building found that, by connecting live data from the building management system, meters and sensors to a performance digital twin, the project verified 23% energy savings and £25,000 in operational cost savings over an initial nine-month period following an HVAC refurbishment (April – Dec 2023). When extending the period assessed from February 2023 to May 2025, the figures for energy consumption displays a 20.95% reduction from the 2019 baseline and have resulted in savings of £50,080.
That kind of intervention is practical operational intelligence. It helps organisations see where energy is being wasted, act before faults become costly, and make buildings more resilient in real time.
The UK needs to reframe office decarbonisation
The debate around the future of work often separates office attendance, productivity, property value and climate action into different conversations. Today’s reality is that the four are intrinsically connected.
A future-fit workplace will need to do several things at once. It will need to use less energy, provide healthier and more comfortable conditions, support changing patterns of occupancy, and remain operational through heatwaves, fuel shocks and rising energy costs.
A building that only performs well on a mild day, with stable fuel prices and predictable occupancy, is exposed. Resilient buildings need to perform under the real and ever-evolving conditions that businesses now face.
That is why decarbonising the UK’s offices is now a matter of economic resilience. It should be treated as part of the country’s affordability strategy, productivity strategy and business continuity planning, as well as a core climate priority.
The CCC has made the macroeconomic case clear: fossil fuel dependence is costly, volatile and wasteful. The next step is to apply that logic building by building. Every kilowatt-hour wasted in an office, university, hospital or public building creates unnecessary emissions, higher costs, weaker resilience and, in hotter summers, greater productivity risk.
The energy transition will run through wind farms, upgraded grids and electric vehicles. It will also run through the offices, schools, hospitals and workplaces people use every day. For the UK to keep working through fuel shocks and hotter summers, those buildings must become cheaper to run, smarter to manage and resilient enough for the climate already at the doorstep – underpinned by better data, better modelling and a clearer understanding of how they perform in the real world.
Ruth Kerrigan
Ruth Kerrigan is Chief Operating Officer at global climate tech firm, IES.
