Dear ZCB subscriber,

Zero Carbon Britain is now entering a second phase. With funding from several sources we now have two people in place to coordinate the research and build partnerships to move the report forward.

We now have the capacity to look into the project in more depth and coordinate all the help offered by others such as you.

While the first report presented a single scenario, Zero Carbon Britain 2 will identify different pathways to the complete decarbonisation of Britain. To make it into a more rigorous report, Zero Carbon Britain 2 is going to be a collaborative project and we are going to be synthesising the contributions, input and reviewing from many different experts and collaborators.

The research will synthesise material from leading researchers on six key areas:

• The global context and need for the report
• Buildings
• Renewable energy
• Transport
• Land use
• Policy, action and economics

We are currently looking for suggestions of people who might be prepared to be involved and it would be very useful if you could contact me with any suggestions. Please feel free to suggest yourself if this sounds like something that you would be interested in being involved in and would like more information; you don’t have to commit yourself to anything at this stage. A lot of the collaboration and discussion will be occurring online but this will also be supported by a series of six two day seminars held at CAT, bringing together a handful of leading experts in each field. The process will result in the production of a series of briefing papers written by the research team, which will feed into the major report to be published in time for presentation at the 15th UN conference of Parties in Copenhagen in December 2009, and an interactive model that can be used to assess different decarbonisation scenarios.

The first topic to be covered is the context for the report, including the latest climate science and to what greenhouse gas budget we should be restricting ourselves in order to prevent dangerous climate change, as well as the latest evidence on other relevant areas such as the possibility of an early oil peak. Because it is to be covered first we are especially interested at this stage in people who may be prepared to input into or review this section.

There will also be several intern opportunities coming up to help with different aspects of the research. Please contact me if you would like more information.

Thank you for your support,

Sincerely,

Josie Wexler
ZCB2 Research Coordinator