Innovative Finance Project
Aims to accelerate the transition to zero-carbon school environments.
Upgrading crumbling classrooms is vital to creating zero carbon schools. But schools struggle to access the finance for these much-needed projects. This leaves their carbon emissions stubbornly high, and puts students’ learning and health at risk.
Through an exciting partnership with the Green Finance Institute (GFI), Let’s Go Zero will lead, inspire and bring together stakeholders to develop innovative finance solutions for school decarbonisation and retrofit.
The need for private investment
Financing education buildings is a highly complex environment – even without the added challenge of a £2 billion per year funding gap to decarbonise them.
Private finance could play a significant role in filling this £2 billion per year finance gap, if done in an appropriate way. Altering the landscape to enable private investment could be pivotal, but can’t be at the expense of investing in education or paying teaching and maintenance staff appropriately to ensure that student education remains the priority.
The GFI and Ashden have developed a series of initial recommendations to assist schools on their decarbonisation journey. These include:
- Calling on the UK Government to remove legislative barriers and clear up the policy on borrowing for schools, creating an appropriate, enabling environment for repayable finance.
- An impartial, quality-controlled technical advice service to work in tandem with funding, allowing for schools to deliver decarbonisation effectively.
These could enable schools to move forward quickly and with confidence on simple, low risk, high impact decarbonisation measures such as building management controls, LED lighting, and rooftop solar PV. Energy savings from these measures could be reinvested alongside building confidence and trust in the supply chain.
If you interested in unlocking new retrofit funding for climate action in schools and would like to learn more about the project, please email letsgozero@ashden.org.
Please note this project will not be giving grants or funding directly to schools.
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