Recent announcements by climate change secretary Ed Miliband are indeed good news (12 March, leader, page 3)

We need low-carbon new homes, hospitals and schools, and we need to avoid the pitfalls that your article on recent Kiwi experience highlights (12 March, page 44).

But that is a small task compared to the upgrading of at least 20 million buildings – the existing stock – by 2050. That is 500,000 buildings a year or about 2,500 buildings every working day for 40 years!

Your leader rightly asks how this will be done. The answer is that construction, planning and engineering need to come together as never before, to deliver low-carbon buildings on a mass market, industrial scale, using standardised solutions. The reality is that, as yet, we just do not have the delivery mechanisms in place to achieve this. The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) is up for this journey into the unknown, but we need to leave soon! Who wants to be a fellow traveller?

Rob Manning, president elect, CIBSE

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