University expertise can drive net zero – if people can find it

The UK's net zero challenge has long been framed as a knowledge problem – one that requires new technologies and deeper understanding. But the harder problem is integration: connecting what universities know with the people who need to know it.

Ask where net zero expertise lives and the answer is: everywhere, and therefore nowhere. It sits in engineering departments and business schools, in materials labs and social science centres, distributed across more than a hundred institutions with no shared front door.

For a business trying to decarbonise a supply chain, or a local authority writing a heat strategy, the university system presents as a maze. The knowledge exists; the route to it does not. That is not a research problem – it is a knowledge exchange problem, and it is the one the net zero transition keeps tripping over.

“The knowledge exists; the route to it does not.”

The transition depends on knowledge integration between universities, business, government and communities – four worlds with different timescales, different languages and different definitions of evidence. Integration is a skilled activity in its own right, and the UK underinvests in the people who do it.

None of this is an argument for another portal. It is an argument for treating discoverability and translation as infrastructure – funded, staffed and measured with the same seriousness as the research itself.

The prize is considerable. Net zero is the largest coordinated demand for expertise the UK economy has generated in decades. Universities can drive it – if people can find them.