Net Zero – Entrepreneurial Futures (2024 – 2025)

Working with businesses to deliver research and development-led approaches to achieving net zero
Close up of the Sustainability Hub's external facade
The Entrepreneurial Futures project ended in March 2025.
To find out about other opportunities to collaborate with the Â鶹´«Ã½ on net zero projects, please contact the Sustainable Earth Institute .
Through the Entrepreneurial Futures project's net-zero strand, the University collaborated with businesses in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly on low-carbon projects.
Our support included the opportunity to partner with a Business Research Fellow to carry out research informed by business needs around one of the following topics:
  • living wall systems
  • cob as a sustainable building material
  • nature-based solutions for carbon offsetting.
The project also funded the Net Zero Internship and Leadership programme.
Current students and recent graduates of the University worked with businesses across Cornwall on a variety of projects to help businesses reduce their carbon emissions and attended workshops at the Sustainable Earth Institute to develop their sustainable leadership skills.
View over countryside looking towards Redruth in Cornwall
 
 
 

Research themes

Green Wall Close Up
Built Environment: Living Walls
Exploring new advances and climate change variables in nature-based living wall systems.
Business Research Fellow: Jack Morewood
CobBauge Building
Built Environment: CobBauge
Investigating the performance of cob as a construction material through dynamic thermal modelling to predict climate and commercial viability.
Business Research Fellow: Halat Alnaqshabandy
Oak woodland. A group of trees on a hill.
Carbon offsetting: Nature-based solutions
Mapping nature-based terrestrial carbon offsets, focusing on land of marginal agricultural profitability.
Post-doctoral Research Fellow: Tracey-Anne Najafpour Navaei

Net-Zero Exchange

Supporting the race to net zero.
A network of researchers and enterprises exploring a whole-systems approach to net-zero carbon emissions.
net-zero connections

Net zero explained

Professor Ian Bailey shines a light on the importance of climate change acts and asks how we reconcile the time frames over which climate policy needs to be developed with short-term political pressures – a challenging task that both present and future governments will need to address when trying to introduce policies to achieve net-zero emissions.
Research at the Centre for Decarbonisation and Offshore Renewable Energy aims to make climate solutions more affordable, more technologically feasible and less politically contentious.
 

Entrepreneurial Futures: Net-Zero Team

Entrepreneurial Futures