Publications

Accelerating innovation in building retrofit for a net zero future (September 2025) – Many UK homes and other buildings are poorly insulated, expensive to heat, and rely on fossil fuels for heating and cooking. Upgrades through retrofit can help deliver comfortable, climate-resilient, low-carbon dwellings, but challenges such as the scale of disruption and limited options for suitable products put many people off. This background briefing, which shares insights from the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator programme, showcases some of the ways in which innovation in the building retrofit sector can help overcome these challenges and how targeted support for innovators can help get these products to market, benefitting households and helping to build a thriving UK retrofit sector.

Explore other briefing papers and publications from the team at Imperial’s Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment.

Cleared for Take-off: Unlocking Cleantech Innovation in UK Aviation (July 2025) – With strategic investment in diverse clean technologies, smart regulation that enables innovation and bold institutional backing that keeps British aerospace excellence at home, the UK can shape the future of flight. The prize is substantial: economic strength, regional growth and global competitiveness with the added benefit of supporting net zero.

Staying the Course: UK Cleantech in 2024 – This report builds on the findings of 2023, reviewing the UK’s progress in cleantech innovation, investment, and policy within an evolving global context. It also looks ahead to 2025, identifying the actions needed to maintain the UK’s competitive edge and strengthen its role in the global transition to a low-carbon economy.

Recharge, refocus, rebuild Cleantech for UK’s vision for a clean industrial revolution: Recharge the cleantech economy by closing the scaleup funding gap; Refocus on enabling policy; Rebuild British leadership in key cleantech sectors.

UK Cleantech 2023 Progress Report: Charting cleantech progress in 2023; Identifying bottlenecks to scale cleantech in the UK; Looking ahead at upcoming 2024 trends.

Innovation in the UK power sector: How to fast track deployment to meet the UK’s 2035 goals.

Building the next generation of cleantech champions The latest VC data for cleantech in the UK; A mapping of the ecosystem of cleantech innovators and investors in the UK; How ambitious policymaking could help supercharge the UK cleantech ecosystem.

The CleanTech Policy Coalition, led by Startup Coalition, brings together academia, investors and startup founders to build a policy agenda that accelerates the use of technology to mitigate climate change. Undaunted is a founding member.

A New Era for ClimateTech (December 2024) – The Coalition interviewed and surveyed leading UK ClimateTech startups on their perspectives on the new Labour government in the wake of its General Election victory back in July 2024.

Built Different (September 2024) – Startup Coalition is calling for the Government to transform its approach to building and retrofitting homes, powered by British tech. Our new ‘Built Different’ report finds that, despite evidence showing that insulating homes properly could save the UK economy £136bn over thirty years including £13bn to the NHS alone, successive governments have failed to produce a credible plan to decarbonise buildings and homes. Our blueprint for Building Differently sets out recommendations.

Unlocking Climate Innovation (November 2023) – We outline low to no-cost steps for the government to unlock climate innovation across the UK. Of the 28 recommendations set out in our 2022 report, only two have been delivered by Government, though sixteen have progressed, but ten have made no meaningful progress whatsoever. The ClimateTech sector can support jobs and growth across the UK and will be a vital part of producing a prosperous and greener future – but Government needs to unlock this potential through regulatory change. We’ll keep fighting for these 28 recommendations.

Towards unearthing neglected climate innovations from scientific literature using Large Language Models (preprint, November 2024) – Climate change poses an urgent global threat, needing the rapid identification and deployment of innovative solutions. We hypothesise that many of these solutions already exist within scientific literature but remain underutilised. To address this gap, this study employs a curated dataset sourced from OpenAlex, a comprehensive repository of scientific papers. Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT4-o from OpenAI, we evaluate title-abstract pairs from scientific papers on seven dimensions, covering climate change mitigation potential, stage of technological development, and readiness for deployment. The outputs of the language models are then compared with human evaluations to assess their effectiveness in identifying promising yet overlooked climate innovations. Our findings suggest that these LLM-based models can effectively augment human expertise, uncovering climate solutions that are potentially impactful but with far greater speed, throughput and consistency. Here, we focused on UK-based solutions, but the workflow is region-agnostic. This work contributes to the discovery of neglected innovations in scientific literature and demonstrates the potential of AI in enhancing climate action strategies. Part of the work of Undaunted’s Climate Soltuions Catalyst.

Is cleantech entrepreneurship missing out on the Diversity Dividend? (December 2018) The London Sustainable Development Commission conducted a survey and a series of workshops in 2018 to deep dive into the issues, challenges and opportunities for women led cleantech enterprises and those women looking to start one.

The Action Plan (2020) developed from this initial evidence base aims to ensure that the London cleantech economy benefits from attracting female innovators to the field, keeping them in a thriving business community and helping them succeed in cleantech entrepreneurship as current and future market leaders.

Learn more about the Women in CleanTech initiative.

Finding your first space: a guide for startups – The UK has a growing climate innovation community, comprising businesses with varied and specialist space needs: securing your first space as a startup can be overwhelming. This guide covers what you should consider before committing to a space, from both a landlord’s and startup’s perspective. It explains some of the language and terminology that you might hear during the process, and offers top tips.

UNICEF’s Innovation30 initiative, launched in 2023, brings together young climate innovators under 30 in collaboration with 13 leading global climate accelerators.

Catalysing a New Global Industry of Climate Innovators (2024) – This Undaunted report explains why a cohort of young climate innovators is critical to addressing the global climate change challenge and shows why investment in young innovators is critical. Ambitions for Innovation 30 invites sector-wide conversations and action to raise the scale of funding to young innovators towards a net-zero, climate-resilient economy. Investment in young people could be the tipping point for climate innovation to outpace the impact of the climate crisis. Read the report to find out more.