Speakers

Kit Knowles is the founder of Ecospheric, an award-winning sustainability consultancy specialising in low-energy retrofit, heritage buildings, and estate-scale decarbonisation. For over a decade, he has led nationally and internationally recognised projects that translate net-zero ambition into practical, achievable delivery pathways responding to real buildings, real communities, and real constraints.

Notable projects include energy assessment for a sensitive refurbishment and low-energy library archive at The Gamble, a Gothic Revival civic building in St Helens; Towards Net Zero Hamilton Square, a Historic England-funded retrofit feasibility study of listed properties in Wirral; and the energy and sustainability strategy for a near-zero carbon event space incorporating mass timber at Salford’s landmark Victoria Warehouse.

Kit is leading the development of the EARTH (Eco-Architectural Retrofit Toolkit for Heritage) methodology in collaboration with the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture. EARTH is a place-based, whole-building decision-making framework designed to move retrofit beyond fragmented, single-measure approaches. Using scenario-based feasibility, it combines building physics, heritage significance, and whole-life carbon analysis to identify interventions that are technically achievable, heritage-compliant, and operationally viable.

Alongside consultancy work, Kit leads Ecospheric Developments, using live projects as testbeds to validate emerging retrofit strategies in practice.

Kit is Chair and acting executive of the Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB), a Trustee of the Passivhaus Trust, and an advisor to the National Retrofit Hub and Manchester Climate Change Partnership.