After a wobble under the previous government, the UK delegation heading to COP29 in Azerbaijan will be aiming to reassert Britain’s credentials as a global leader on climate change.

Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband will lead negotiations himself, pledging ambitious climate action and seeking similar commitments from other countries.

But behind the climate diplomacy, the UK has a problem: it's at serious risk of missing its climate pledges over the next few years.

In its Nationally Determined Contributions, the most important part of the COP process, Britain has already pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 68% from 1990 levels by 2030, and its advisor has recommended this pledge extend to 81% by 2035.

These targets are in line with the levels written into the UK’s own carbon budgets, which are legally binding.

The problem is that the UK may be about to fall far off track in delivering these obligatory commitments. That problem is specifically related to home heating, and the UK’s very slow progress on replacing gas and oil boilers in homes with low-carbon alternatives.

For all the progress the UK has made on decarbonising electricity and the ambition of the Clean Power 2030 pledge, the UK’s climate efforts over the next decade will be made or broken by heating our homes - almost a sixth of the UK’s annual carbon emissions.

To keep up with its legal obligations and treaty pledges, the UK would need to replace about 1 in 10 boilers with clean heating over the next parliament, a rate 12 times faster than achieved under the last parliament.

And while the UK has made some progress over the last year, roughly doubling the number of heat pumps installed, it's doing so from a very low base, with one of the slowest heat pump rollouts in Europe.

These problems have largely been inherited from the previous administration, which delayed or reversed a series of key policies on home heating. Boilers are still being installed in new homes despite years of promises, crucial action to reduce electricity prices stalled, and key measures to phase out gas boilers and encourage the heating industry to sell more heat pumps have been delayed.

If the new government in Westminster wants to return the UK to its long-standing role as a climate leader, it needs to reverse this situation quickly. Fortunately, a good set of technological solutions for decarbonising homes now exists.

What's needed is policy to make it happen.

First, the UK needs a clear roadmap to clean heating for the whole country.

The government should swiftly rule out using hydrogen for home heating, which has caused so much uncertainty within the heating industry, especially among the all-important gas heating engineers. It should give the public a timeframe and a positive story about the transition from dirty to clean heating.

Second, it needs to beef up its approach to delivery.

As well as encouraging innovation in the UK’s nascent clean heating industry, it should also offer some households a new choice for greening their homes: switching together with their neighbours, as part of an area-based approach. These types of schemes, which are especially appropriate in denser areas where space is at a premium, could make life easier and cheaper for households while allowing the government to dictate the pace of the transition.

To make this work, the government should build expertise in home heating in a new, dedicated national agency, while also creating new local bodies to help homes switch en masse.

Third, it must take steps to make heat pumps more affordable.

The key step is to make electricity cheaper, by rebalancing the levies which make electricity artificially expensive. This change would mean switching to a heat pump saves the typical household £400 on their energy bills compared to a gas boiler. Clean heating can then become a solution to both the climate and the cost of living crisis.

Heat pumps also involve a high upfront cost, like many other green technologies. While the government will need to maintain some subsidies, the key to solving this is by combining affordable finance with lower energy bills. If the government can help to lower the cost of capital as well as electricity, many households will be better off with a heat pump.

Home heating is not the most difficult aspect of climate change - it has nothing on reducing meat consumption or flying - but it is the country’s biggest challenge on climate change over the next decade. If the UK wants to reclaim its role as a climate leader, it needs to turn around its tepid performance on heating, or else its climate pledges will leave other countries cold.