Climate Plan Scorecards
A fifth of UK local councils have still not published plans to tackle climate change, despite most having declared a climate emergency more than two years ago (via Climate Emergency UK)
For the first time, all UK councils’ written Climate Action Plans have been assessed and scored, creating the Council Climate Plan Scorecards, published today by Climate Emergency UK who have led this citizen data science project. Eighty four of the UK’s 409 local authorities have no published plan, while others have plans of very varying quality and ambition.
The average score for Scottish and English councils was 46% dropping to 31% for Wales and 25% for Northern Ireland. Within that, there is a wide variety of scores across all council types. In England, the highest scoring County Council was only 63% compared to 19 District Councils that scored between 63% and 92%.
All UK councils Climate Action Plans that were published online before 20 September 2021 (and written after 2015) were assessed by a team of over 120 volunteers, trained and overseen by Climate Emergency UK. The 28 questions they asked included: whether the climate actions are costed; do the actions have a clear goal; are local residents being engaged with climate action; does the Plan include strategies to decarbonise waste, planning, homes and other services that the council is responsible for; does it go beyond cutting the council’s own emissions and plan to work with others to cut the whole area’s emissions, and does the Plan cover areas such as re–skilling the workforce, climate education, governance and funding for climate action.
Annie Pickering, Campaigns and Policy Officer at CE UK, said: “A good Action Plan has the basics covered. This means that the actions are specific and measurable and assigned to teams or departments. It should also be clear how the plan will be monitored as it is implemented.”