Whilst the days get shorter, October is already over. Here’s what the Climate team has been up to this month!

Events

This month, we ran our second Innovations in Climate Tech event. It went well! Some project ideas from the first event began to build up momentum and excitement, and we closed our applications for grants at 23:59 on the last day of October. That means we’ll be announcing our decisions very soon! If you want to find out more about how the event went, check out Myf’s post here.

Communications

Myf graduated from the Weston Communicating Climate programme, and is feeding back to the team everything she’s learnt. It was an in-depth course, where she’s picked up lots of very valuable information to help us use communications around climate as effectively as possible.

Development

Off the back of our prototyping weeks over the year, we have been continuing developing.

Struan’s been working on development of the Local Intelligence Hub (which you can read about the prototype of here), and we look forward to borrowing Graeme from the Transparency team over the coming month to help bring this to life.

Meanwhile, Alexander has been working on Contract Countdown (with the prototype report for that here), getting it ready for focus groups, which Siôn has been hard at work to start getting together.

Our partners, Climate Emergency UK are working on their methodology for measuring actual climate action from councils. This is for the next iteration of their climate scorecards site, which up until now has only assessed councils’ plans rather than what progress they’ve made in implementing those plans. Full details of the criteria they’re working to will be released in November, before they dive into the rigorous process of scoring.

The Climate Action Plan Explorer is going to be undergoing some improvements – Myf has been looking at how to make the tool more accessible for non-specialist users and the team are now beginning to see how that can feed into development. Look out for changes between now and December.

Everything else

The Climate team has recently started to experiment with “fallow sprints”. Placing them at either end of a cycle, they’re allowing the team time to plan, and regroup, ready for the next sprint. This is helping us to feel more focussed in our work, and seems to be doing good for the team as a whole.

Even as the nights get longer and the days get colder, we’re not slowing down, so if you can’t get enough of what we’re up to, you can sign up to our newsletter to get updates in your inbox!

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Image: Jonathan Cutrer (CC by-nc/2.0)