We started the month with some great news – as detailed in yesterday’s blog post we’ve been accepted into the Blueprint Coalition, an influential group of local government organisations, environmental groups and research institutions, pushing for a more joined-up approach to local climate action in the UK. We’re excited to see how our services, data, and expertise can help the coalition in the coming months. Massive thanks to our new Policy and Advocacy Manager, Julia, for pushing this through!

Meanwhile, on our Local Intelligence Hub project with The Climate Coalition, Alexander and I have been importing more datasets, and improving the metadata for datasets we already hold, in preparation for wider use of the platform (and public access) later this year. Excitingly, our Senior Researcher, Alex, got us to the point where we’re now able to import data by both current (2010) and upcoming (2025) parliamentary constituencies, which is a first step towards supporting climate campaigners and community organisers in the run up to the next general election.

Watch this space for some upcoming blog posts about the technical detail behind how we’re transforming environmental, demographic, and public opinion data between the two generations of constituency boundaries – it’s pretty cool!

At the very start of the month, Julia went to Manchester to work with the Youth Steering Group of the Fair Education Alliance. We talked about what an MP is, how the House of Commons works, and the top 10 things to find out about your MP using TheyWorkForYou.

Julia and the FEA steering board

With our technical support, and a massive effort from their team and volunteers, our partners, Climate Emergency UK, completed their audit of the marks for the 2023 Council Climate Action Scorecards. We’re now working on getting them a dataset of processed scores for initial analysis, as well as building the web-based interface through which the scores will be published later this Autumn. Big thanks to Struan and Lucas for their tireless work on this – it’s a mammoth project, but worth it. We’ve already seen how influential last year’s data on councils’ climate plans was, and we can’t wait to share the latest data on the actions local councils have taken.

Speaking of climate action plans – it was nice to see CAPE (our database of local authority climate action plans) getting a namecheck in this thoughtful piece from Andy Hackett of the Centre for Net Zero. Happy to be of service!

Alongside all of this, we’ve continued to beaver away on preparing for the next stage of our Climate programme beyond the end of our current funded period in March 2024. We’ve been having some really exciting conversations with funders, as well as investigating joint projects with new partners. In particular, we’ve been looking at ways we could use our data and machine learning expertise to improve the transparency and quality of climate data, and considering next steps for Neighbourhood Warmth and our work on community-based, democratic approaches to home energy transition.

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Image: Maria Capelli