The 2025 Scorecards launch today

Wondering how your local council’s doing around climate? With today’s launch of the 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecards, you can check their progress right now. 

And because this is the second edition of Scorecards, you can check not just your council’s scores, but also how they compare with last time. Are they doing better or worse in each of the vital 93 areas for meeting the challenges of the climate crisis?

Today, you can:

• Search for your council by name
• See at a glance how their overall score compares with others across the UK, overall and within each section of activity
• Click through for an in-depth breakdown of every question and how they scored
• See at every level of the Scorecards how their performance compares with the 2023 assessment.

What next?

Great — so you’re up to speed on the areas where your council’s doing well on climate action, and where it could be doing better. 

Start a conversation If you have thoughts about these, you can use the Scorecards to open up conversations with your local councillors — our website WriteToThem makes that super easy. (Want more data? Type your postcode into Local Intelligence Hub for lots more climate-related local info!)

Use Scorecards in your work If you’re a council climate officer or councillor yourself, we hope the Scorecards will show where you could be making improvements — and give you an idea of which other councils are doing well in those areas. You can even get in touch and swap notes! Take a look at our case studies to see how councils have been using Scorecards to learn and improve.

Help us do more

Scorecards are a joint project from Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.
If you value the work that we do to make it easier to hold authorities to account for climate action, please consider making a donation.

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Image: Alastair Johnstone / Climate Visuals

If you’re someone who’s concerned about the climate but not really sure what to do about it, this webinar is definitely a good place to start.

Our event this week brought together investigative journalist Lucas Amin of Democracy for Sale; Anne Friel, Head of Just Societies at Client Earth; and Joschi Wolf of the German transparency project Frag Den Staat – all sharing their knowledge around Freedom of Information as an invaluable tool for tackling the climate crisis.

It was very encouraging to hear practical tips and thoughts that made FOI-based activism seem within reach, even to the beginner. And all from your own desk!

Watch the webinar on YouTube. We’ve also compiled the responses to the questions from the audience that there wasn’t time to answer during the session: you can see those here.

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Image: Matteo Miliddi

The Council Climate Action Scorecards are helping climate officers across the UK to understand which elements of their path to Net Zero are working well, and which areas need improvement.

Marina Ebbage, Procurement Policy Officer at Norfolk County Council, explained the many ways in which Scorecards have helped the authority’s Climate Hub team in their work. She began by explaining how the council came to understand that a council taking climate action is one thing; while communicating that action is something else.

“We first came across the Scorecards following Climate Emergency UK’s assessment in 2021, and through the subsequent publicity which usefully highlighted the areas of work where our actions were not publicly communicated”, says Marina.  

“We’ve found the independent and external assessment of our council’s climate action not only allows us to systematically mark our progress in tackling climate change, but helps us to maintain and strengthen our accountability to the public. 

“The Scorecards have helped us strive for greater transparency and accessibility in our climate action efforts. Following that initial assessment, we realised that a lot of information about the work we were doing was not readily available to the public – hence our initial low score. 

“A key example is our Climate Action Plan, which draws all the information we are doing together on climate-related work and is now publicly available in one place on a dedicated part of the council’s website. Previously, information was in committee papers which are publicly available but often not easy to find, or knowledge was internal rather than shared publicly.

“Since then, we’ve brought together this information and evidence on the council website, making it available and accessible to Norfolk’s citizens and businesses, and indeed more widely.” 

The benefits go more widely than communication, though — they resonate through many aspects of the council’s work, as Marina explains: “We’ve found the Scorecards valuable as a way to check the comprehensiveness of our Action Plan, ensuring that we’re taking a well-rounded approach to addressing climate change. 

“At a senior management level, the Scorecards provide an overarching view of our climate action and comparative performance, which our Climate Board has integrated into its review process, using them to assess our actions and identify areas for improvement.”  

Talking of comparative performance, Marina adds, “We benchmark our performance against other councils. This comparison helps us identify areas where we need to improve and informs discussions with other councils on what further actions we can take.” 

And the bottom line? “Ultimately, the Scorecards have provided a useful means to review and benchmark our climate actions and provided a stimulus to improve the way we communicate what we do to the public.” 

That’s great to hear — and as we near the publication of the 2025 Scorecards, we were gratified to learn that Norfolk see their use into the future: “We plan to continue using the Scorecards as a monitoring tool, ensuring that our climate action remains ambitious, transparent, and effective.”

Thanks very much to Marina for sharing Norfolk County Council’s experience with the Scorecards, which are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Nathan Nelson

The Council Climate Action Scorecards were recently mentioned in East Sussex County Council’s Written Questions (see question 12, on the council’s score for mitigation and adaptation). When we spot that the Scorecards are helping to inform councils’ conversations like this, we often make contact to find out more.

East Sussex were happy to fill us in with more details of how the Scorecards have helped them, and how they’ve been able to feed into the process with their own experiences:

“For local authorities, climate change is an evolving area of work with few statutory responsibilities. As a result, we can struggle to see what ‘good’ looks like, both for individual areas of work and holistically across the council. We’ve therefore found the Climate Action Scorecards useful to help identify areas where we’re doing well and those where we may need to pay more attention. The results of the Scorecards have been briefed to senior officers and elected members.

“Officers have also used the Scorecards as a research tool. When we review an area of work (or our Climate Emergency Strategy as a whole), one of the first questions we ask is what other local authorities are doing. The Scorecards provide an easy way to identify leaders in particular fields for further investigation.

“Finally, the marking process behind the Scorecards has encouraged us to look at our website and the information it provides on our climate change work. As a result, we’ve made changes to place important information front and centre and make the climate change pages easier to navigate.

“Climate Emergency UK have taken an inclusive approach to the Scorecards, and we’ve appreciated the opportunity to attend briefings and feedback on scoring through the right to reply. Through this, we’ve explained some of the issues faced by largely rural authorities such as East Sussex, for example in areas such as public transport.

“We’re pleased to see some of that feedback taken onboard in the latest round of scoring. We hope the CE UK will continue to evolve the scoring criteria to make the exercise even more useful for both local authorities and the public we serve.”

Thanks very much to East Sussex for giving us the view from a County Council. Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Neil Mark Thomas

The Council Climate Action Scorecards project, which assesses local councils on their climate action, is only possible thanks to a large number of people who give up their time to volunteer. Their job is to source and analyse data from a variety of places, analysing more than 40 different possible pieces of climate action that councils should be taking on their path to Net Zero. 

It’s very worthwhile work, and the project has tangible results (just see our previous case studies) — which is obviously a great motivator for volunteers to get involved. But going through the process of training, and then the actual marking, has other benefits too: it adds to their knowledge, giving them a new, comprehensive overview of the climate sector and its many component parts.

We spoke to Scarlette, who volunteered as part of the 2025 cohort. Scarlette told us how she got involved, and how it took her down a new avenue.

“I’d been looking for a job in the environment sector following my Masters,” explains Scarlette, “and since this had been a long and slow process, I decided to look for volunteer opportunities to do alongside my temporary job. 

“I came across the advert for the Scorecards and felt it really aligned with my interests, particularly in the area of transport.”

While helping to assess councils’ action on transport, Scarlette came across a novel concept. Question 2.3 in the Scorecards asks “Does the council have enforced school streets across its area?”, with points awarded to councils with more than ten such streets year round, and bonus marks available for those with more than 30.

A school street is a road outside a school that is effectively closed to motorised traffic at drop-off and pick-up times. As the School Streets website notes, such schemes help tackle air pollution and road danger, encourage a healthier lifestyle and active travel to school for families, and lead to a better environment for everyone.

Once Scarlette found out about them, she was keen to get involved:

“I started volunteering as a School Street Marshal at a local school for a six month trial period. Prior to volunteering on the Scorecards I had never heard of the School Street initiative, and certainly wasn’t aware of any near me. The Scorecards led me to seek out this new role, and has encouraged me to get involved further with local campaigns.

“Volunteering with the Scorecards and the School Streets initiative has further cemented my passion for working in the environmental sector. I’ve been able to build on my academic knowledge within environmental law and have had the opportunity to gain more experience working in my local community with an environmental charity. I continue to look for further volunteering opportunities elsewhere to build on these experiences.”

We’re really glad to hear this, and wish Scarlette all the best in finding a permanent role in the environment sector: it certainly sounds like she’s acquiring some really relevant experience.

Scorecards are a joint project from Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Hammersmith and Fulham Council (CC by-nc-nd/2.0)

Has your local authority declared a Nature Emergency? – Find out with a new service from the Woodland Trust, Climate Emergency UK, and mySociety!

The UK nations are among the most nature-depleted in the world. But there’s hope! Just as we’ve found with climate action, the UK’s local authorities hold the power to drive the change that our natural environment urgently needs. And that starts with declaring a Nature Emergency which commits the council to act.

So today we’re excited to launch Nature Emergency UK. This new website brings together the latest crowdsourced data on which UK local authorities have declared a nature emergency, alongside three metrics of the ambition of those declarations, plus case studies and model motions from the Woodland Trust, to help local councillors and local authority officers push for better.

For each local authority in the UK, our long-time collaborators Climate Emergency UK collected not only the exact wording and date of the council’s nature emergency declaration, but also the presence of three priority actions identified by the Woodland Trust, that mark out the councils with the most ambitious plans for nature recovery:

On top of that rigorous database, we’ve built a clean and simple interface that lets you quickly find your own council’s information, compare it with similar councils elsewhere in the UK, or look for patterns in nature emergency response amongst councils of the same type, population, and more.

Our Climate Programme lead, Zarino Zappia notes: “Through our work on both the Council Climate Scorecards and the Local Intelligence Hub, we’ve seen first-hand how important nature and biodiversity are as issues for local communities around the UK. We hope this new website will help citizens and community groups have informed discussions with their local representatives about the pace of action to restore nature near them, and then help those local councillors and council officers to discover and share best practice, in response to that democratic voice.”

If you’d like to see whether your local authority has a plan to restore nature in your area, check them out on Nature Emergency UK!

We spoke to Martin O’Brien at Lewisham Council about the Climate Council Action Scorecards, and the ways in which he’s used them to support his role as Head of Climate Resilience.

The Scorecards assess all UK councils across a large variety of different climate actions, publishing the final marks online, for both councils and the public to see.

So, how do all these numbers actually help a council in their work towards Net Zero? Martin told us that there are three distinct ways in which they’re useful.

“Firstly, I use them to build a sense of what’s going on around climate action, across all local authorities. They help me identify areas where we have gaps in our own action, and the places where we might pick up useful insight, tools and advice from other councils.

“Then they’re also useful for our engagement across the council’s service teams, to spell out and reinforce the connections between what they do and our ambitions on climate action.

“And then finally, they help with our communication and engagement with residents, particularly local activist and environmental groups. They encourage a conversation that acknowledges we can’t do everything, that there are some areas where we are taking meaningful action — but also, areas where we are keen to learn, to expand and improve how we work and what we can achieve.”

Can Martin put any measures to the impact the Scorecards have had for Lewisham?

“It’s hard to translate the benefits into hard facts and figures, but I feel that they’ve given us, as a council, confidence and pride in some of the things we have achieved. They’ve shown that while the scale of the challenge might sometimes feel overwhelming, it’s possible to break it down into achievable steps.

“I don’t always agree with the scoring.  If I’m honest there are times I’m surprised we get a mark (I won’t tell you which ones) and there are other times I’m outraged we don’t (happy to share information about this).  But more often than not when I look at the methodology and the assessments, I can see there’s a potential opportunity to reshape the way we do things for the better.”

Thanks very much to Martin for sharing these insights — it’s always helpful for us to understand exactly how the Scorecards are proving useful. The Climate Council Action Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Robin Inkysloth cc by-nc-nd/2.0

Cambridge City Council was the second highest scoring district council in the UK on the Council Climate Action Scorecards, a joint project between mySociety and Climate Emergency UK (CE UK).

Given their success, Climate Change Officer at Cambridge Janet Fogg was keen to tell us how they’ve been using the Scorecards since they were launched. She and CE UK’s Annie spoke over Zoom. 

“I came across the project thanks to CEUK letting us know via email about the Scorecards and the Right of Reply back in 2022. We took part in the Right of Reply that year, before the final Scorecards results came out. 

“I used the 2023 Scorecards in the most recent committee report on our climate action.

With the score that we got, we were keen to let people know about it! Receiving this high score helped us show to people that when we say we are doing everything we can, it’s backed up by evidence: the Scorecard results. 

“Sometimes we get criticism that we don’t talk enough about what we are doing on our climate action, and these Scorecards are a way for us to show what work we are doing, and in an easy way for residents to see and understand, too.”

Janet went on to explain how the Action Scorecards are a useful tool within the council when working with other departments. 

“Having the specific actions laid out in the Scorecards helps me justify and put forward a stronger case that these actions are good to do.They’re not just actions that I think we as a council should do, but best practice, and I can point to other councils that are doing these things. And it’s not just a list, we are all also being measured on whether we do these actions, via the Scorecards, so it’s important we really do implement them. 

“A lot of my work is about dealing with change and change is difficult. Having the Scorecards helps us lay out clearly which actions we want to be doing and the benefit of doing so.”

The Council Climate Action Scorecards results are public for everyone to see. Janet told us how this is one of their most useful benefits.

“Having an external organisation like CE UK giving us feedback on our work is helpful. And I’m happy that it’s not a hidden assessment, it’s really clear for us to see where we got marks and where we didn’t, and see also where other councils scored or not too. 

“The Action Scorecards questions help shape our future work plans. The questions set out what needs doing and we shape our work around this.” 

Cambridge City Council also responded to the latest Right of Reply, ahead of the 2025 Action Scorecards. But they are aware of where improvements can still be made. “As a council we have high ambition but are constrained in some areas such as still being in the process of updating our Local Plan”. 

Thanks to Janet for taking the time to talk to us!

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Image: John Sutton (cc by/sa-2.0)

Kelly Murphy is the Climate Change Officer at Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, a local authority in Hertfordshire that oversees a mix of urban, suburban, and rural areas.

As Kelly explained, Welwyn Hatfield works collaboratively with nine other authorities within the Hertfordshire Climate Change and Sustainability Partnership (along with County Council and Hertfordshire Futures), where they share information and work collectively to broaden the impact of their Net Zero and sustainability projects. We were keen to hear what part the Council Climate Action Scorecards have played within Welwyn Hatfield.

Kelly explained that, for Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, one big advantage has been the ability to learn from other authorities: 

“We’ve used the Scorecards to understand what areas we need to improve in, and to research what ‘good’ looks like”, she says. “The transparent scoring meant we could identify local authorities across the UK that had performed highly in specific sections, then research what aspects they were doing well on, and how they were doing it.”

And how does that kind of research translate into action? Kelly gave a perfect example: 

“One section where we could see that we needed to develop our approach was Collaboration and Engagement. Having a climate agenda and taking action is obviously of great importance, but we needed to ensure that they were also being communicated throughout the borough so that residents understood exactly what the council is doing.  

“After researching other local authorities that performed well in this section, and incorporating feedback from a resident survey we conducted, we looked at what was within our budget and officer capacity. 

“We decided the best way to engage with residents, community groups and businesses was the creation of our Welwyn Hatfield Climate Hub, a dedicated space on the One Welwyn Hatfield community website. It’s a single source for everything climate-related in the borough, with progress updates, news, links to relevant reports and policies, educational resources, funding information, notification of relevant events and competitions, a list of community eco groups and so on.”

That sounds like a real step up, and a great response to learning that improvements needed to be made in this area.

Compiling the Scorecards is a significant effort, managed by Climate Emergency UK with trained-up volunteers. But equally, they wouldn’t be possible without buy-in from the councils themselves, who are invited to respond to their marks before the Scorecards go live. We asked Kelly what the council’s experience had been of this process.

“It’s actually been very useful,” she says. “For instance, during the right of reply period, I noted that we had not scored on a number of questions. I knew that marking depends on having publicly available evidence, and when I looked for it I discovered that, in some cases, the information was quite tricky to find. 

“A new sustainable procurement appendix, for example, had been recently added to our procurement and commercial strategy 2021-2025, but unless you knew it was there, you might not scroll all the way down through that document. 

“As a result, I updated the Climate Hub, with a new section specifically on sustainable procurement, including a link to take readers directly to the strategy and ultimately improving accessibility to this information.”

Another benefit was also provided regarding funding, Kelly explains “Climate awareness/literacy training has featured in the Scorecards for the last few years. The fact we had not scored in this area, along with a number of other persuasive reasons, was presented in a report to senior leaders and councillors to request draw down of money from the climate reserves to fund this training.

“Having agreed that providing climate awareness training was a crucial step in supporting, enabling and empowering individuals to take climate action, we collaborated with a private company to offer staff, councillors and our residents bespoke climate awareness training. We are excited to launch this training at the end of the month and look forward to hearing about the positive impacts the training has had both internally within the organisation and externally around the borough.”

It’s wonderful to hear of the tangible results the Scorecards have helped to bring about, thanks to Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council’s positive and proactive attitude. 

Kelly says as we conclude our conversation, “You can’t compare councils like for like — they have different demographics, governance structures, administration, budgets, officer capacity, and so on — so it might have been easy to dismiss the Scorecards. But it’s not a competition, and the Scorecards don’t try to make it one. We’ve embraced the process because climate change has no borders.”

“Ultimately, a platform that flags areas for improvement and signposts to best practice should only been seen positively. It enables us all to move in the same direction towards the same goal.”

We heartily agree! Thanks very much to Kelly for sharing her experiences.

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Image by Jim Osley CC by-sa/2.0.

Following a call out by Climate Emergency UK (CE UK) to councils across the UK that were using the Scorecards, we were grateful that Gedling Borough Council responded and wanted to talk more. Annie from CE UK spoke to Sim Duhra, their Climate Change Manager, and learned about the current and potential uses of the Scorecards as they see it. 

“I started in this role at the end of 2022, so it wasn’t long after — Spring 2023 — that I was receiving emails from CE UK about the Right of Reply process for the first Council Climate Action Scorecards. I completed the Right of Reply both in 2023 and the most recent one; I have attended their webinars and made use of their website, too.

“Gedling Borough Council is currently reviewing their Carbon Management Strategy and Action Plan and we are looking at how we can make our own actions SMARTer. The Scorecards offer further scrutiny, clarity and focus on those seven sections that we can learn from.”

Sim then went to talk more about how the Action Scorecards are useful, even for a small borough council. 

“I appreciate that it is an independent piece of work, the Scorecards. You are a completely separate organisation from the council. The comparison tool is interesting and we have made use of this too to see what other local authorities are doing. Although, we are a small borough council, and if we had more capacity, both in terms of staff and funding then we would be able to incorporate more best practice into our work in terms of climate action. 

“Although we could improve in some sections we are progressing in others, such as Collaboration & Engagement. The Planning section is useful as it is a good way to start a conversation with internal departments about what they are doing in relation to climate action within Planning. The questions and topics in the Scorecards give you gravitas to approach different departments internally and engage in conversation about what can be done in these departments for relevant bits of climate action. 

“We know that there is so much more than we need to do as a council on our journey to Net Zero, whilst also recognising that some things are out of our control in terms of the funding and resources that are available to us. 

“We appreciate that a lot of work goes into the Scorecards, including from councils when they respond to the Right of Reply and the FOI requests, but we do get something out of this work we put in which we recognise.”

It was wonderful to put a human face to one of the many local councils in the UK and we really appreciate the time Sim took to talk to us: thank you! Scorecards are a joint project between mySociety and CE UK.

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Image: Alan Murray-Rust (CC by-sa/2.0)