Climate Action Plans and more

CAPE homepage as of April 2023

Many local councils across the UK have declared a climate emergency, committing to taking action. But with Climate Action Plans in disparate locations, formats and states of completion, it was impossible for them to be compared or for their effectiveness to be assessed in aggregate. Nor could those councils who share similar challenges or demographics learn from one another.

That’s why we — with crowdsourced help and working with Climate Emergency UK — gathered together all the action plans we could find, and loaded them into CAPE, an online data explorer. It’s the first proof of concept that data can accelerate and facilitate action. Learn more about this project here – or sit back and watch our session at Net Zero Local.

 

CAPE tools, features and collaborations

A brightly coloured graph showing where carbon emissions for a single council come fromA page for every council 

Input a postcode (or let the site locate you) to find a council’s Climate Action Plan, plus other useful information such as the carbon pledge they’ve made, when they aim to achieve it, what their baseline emissions are and how these emissions break down into sectors.

 A table of date from the Climate Action Plans Explorer, CAPEData 

CAPE also puts all the plans together, so you can search across them all, or pull out councils that have traits in common. It’s the first time this data has been available in aggregate, allowing plans to be studied and compared across the country as a whole.
A very basic API - ie some words on a white background with one input fieldAn API 

mySociety believes in the power of open data to drive innovation and allow for more useful research. The CAPE API is currently in a rudimentary state but we’ll be working it up as we go along, ensuring that you can query the database in the ways you need.

 A pastel-coloured table showing councils and the percentages they achieved n the Climate Action Plans Scorecards projectCouncil Climate Plan Scorecards

Climate Emergency UK marked every council’s Climate Action Plan across nine categories for their Scorecards project, showing citizens and councils a way to benchmark how their plans stand up to the tasks ahead.
A table showing which councils are similar in population, deprivation, etcSimilar councils

Our algorithms twin councils with meaningful metrics such as where their emissions come from, where they sit on the index of deprivation, and how rural or urban they are – giving them the opportunity to learn from others who face the most similar challenges.

 Browse by Feature page on CAPETagging 

From the Scorecards data we were able to identify which councils are strongest in which areas: now you can see these via our ‘Browse by feature’ page. Or navigate in from the other direction: tags on the strongest performing councils’ pages will link you to the other councils who did well in the same areas.

 

How to use CAPE:

For climate action groups For journalists
For council staff, contractors and councillors For researchers
For people and groups outside the UK