Climate Action Scorecards are having real-life effects

mySociety podcast
mySociety
Climate Action Scorecards are having real-life effects
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In this super-short episode, we look at three recent examples of how the Council Climate Action Scorecards are bringing measurable change. The Scorecards are a joint project between mySociety and Climate Emergency UK, and you can visit them at councilclimatescorecards.uk.

Here are the three blog posts where you can find more details about all of these examples:

If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.


Transcript

0:00 [Myf:] I’m not really a data person. I’m a Communications Manager, right? So my currency is words and pictures, but my colleagues at mySociety are real data people.

0:13 And every day, when I’m writing up the stories about what people are doing with our data, I learn and understand more about the power of what it can do.

0:23 So this week, it’s been my job to write up the stories about how three different types of people are using the Council Climate Action Scorecards. And these are a joint project between mySociety and Climate Emergency UK, and they mark local councils all over the UK on their climate action.

0:43 Now looked at one way, those scores are just loads and loads of numbers, but they are helping people do really useful things around climate action. So the scorecards mark local councils across all kinds of different areas of climate action, and that’s really useful for the councils themselves to see. But it’s not just the councils who can see this. It’s also local residents. In fact, it’s anyone who wants to.

1:09 We told the story of one local resident in Cirencester who used that data to inform a question that they asked at their local council meeting. And this is a right that everybody has, and that one question resulted in a resident and council group being set up where residents can work together with councils, and they’re working on things like retrofit and sustainable transport together.

1:38 They’re looking for more members as well, people right across the Cotswolds. So if you’re interested in being a part of that, then check out our blog post.

1:46 The Scorecards give councils marks on different areas of their climate action and one thing that South Cambridgeshire noticed was they’d scored poorly around staff awareness training, and since then, they’ve put training in place right across the council, and that includes councilors. So you can read more about that in our blog post.

2:04 And then finally, this week, I wrote about the small Borough Council of Gedling, who also told us about how they had used the Council Climate Action Scorecards. And at Gedling, they basically said that because the Scorecards are an independent source, it gave them what they described as the gravitas to approach all the different departments in the council internally and engage in a conversation about what can be done in those departments around the relevant bits of climate action.

2:36 And if you would like to read more about that, again, it’s all written up in the mySociety blog, and I’ll put the link to all of those blog posts in the show notes. Thanks very much for listening.

2:48 If you appreciate what mySociety does, whether that’s with climate or data, transparency, democracy, then please consider giving us a donation. You can do this at www.mysociety.org/donate, and we promise that we’ll put every penny to really good use.