Our data
Data sources
Much of our data is crowdsourced by an army of volunteers filling in Google spreadsheets. This is then combined with some standard data to enable it to be matched up across sources.
Links to council climate action plans were crowdsourced in this spreadsheet. If you find a plan document that we’ve missed, read our guide on what we consider a climate action plan and how to add one to our spreadsheet.
Council climate emergency declarations and net zero commitments were largely collated by Climate Emergency UK staff.
Local authority CO2 emissions estimates are collated by the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
We make use of data from our Council Climate Plan Scorecards project, which was collected with the support of Mapolitical, who donated their UK Government Political Stakeholder data and Look-up API to help us communicate with local authority officers. Read more on the Council Climate Plan Scorecards site.
Download all plans
Download ZIP archive of all documents
This includes all the documents we’ve found including Climate Action Plans, Climate strategies, pre plans etc. As well as the PDFs, or HTML pages, of the plans, this includes a CSV file (plans.csv) with details and sources for all the included files, along with information like GSS codes to enable linking to other data. The CSV file is available separately, see below for details.
API
We are working to expose an increasing quantity of our data through our JSON API. The API pages themselves include a full description of the data available.
CSV/Excel files
All our public climate and local authority data is avaliable through our data portal.
The following files are avaliable as CSV and Excel files.
If you'd like help working with our data to include it in your service, please get in touch and we will help you do that.
Download council plan metadata
Download council net zero commitments
Download climate emergency declarations
Download emissions reduction projects
Download citizens' assembly dataset
All the above CSV files include the council GSS code, and a three letter council code you can use with the API, to enable matching data across files, and with other sources. The links contain full descriptions of all columns.
The CSV of emissions reduction projects is limited to Scottish local authorities (see reasoning below)
Full explanations of the data can be found in the guidance on the Sustainable Scotland Network site.
Licensing
The API data and CSV files are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The ZIP file is unlicensed as it contains work issued by local authorities under many licenses.
Similar councils
We have built on open datasets to provide comparisons between councils that are similar in a number of dimensions. You can read a detailed breakdown of how we calculated these dimensions on our blog, but here’s a high-level summary:
Download our nearest neighbour datasets.
| Overall | This comparison set combines all the other measures into a single list of similar councils. Councils may be highly rated because they are very similar in one degree, or because they are slightly similar across several. |
|---|---|
| Emissions | This comparison set shows councils who have a similar emissions profile to each other. The goal is to try and draw comparisons between similar emissions in similar circumstances. The five different categories in the BEIS dataset are adjusted in different ways, and then councils are positioned on how different they are to each other. |
| Nearby | This comparison set shows councils which are geographically close to the selected council. |
| IMD | The similarity between authorities is calculated by the proportion of the population living in high deprivation (1st quintile), medium deprivation (2nd-3rd quintile) and low deprivation (4th and 5th quintile) neighbourhoods. The population density is also used to help distinguish between authorities with very similar profiles of deprivation. The labelling scheme is based on a composite score for the whole local authority. The quintile labels are assigned based on lower-tier population, and county and combined authorities are then slotted into based on their relative score. This UK-wide comparison is based on a Composite Index of Multiple Deprivation system. |
| Rural/Urban | The similarity between authorities is calculated by the proportion of the population living in urban, rural, and highly rural neighbourhoods. The population density is also used to help distinguish between authorities in entirely urban areas. This UK-wide comparison is based on a Composite Rural Urban Classification system. |
Emissions reduction projects
We are able to display emissions reduction projects reported by Scottish local authorities, thanks to the ‘Climate Change (Duties of Public Bodies; Reporting Requirements) (Scotland) Order 2015’ which requires them to submit reports on their climate actions to the Sustainable Scotland Network website each year.
We automatically collect these reports, extract information about the local authorities’ emissions reduction projects, and display them in a more accessible, interactive format, here.
Sadly local authorities in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland have no corresponding reporting requirement, so data is unavailable for them.
Feedback
If you find this data useful we’d love to hear from you about how it was used. It’s helpful for guiding future work, providing examples to others and for talking to existing and current funders.