Spotlight on Reading's Low Carbon Leisure Programme 

Reading Borough Council is investing in modern, regionally significant leisure facilities to improve health and wellbeing whilst ensuring alignment with its ambitious climate commitments. You can read more about how the council retrofitted critical leisure facilities to reduce emissions through heat pumps and solar systems on the website.

Greenhouse Gas Accounting Suite of Tools 

The Greenhouse Gas Accounting Tool has been developed by Local Partnerships, working with the LGA, to provide a straightforward and consistent approach for councils seeking to calculate their own carbon baseline. Featured alongside the tool is a Waste Emissions Calculator that has been developed by Cambridgeshire County Council and University College London on the LGA Net Zero Innovation Programme. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, please contact ghgaccounting@localpartnerships.gov.uk. 

LGA & Design Council Design Differently Community-Based Climate Change Programme – Applications Open 

The Design Differently programme is free to councils and looks to use design thinking and problem-solving to support community focused climate change projects. Starting in April, we’re looking for up to ten councils with a sustainability challenge to build capacity or kick start a fledgling project.

Interested parties are asked to contact Guy.head@local.gov.uk who will send further information and on-boarding expressions of interest documentation. 

LGA Climate Change Programme – Decarbonising Transport Action Learning Sets: Participant Resource List 

The Decarbonising Transport Action Learning Sets have brought together councillors and officers to address decarbonising transport and local transport planning. As part of the programme, we have a list of resources on a range of topic areas that participants shared during the session for each other and the sector to utilise. 

Webinars

Net Zero Innovation Programme 2021/22 Showcase

Thursday 9 February 2023, 10.00am – 12.00pm

The Net Zero Innovation Programme brings together local authorities, universities, and other stakeholders to address climate challenges at the local level and seeks routes to achieve councils' net zero commitments. In this webinar we will hear how some of the partnerships approached this and what they created through the programme.

Making the most of ECO4 Flex – Webinar 1 March 2023 

This webinar will highlight the opportunities ECO4 Flex can provide to local authorities and the communities they support through a refresh of the ECO4 Flex and access requirements, data sharing requirements and best practice examples of councils maximising ECO4 Flex. If your council would like to showcase ECO4 Flex best practice, please contact andrew.richmond@local.gov.uk 

Join us in-person at the LGA National Construction Conference in Leeds on Tuesday 7 March 

Working with the construction industry, councils are best positioned to lead place-based approaches to hit net zero targets, lead on local green growth and, use procurement best practice to tackle spiralling inflation, resource scarcity, sustainability issues and a move to modern methods of construction and digitalisation. After three years of online conferences, we are back in person to promote networking on construction across the local government sector.

Sustainability in council services - Show and Tell

Thursday 16 March 2023, 10:30am – 12:00pm

The LGA has commissioned the Zero Carbon Britain team at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) to undertake an exciting project to develop draft routemaps for councils across England to understand how to embed sustainability across some council service areas. Through a series of workshops that brought together voices from across councils to contribute expertise in how service areas and operations work, this webinar will explore what was discussed, provide space for feedback and questions as well as explaining what the next steps for the project are.

Mission Zero: Independent Review of Net Zero 

On 13 January Chris Skidmore MP published his final report Mission Zero, Independent Review of Net Zero. The LGA submitted evidence in October 2022, followed by a meeting between the Climate Change Task Group and Chris Skidmore MP, and officer meetings with the review team. The final report references the LGA on multiple points, including around the need for funding reform. 

Preparing for our changing climate: capturing local government's views on local climate adaptation 

Thank you for all your responses to our survey. In January, we held three follow-up workshops to give councils the chance to elaborate on their responses, and feed into recommendations for central government on the climate adaptation programme. We look forward to sharing our findings at a webinar 28 March and will share details on this soon. In the meantime, please take a look at our adaptation toolkit.