The challenge
Ealing Council declared a climate emergency in April 2019 and set a target of 2030 to reach carbon neutrality for the Council and borough. The target covers all carbon emissions, both produced and consumed, by everyone in the borough. Ealing Council adopted the Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy (CEES) in 2021 and a two-year action plan was created for 2023-2025 which outlined key activities to push towards the 2030 target.
The solution
To aid with the prioritisation and delivery of these decarbonisation actions, Ealing Council commissioned Aether to estimate the implementation costs and wider benefits of the actions and to develop a tool to enable Council officers to refine and update the analysis as new information becomes available. This was developed through a multi-criteria assessment of the CEES actions.
This involved:
- Stakeholder engagement to realise a political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental (PESTLE) analysis to understand the broader influences and success determinators of the actions
- Estimating capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) of the actions, including staff time for the Council, asset purchases, external resources
- Analysing wider social, economic and environmental impacts of the actions beyond decarbonisation, aligned with the 9 priorities identified in Ealing’s Council Plan
- Qualitative assessment of the GHG emissions impacts of the actions
The analysis was developed in a Climate Impact Action Tool in Excel that the Council can use independently to view and refine the multi-criteria assessment in the future. This includes graphic viewers of the results across actions and detailed dives for specific actions.
A gap analysis of climate actions for the decarbonisation of Ealing was performed to help identify opportunities for further ambition and GHG emissions reductions.
The result
Ealing Council has a user-friendly multi-criteria assessment tool established to aid with the prioritisation and analysis of Ealing’s policies under the Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy. The tool can be used to update analysis as more data is collected. The next steps for Ealing will be to review the impact scores of their actions, consider further actions that could be drafted, and to make demands of Central Government to enable the significant changes that are required to meet the challenges of reaching net zero carbon.
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