Adaptation and Mitigation Planning for Tamworth Borough Council

The challenge

Local authorities have a key role to play in helping to achieve challenging local and national targets for net zero and for building local resilience to climate change. In part, this is about how councils operate as large organisations and service providers.  Measures to reduce emissions can include improving council buildings’ energy efficiency, installing or sourcing low carbon energy, moving to a low carbon vehicle fleet and encouraging employees to adopt low carbon behaviours. Measures to adapt to climate change can include risk assessments and business continuity planning, flood protection measures, changing grounds maintenance routines or types of planting and including appropriate water conservation and cooling measures in buildings. Local authorities can also provide leadership to local partners, businesses and communities, giving information and support to carbon reduction initiatives and adaptation measures across the council area.

On 19 November 2019, Tamworth Borough Council declared a climate emergency, following the UK Parliament’s declaration in May 2019. The council made a commitment; its estate would become net zero by 2050 at the latest, or by 2030, if deemed financially viable. Meanwhile, in Januray 2024, floodwaters from the Anker and Tame rivers submerged several town centre car parks, cut off surrounding villages and closed highways. These kinds of extreme events are expected to become more frequent and more extreme because of climate change. This project aimed to provide an evidence base to inform implementation of climate actions that would enable the council to meet their net zero target and build their resilience to climate change.

The solution

Aether led work to develop an adaptation strategy for the entire Borough, and a climate change mitigation action plan for Tamworth Borough Council. The first step for this work was to build an evidence base to underly the action plans. In the case of the adaptation strategy, the underlying evidence was provided by a climate change risk assessment. Aether developed this by working with the council to understand their current experience of climate risk, assets and services that may be exposed or vulnerable and by using the existing evidence base provided by CCRA3 and UK climate projections. For the climate mitigation action plan, Aether updated the council’s baseline greenhouse gas emissions inventory to understand which services contributed the most to overall emissions and hence would most benefit from action to reduce them.

The adaptation strategy was designed to focus on actions within the council’s control and to align with existing council policy, particularly where easy-wins or low-regret changes were possible. A longlist of actions was prepared, drawing on regional adaptation planning in Staffordshire and the West Midlands, and our wider experience of adaptation action planning. This long list and the characterisation of the climate risks were tested with council members and officers through a series of workshops, and refined as needed.

The mitigation action plan was similarly produced via engagement with council officers and members and drawing on our extensive experience of producing local authority climate action plans. Modelling of the proposed actions was undertaken to estimate the impact of these actions on the council’s future emissions out to 2050.

For both adaptation and mitigation, the co-benefits of actions for other policy areas including health and wellbeing, the environment and the local economy were identified. Indicative costs and timelines were also identified for each action to support council decision making and prioritisation. Developing both plans simultaneously allowed us to ensure adaptation and mitigation actions were implemented in a joined-up way.

The result

In January 2025 Tamworth Borough Council’s cabinet adopted a climate mitigation action plan and climate adaptation strategy built on the evidence base provided by Aether. The adopted plans can be found here. The plans provide a clear route to reducing emissions and building resilience and the evidence base behind them will help inform implementation and engagement with key partners and stakeholders across the borough.

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