6. Partnerships and data

Globally cities are responsible for over 70% of carbon emissions, so action by councils and local authorities will be key to reaching carbon net zero. Some of the biggest advances by cities are being delivered as a result of partnerships – either with other local authorities or with the private sector – to ensure knowledge is shared and the benefits are broader.

The Scottish Cities Alliance is a prime example of pooling knowledge and the eight cities within the alliance represent around three quarters of the population of Scotland. Dundee City Council leader and Scottish Cities Alliance chair John Alexander explained that the wide representation meant the cities are better able to come together to demand action and make the biggest impact.

He said: “The Alliance brings us together to focus on the net zero challenges we face. We each have our own focus with specific cities taking the lead on certain areas. Aberdeen is leading on hydrogen, Glasgow is taking the lead on smarter cities and Dundee’s focus is mobility as a service and what that looks like in terms of transport decarbonisation.

We try to play to our strengths and learn from each other.

“The knowledge, data and investment spearheaded by the cities is then used by other local authorities in the Alliance. We try to play to our strengths and learn from each other.” Collectively this represents a great learning resource.

John added that the Alliance also shares where ideas have failed in order to address the underlying issues and improve the situation for the cities taking part in the next phase of development of the approach.

Role of civic leadership

In Manchester, a broader partnership is also benefiting climate resilience, according to Trafford Council leader Tom Ross, who is also the portfolio lead for Green City – Region for Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). Ross points to Manchester’s Integrated Water Management Plan, which brings together GMCA with the Environment Agency and United Utilities, as an example of how external partnerships can benefit local authorities. The aim of the plan is to review how excess water and drought is managed and ensure water systems are interwoven into future growth and development zones.

“We had a number of round tables to bring the various partners from across Greater Manchester together and it was crucial to have civic leadership to do that,” said Tom.

Long term relationship gains

E.ON commercial and strategy director Mark Daniels urges such partnership to be longer term ones in order to fully derive the potential benefits.

E.ON has just entered a 15-year strategic energy partnership with Coventry City Council, which will see the two organisations collaborate on revolutionising energy use in the city for the benefit of local communities and the wider economy. “It is going to work in a fundamentally different way from anything seen before,” said Mark.

It was crucial to have civic leadership.

“The first point is that the length gives the partnership time to tackle some really difficult and big topics. The partnership has also gone through a very strong procurement process so has the right to deliver projects with the council and has a different governance process to what has been seen before too. As we go through the gate processes to build the business case together, we have flexibility over the method for delivering them too.”

In addition to sharing knowledge, partnerships are also helping to create better low carbon funding options for councils. One of the biggest is the Cities Commission for Climate Investment (3Ci), which is a partnership between Connected Places Catapult, Core Cities UK, London councils and other local authorities that aims to help secure the necessary long-term finance needed for achieving net zero. “Essentially it is pooling, bundling and blending to crowd in green finance,” explained Mott MacDonald global practice leader for cities Clare Wildfire. “By going large and pooling pipelines of work across multiple cities it is attracting institutional investors. It is bundling work to take attractive propositions, such as renewables, and bundling them with the less interesting ones, like energy efficiency. Then it is blending public and private finance to make the funding go further. This approach in creating a pipeline of more than £200bn of low carbon investments in the UK’s 11 biggest cities.”

Data on carbon reduction and climate resilience is not just key to benchmarking and tracking progress, it is also essential to providing evidence of the wider benefits that can be delivered on the journey to net zero. “This isn’t just about beneficial environmental change, we can also bring social and economic benefits too,” explained Mott MacDonald global practice leader for cities Clare Wildfire.

One project aiming to present that evidence is the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo), which has been funded by Innovate UK and managed by the Connected Places Catapult. Under the CReDo pilot scheme, data is being shared across Anglian Water, UK Power Networks and BT to look at the connections between the different networks and to see the interdependencies.

“In CReDo, which is based on a digital twin, we look at the impact of extreme weather events across the whole system,” said Connected Places Catapult CReDo strategic engagement lead Sarah Hayes. “By doing this, we can see that if there was a really bad storm, we can understand how flooding would impact certain assets. If they fail as a result of the flooding, we can see how that failure propagates across the whole system.

Data helps infrastructure operators to identify which are the most critical assets.

“This data helps infrastructure operators to identify which are the most critical assets across the whole system so they can focus their investment in relocating them or adding defences to improve resilience.”

Targeting investment

As an example of the insight CReDo is already delivering, Sarah said that they can see that it might be better to direct water company investment to power network resilience rather than water network assets. “CReDo shows that this investment will give them a higher level of resilience because they are so dependent on power network assets,” explained Sarah. “This really helps us to think about the idea of systems resilience.”

Making the case for investment in a tool like CReDo is not simple though, added Sarah. “The issue with CReDo is that the benefits accrue to many different parties, so when we are getting the data together to make the business case, there is the question of who should convene CReDo, who should lead it and who should pay for it in the longer term.”

CReDo is all about resilience and that does help with the funding question. “It is difficult to value resilience, so when we look at the benefits of CReDo, we look at the avoided cost,” said Sarah. “It allows us to look at how we’re able to reduce costs to asset owners in terms of protecting their network and reduce repair costs in the future when assets fail and we lose the service.

Understanding unintended consequences

“When we think about resilience, there are all sorts of other unintended consequences that happen as well and I think we have a very poor understanding of what those are.” Sarah suggested that a better understanding of the knock-on effects from losing power, communications or running water or not being able to get to where we need to be is key. “I think we need to develop a better understanding of how we value resilience,” she added.

“The Treasury needs to lead the way in setting out guidance so that we can build real numbers into our projects so that we can really make the benefits case for investment.”

We need to develop a better understanding of how we value resilience.

Data generated by CReDo on resilience will also help guide more systems level thinking too. Generally, people don’t understand their carbon impact and how it fits into the local area or bigger picture, according to Sarah. “Across a city, how do all the interventions add up and how do we prioritise different interventions?” she asked. “You really need data to understand that, so sharing data at the bigger picture level across organisations will help. At the moment it is piecemeal – there are good initiatives all over the place but we don’t really have a sense of how it all adds up.”