Environmental assessment platform for cities racing to net zero

Abstract

The UK was the first major economy to pass a Climate Change Act in 2008, which was revised in 2019 to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. In 2019, Southampton City Council (SCC) declared a climate emergency setting ambitious targets for the city to become carbon neutral under the banner Green City Charter (GCC), which was signed by 70 city-based organisations. There is, however, no specific methodology to quantify progress towards the targets. Here we present the outcomes from developing the GCC Tracker in collaboration with local authorities and stakeholders. The approach is based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process, with expertise agreed weights to measure the success or otherwise of carbon environmental commitments. The outcome is the Green City Tracker encompassing an assessment matrix that provides ratings and quantifies annual progress for achieving committed targets. The Tracker was applied to 10 institutions and the results show their ratings as a function of each sub-criteria and as an overarching rating. The approach highlighted the importance of generating a universally applicable and time/resource efficient processes in order to incentivise organisation participation. The Tracker was widely accepted by regional local authorities with a plan to widely adapt it to other cities declared targets.