The Carbon & Place research project is a continuation and expansion of the CREDS Place-Based Carbon Calculator. The project seed to understand how carbon footprints vary between neighbourhoods across the UK and what can be done to reduce them. The project publishes data and analysis for communities and policymakers via the free tools on the www.carbon.place website.
Carbon & Place
Malcolm Morgan, EDRC
Themes
Project overview
Key Objectives
- A complete rebuilt of the www.carbon.place website updating data adding new tools and features
- Improved methods for calculating neighbourhood carbon footprints enabling annual estimates from 2010 – present and annual updates in the future.
- Working with the Futures Theme, to produce localised decarbonisation pathways for every neighbourhood in Great Britain.
Methods and approaches
The analysis uses a range of statistical methods using Census and Administrative data as well a surveys and synthetic population approached to build a detail model of household consumption for each neighbourhood in Great Britain. The analysis is published as open-source R code at https://github.com/PlaceBasedCarbonCalculator
Key Findings
Per-person consumption carbon footprints are up to 8x higher in the highest carbon neighbourhoods than the lowest carbon neighbourhoods. This leads to significant difference in the speed and type of decarbonisation required across the UK.
Next Steps
Future scenarios are being developed to understand how the rate of transition to electric vehicles and low carbon heating will vary across scales.
