A practical guide to learning for decarbonisation at the city-level

We know rapidly decarbonising cities will be pivotal in our transition to a low-carbon future. But making the decisions on which decarbonisation initiatives to pursue at the city-level can be challenging due to the plethora of factors impacting these choices. Working with the GMCA Low-Carbon Team I have designed a tool as part of my PhD Research that can help support these decisions and narrow down the most impactful places to learn from to accelerate city-level climate action.

The practical guide to learning for decarbonisation at the city-level (published in Environmental Science & Policy and co-authored by Dr Claire Hoolohan, Dr Christopher Jones, and Professor Carly McLachlan) delivers four key ideas:

•  It helps local authorities pinpoint their learning priorities for sustainability.
• Allows more efficient experimentation for accelerating city-level climate action.
• Formalises city-to-city learning for sustainability projects at the city-level, and
• Supports a wider look at decarbonisation projects from around the world.

This tool came about after I spent the first year of my PhD working with the GMCA Low-Carbon Team finding examples of decarbonisation projects and initiatives that have been effective in other cities around the world. I then put together list of case studies that highlight the wide range of projects other local regions are utilising to help them create a low-carbon city. This list is a snapshot of projects and if publicly available on the University Figshare here.

This list was too long for anyone to effectively learn from for real action, so I created a learning framework to narrow down the most suitable decarbonisation projects for Greater Manchester city-region. The GMCA Low-Carbon Team act as a case study for the design and application of this framework to create a bespoke list of projects that fulfil the decarbonisation priorities of the team. This framework uses elements of co-design to highlight the main concerns of a Local Authority and use these priorities to extract the projects that offer the best opportunity for effective learning.

The framework has been applied here to Greater Manchester, but has been designed in such a way that any Local Authority Environment Team could use it to help them narrow down their search for information on decarbonisation from other cities.

My PhD research is co-funded by the University of Manchester School of Engineering and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. My research investigates how cities can learn from each other to accelerate their decarbonisation journey.

Thank you to the GMCA Low-Carbon Team for their participation in this research.