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This month’s climate change blog comes from Emily Bolton, Climate Crisis Strategy Manager at Cambridgeshire County Council. Emily attended ADEPT’s Climate Change Board meeting in January to present her team’s work on Locally Determined Contributions (LDCs).

Locally Determined Contributions

The project is a partnership between the county and district councils, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, the Centre for Climate Engagement at the University of Cambridge and Collaborate CIC.

It is funded through Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme, a £60 million, three-year initiative to help accelerate the transition to net zero. 

The “Thriving Places” stream, which the LCD sits within, aims to support:

• Removal of the non-technical barriers to net zero scaling.
• Driving widespread business growth and innovation across the economy.
• Unlocking significant additional private investment to enable true levelling-up both between and within places.

Phase 1

Phase 1 of the project addressed the question - “What is needed to scale financing of net zero activities?” 

The team asked stakeholders why investment in high carbon activities is more attractive than low carbon ones and the answers that came back included:

• Low investor confidence in net zero policy.
• Lots of different, sometimes changeable targets and policy within areas.
• No apparent link between local and national ambitions.

The work identified 3 key “conditions of success” for any solution to provide market/investor confidence:

• collaboration and coordination across sectors.
• creating a clear framework of responsibilities between national and local government so that targets can be aligned.
• promoting the use of apprenticeships and training so that businesses can grow the skills they need.

Phase 2

To tackle this the phase 2 project focuses on developing the concept of a Locally Determined Contribution to express how local authority climate action plans contribute to the delivery of the national Net Zero target. As well as reflecting the way that the UK’s Nationally Determined Contribution states our commitments towards meeting international obligations and ambitions. 

There is currently no formal alignment in practice between national targets and local action, or alignment between local areas. There are also no standard reporting requirements or common approaches on investment in place-based delivery.

A robust LDC can express collective ambition and commitment, improve collaboration, align with other priorities, and build market confidence in green investment. 

It can also provide:

• Strategic alignment of ambitions and actions.
• A structured approach for policy decisions (e.g. local plans) and government funding/policy asks.
• A systematic approach, aligned to national targets, to justify where action can be delivered and where an area may need to go slower.
• Strategic understanding of emissions and roles/functions of different parties to avoid duplication and to maximise each party’s impact.
• A way to assess how climate ambitions intersect with other strategic ambitions/priorities.
• Clear and consistent policy positions to promote investor confidence and risk perceptions.

The LDC toolkit

The Cambridgeshire project is producing a toolkit that will be able to be used by other local authorities interested in developing a LDC. The toolkit will take the form of a workbook with 6 sections.

These include:

• Principles for a robust, transparent and deliverable LDC.
• Governance and influence to align with existing governance, understand local influence on emissions and identify priority areas of focus.
• Carbon budgets and targets with practical guidance on how to calculate these.
• Place-focused reduction pathways to meet these targets.
• Co-benefits and resilience.
• How to use the LDC to leverage the investment needed.

As part of the feedback on the draft toolkit we are running a workshop for other local authorities to test the replicability of the LDC. This will be held on Thursday 12th February, 12:30-3:30pm, via Zoom. 

We will explore the potential for replicating and scaling of the toolkit and how it could be applied to other local authorities. The workshop will focus on the robustness and flexibility of the guidance for other contexts and also appetite for potential post-project rollout activities.

If you are interested in attending, please email [email protected] by the 10^th of February and an invitation will be sent out to you.

Further information 

• ADEPT's Climate Change hub 
• ADEPT Climate Change Board 
• You can find out more about the work of the Centre for Climate Engagement at the University of Cambridge and the international context for place-based local climate action following COP29 here.

Author 

Emily Bolton is a Climate Crisis Strategy Manager at Cambridgeshire County Council