The Scorecards are making a tangible impact at the local level well beyond our expectations. We’ve seen campaigners, council officers and councillors use the Scorecards in all sorts of creative ways, from informing community engagement, to drafting a motion or acting as a framework of reference! We collected case studies of how people are using the Scorecards on our website. Have your own story to share? Get in touch!

We have delivered local engagement events to help over 500 residents use the Scorecards to understand their council’s climate action and identify campaign asks, partnering with 14 organisations, including local Friends of the Earth groups and the Women’s Institute to have as wide a reach as possible.

Over the course of the year, the Local Climate Academy, our in depth introduction into council climate action and the Scorecards, empowered 50 participants to win further support for climate action. 

Our Scorecards in Action events, which cover the best practice action from councils in each of our Scorecards sections, have been attended by 140 councils – that’s over a third of UK councils!

In early 2024 we conducted our first ever insight and analysis of the Scorecards results. We worked with Anthesis to produce the report Scorecards Successes: What factors enable climate action within UK local authorities?, the first ever attempt to understand which characteristics and actions impact positively or negatively on a council’s Scorecard result and their local climate action. We found that having a dedicated climate portfolio holder improved a council’s Scorecards result by 11% and access to external funding, a published climate strategy with SMART targets, and embedding area-wide climate targets in key council documents improved a council’s score by 9%.

We were proud to launch this report at our Scorecards Successes Conference – our first in person conference in 4 years. We had a packed conference room, an exciting agenda and speakers and a real mix of local community groups, council officers, councillors and those that work in the sector.

In the Scorecards Successes report we made the explicit call for a climate statutory duty. We were thrilled to support a packed event from the Independent Group at the Local Government Association’s (LGA) Annual conference focusing on “What could a climate statutory duty look like?” 

We were even more excited to see that the LGA Local Infrastructure and Net Zero (LINZ) board has endorsed the principle of a statutory duty on climate change. You can see confirmation of this from the Chair of the Board, Cllr Adam Hug, here. This is a big step towards changing the LGA’s position on a climate statutory duty in England.

Recently, we have even been quoted in the House of Lords by three Peers (see one talking about us here) during the Second Reading of the Environmental Targets (Public Authorities Bill). We are actively supporting the Environmental Targets (Public Authorities Bill) alongside Wildlife & Countryside Link and Peers for the Planet. The bill seeks to create strong statutory duties for climate and nature for a large number of public bodies, including councils, and you can view our briefing here. 

Organisationally, this year saw our founder, Kevin Frea, step down from the Board and in his place, we recruited Aaron Gould to join our 5 other wonderful Board members. If you didn’t spot it a few months back, Kevin wrote a reflective piece about where we’ve come from as an organisation and how excited he is about the direction of Climate Emergency UK. 

Internally we’ve been streamlining a lot of our processes, including moving to Airtable to better manage our outreach and national advocacy work. We also redesigned and launched our new organisational website this year – we love the new design and big thank you to A Better Planet for the work they have done! 

We have also continued with steady media coverage with dozens of media hits this year.

Highlights include our investigative work on the electric bus fleet in mayoral authorities, which made The i newspaper, with further coverage in The New Statesman, The MJ and this great piece highlighting Cllr McMurray, from Newry Mourne and Down District Council, using the Scorecards to pass a motion for further climate action. 

To make all of this work possible we’d like to thank our new funders in 2024 who are: Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation, Calouste Gulbenkian and the Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust. We’d also like to thank Polden Puckham for their continuing funding and support, as well as our Scorecard Sustainers who donate monthly to Climate Emergency UK. And finally, a huge shout out to mySociety, our partners in the Scorecards, for all of their work to support us in 2024.