Zero carbon and climate change Our climate action

Annual report 2023/24

The annual report tracks our progress against our climate change action plan. It shows that we're on track to achieve our goal to become a zero-carbon organisation by 2038 or earlier.

The report looks at our direct carbon emissions for the tax year 2023/24. It's the fourth year of the current climate change action plan, which runs from April 2020 to the end of March 2025.

Our target is science-based. It was set for us by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. They set a carbon 'budget' of 126,336 tonnes for the five years from 2020 to 2025. In the first four years, we only used 75.5% of our budget. That left up to 31,173 tonnes of carbon emissions in the carbon budget.

Barring exceptional circumstances, we'll end the 2020 to 2025 period on the right path. We'll report on our emissions for the tax year 2024/25 in October.

This is despite our overall emissions going up by 7% between 2022/23 and 2023/24 – from 22,056 tonnes of carbon to 23,056 tonnes. And exceeding the 21,256 tonnes target for 2023/24.

Most of the rise is due to the National Grid using more fossil fuels to generate electricity. This has an unavoidable effect on our figures for the year. We're also reviewing other internal factors to ensure they're addressed.

The next phase will be more challenging for a number of reasons. These include the difficult national funding landscape. And issues retrofitting council-owned housing at scale. This is due to technical complexity and an industry-wide skills gap. We're playing our part to tackle these wider challenges.

Our action plan is under regular scrutiny to ensure it will deliver the change we need and to keep us on track. We report to the committee for Environment, Climate Change and Neighbourhoods. Find out more about how we work.  

Figure 1: Total Council emissions vs annual budgets

Description of Figure 1: Bar chart comparing Council emissions to our carbon budget for the tax years from 2018 to 2024. It shows the Council has stayed in budget overall since 2018, despite exceeding the budget in 2023/24.

In detail:

In 2018/19 we used 37,173 tonnes of a budget of 43,261 tonnes.

In 2019/20 we used 32,284 tonnes of a budget of 37,637 tonnes.

In 2020/21 we used 25,501 tonnes of a budget of 32,744 tonnes.

In 2021/22 we used 24,240 tonnes of a budget of 28,487 tonnes.

In 2022/23 we used 22,580 tonnes of a budget of 24,784 tonnes.

In 2023/24 we used 23,056 tonnes of a budget of 21,562 tonnes.

Our budget for 2024/25 is 18,759 tonnes.

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