Annual report 2024/25
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 2024/25. It's the fifth and final year of this climate change action plan, which ran 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.
Over the five years, we used 97% (122,000 tonnes) of our carbon budget. We reduced our carbon emissions by 6,911 tonnes or 21% (compared to 2019/20 emissions).
The next phase, from 2025 to 2030, 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 was under regular scrutiny to ensure it would deliver the change we needed and to keep us on track. This will also be true for the next action plan which will run from 2025 to 2030. We report to the committee for Environment, Climate Change and Neighbourhoods. Find out more about how we work.
Figure 1: Council emissions vs the 5-year carbon budget
Description of Figure 1: A stacked bar chart showing carbon emissions by tax year from 2020 to 2025. It shows that the Council stayed within its carbon budget of 126,336 tonnes, with 4,366 tonnes remaining.
In detail:
In 2020/21 we used 25,501 tonnes.
In 2021/22 we used 24,240 tonnes.
In 2022/23 we used 22,580 tonnes.
In 2023/24 we used 23,056 tonnes.
In 2024/25 we used 25,373 tonnes.
4,336 tonnes remain unused.