Working from the national carbon budgets set out in the Paris Agreement, the researchers, led by Dr Jaise Kuriakose, have shared out the UK’s budget between local authorities. They then calculated the annual reduction required for each authority to remain within that budget as far ahead as the year 2100.

These figures were initially released as a written report at the request of each authority, but with over 400 individual authorities and a range of combined authorities all wanting reports, they approached Research IT with a view to automating the report generation.

Research software engineers (RSEs) James McGrath and Joshua Woodcock have worked closely with the researchers to streamline the report format. They have created a web-based presentation to make the reports easily accessible and added interactive features to make the reports more engaging. They also automated the process of combining authorities for flexible regional budgeting. This has freed the researchers from the time-consuming process of manually generating reports, as well as helping make the reports more readily available to both local authorities and the general public.

The reporting tool has been demonstrated at a recent climate workshop and at a Parliamentary evidence session where it was very well received. The next step is to continue working on the publicly available version of the tool, which will be available later this summer.

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