- 4. City-scale decarbonisation
Turning ambition into reality with a detailed route map
“We set out decarbonisation pathways, but none were costed or created using scientifically-based approaches,” admitted Glasgow City Council head of sustainability Gavin Slater at Carbon Crunch. But Glasgow City Council has just taken delivery of a detailed route map, showing what will need to be done for the city to become carbon neutral by its 2030 deadline.
The ambition was set in 2019. The council made a good start, but progress began to stall, Gavin said: “We’d got close to half of our baseline reduced but, getting below that, we started to see diminishing returns. It was much harder to quantify how we were going to do it.”
The route map, which has been developed by Mott MacDonald in partnership with climate data science company ClimateView, is key to overcoming that and fills gaps in understanding of the city’s emission sources, challenges and opportunities.
Granularity that identifies the critical interventions
ClimateView’s digital platform integrates data on capital and operational carbon emissions, costs, and environmental, social and economic impacts across transport, industry, materials, energy, heat, agriculture, waste, machinery and waste, which is divided into 90 subcategories. It marries this granular view of economic infrastructure and activity with systems thinking that enables it to model cause and effect relationships.
ClimateView UK director Orren Shalit said: “There’s a chain that links interventions to outcomes. The platform takes into account the attributes of city systems, people’s perception of those systems and their behaviours. It enables users to identify and experiment with ‘levers’ that will enable transition and indicates which interventions will make the greatest contribution to delivering the desired outcomes, in terms of carbon abatement and other benefits.”
The detailed picture of present emissions showed Glasgow City Council who the critical stakeholders are to better understand the effort and investment required to implement interventions, as well as their contribution to the goal of achieving net zero.
Additional data across location-specific carbon, cost, environmental and social data was also included and analysed. This enabled practical decisions on potential levers for change, stakeholders who needed to be involved and guidance on how to design and implement the interventions required to achieve rapid transition to net zero.
“Making the journey to net zero requires really skilful stakeholder engagement, influence and persuasion.
Visualising the interconnectedness of decarbonisation
As the route map took shape, Gavin said: “It showed the interconnectedness of the decarbonisation journey and many different stakeholders – both across council departments and the private sector – whose decisions impact carbon and other outcomes. We’ve never been able to visualise this before. It’s been transformational.”
Mott MacDonald Glasgow City lead Alan Hendry reflected on how the route map revealed the importance of collaboration in achieving net zero: “When you look at the multitude of transition steps required to achieve city-scale decarbonisation, you see that the council has direct control of only a few. The rest sit with the UK and Scottish governments, public bodies and private companies.
The route map provides the council with indicative costs and is assisting with drawing up a prioritised list of interventions.
“It’s not possible for the council alone to make the changes that are needed,” noted Gavin. “Private investment is required.” To support that investment, the council formed a green investment team in March 2024 charged with attracting private sector capital into a fund to support decarbonisation projects. The team is targeting £40bn of investment.
Alan said that working at city scale creates investible opportunities. For example, almost two-thirds of Glasgow homes could benefit from connection to a district heating network. “It’s big enough to achieve business efficiencies and achieve attractive return on investment,” he explained. The route map will support such focused discussions between the council and investors.
Glasgow City Council has moved faster than most cities in developing its 2030 route map and is sharing its experience with other city and local authorities, so that they too can quantify the challenges and opportunities in reaching net zero.
