 Welcome everyone, my name is Mark Critch, I'm chief executive of My Society and really pleased to welcome you all to our third tech tech seminar of this year. This one, as you all know, is focused on the climate crisis and the role that civic technology might play in mitigating some of the worst impacts of this crisis. My Society, as you may know, is a charity based in the UK. We run lots of well used civic services around the world, mainly in the UK, but versions of our services are used in about 40 countries. They cover services, looking at freedom of information, transparency, parliamentary monitoring, citizen reporting, all sorts of dealings with the public sector and helping to build communities and generally support democracy. And as I'm sure all of you share concerns about the scale of the looming climate crisis, and no doubt you yourself are considering how might you play your part, either in your personal life, your work life, within your communities, within political organizations, campaigning groups and so on. And so with that in mind, thinking about how we all play our role, we've invited four speakers to come and share what they're working on at the moment in relation to the climate crisis. And from our perspective, we're really keen to understand what role civic technology might play to support that work. We always start from the assumption that technology is not always the answer, but where it can play a role to support, expand and enhance your activity that actually happens in communities around the world, then we like to better understand what role we can play. So first of all, I think I'll just hand over to Rachel Cox-Coon first of all, let her introduce herself, and then I'll pass on to Tom, Natty and Louise. So Rachel, do you want to just say hello, say a few words about what you're working on? Thanks Mark. Yeah, so I'm Rachel Cox-Coon. I wear two hats most days in that and my day job I work for an organization called the Centre for Sustainable Energy, which is one of the biggest energy and climate change charities in the UK, where I lead a programme of work, a climate emergency support programme that's largely aimed at local government at every level in the UK. And then by night, I'm a local politician, so I'm an elected member in the Cotswolds, which is in Gloucestershire, where I am Cabinet Member for the portfolio I manage for that part of local government is climate change and forward planning. Excellent, thank you. Pass on to Tom. Thanks, Mark. Nice to be with you. I'm an associate director at the Institute for Government. We are a think tank, a non-partisan think tank that looks at the workings of government and how government can work more effectively. And we've just published a report about how we think the government needs to change if it's to deliver its net zero target, which sets out a bunch of recommendations to do with how climate change is given proper priority in government, the sorts of skills and expertise you'd need to develop sort of rigorous plans and then the kind of capability you'd need across the public sector to then deliver those plans. So that's the type of thing that we do. Fantastic. And Natty. Hi everyone. I'm Natty Carffy. I'm the deputy director for the Open Data Charter. I'm based in Buenos Aires where it's summer, so it's not that I'm crazy. It's just that it's 28 degrees here. I've been working and leading the work that we've been doing on open data for climate action. We developed a tool alongside with the World Resources Institute and implemented that tool on open data for climate action in Chile and in Uruguay, and I will share the learnings and the challenges that we found in that work. Excellent. Thanks, Natty. And over to everyone, Louise Cole. Hello. I'm the head of development at my society is Mark's already introduced my society. I can quickly say a few words about the climate projects we've been working on this year. We were part of the team that supported climate assembly UK, which was a citizens assembly tasked with making recommendations about how the UK could get to net zero. That assembly released its final report in September to pretty good take up. And more recently, we've been working on a project of our own to try and collect climate action plans from local government so councils in the UK, and provide a simple digital service so people both inside and outside can easily find the plans and see what's in them. So coming back to Rachel, so you said you were two hats, at least two hats, probably a few more. I mean, in your role, obviously you work very closely on the front line of coming up with solutions, especially at a community level local government level around climate change but you're also a local councillor yourself. You know that gives you a pretty unique perspective on both the task at hand and also your the challenges involved in actually implementing some of those changes I guess so could you maybe give give a bit more of a flavor about the both the political and technical challenges you face in your work and I guess where you see the biggest issues are going to need to be overcome that technology might play a role. Well, I suppose you know without saying the extremely obvious the biggest political issue is politics. So, you know, one of the greatest problems for every local authority that's declared a climate emergency is to maintain a unanimous approach to delivering that a lot of climate emergencies have been declared in the UK by local councils and you know well over two thirds of local councils declared a climate emergency. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty of having a full council meeting and deciding what to spend money on. That's where the real politics comes back into play. And so I see data and information as a really important part of keeping everybody on board and making sure that all of the elected members many of whom don't come from this background they come from a huge you know covering quite a big age range as well often so in terms of coming to the climate crisis many of them have come all the way through school in university in their career without really hearing about it much apart from a bit on the news. So being able to provide that information to them is important and as someone who works with with councils in my professional life and then in a council as a counselor. The other thing that has I've always been aware of in a professional sense but is really writ large for me now that I am a counselor is the ridiculous costs that local government are paying to effectively create localised versions of the same thing that could be done at a national level where we could all access it. And this goes back for years with my work hat on probably almost 10 years ago now. Remember having a conversation with the department for energy and climate change as was then you had an idea about creating local level data on renewable energy potential so that people could see maps for example of wind turbines and you know where things could go. We talked to them. We showed them a cost of that could be done for the whole country for about half a million. They then went and put out a fund and spent six million pounds giving out tiny bits of money to 300 different parishes to do this work to a whole range of different and uncomfortable methodologies that left most of the country as a black hole and not covered by this data set anyway. The most extraordinary waste of public money that resulted in almost nothing. And now here we are a decade later so much closer to catastrophe and disaster. This kind of data is still not available publicly. And as a local politician, I find myself in a position of having to spend tens of thousands of pounds of my local taxpayers money to produce that for the Cotswolds when I know that I could do that through work for the whole of England for probably not a great deal more. And I find that enormously frustrating. No, I definitely share your frustration. I mean that you have finding ways that everyone can play the part in relationship with your central government local government community groups, all sorts. I mean, it's such an important part of the work. And with that in mind, Tom, you wrote a fantastic report recently one of the authors at the Institute of Government in relation to, you know, how we how we actually achieve net zero. And one of the, I think, really crystallising things that you may cleave in that report was, you know, for net zero by 2030, you know, we're talking about two, two, maybe three parliaments at most. You know, even net zero 2050 we're only talking about six or seven parliamentary terms and I'm sure that's true in the UK I'm sure it's very similar around the world. But with that, you know, the short amount of time when you consider the amount of time it takes major changes to go through parliamentary process. I mean that is an area of real concern. Maybe talk about the report and a little bit about what you think some of the options we might have on. So yeah, I mean that's actually right. I think one of the big challenges always with climate change is the sort of time consistency problem you know it's easy to say in 2008 when we announced the climate change act that this is a priority it's much harder to make sure it's a priority for all the ministers and and sort of governments that come after you. And, you know, we've seen some progress since 2008, but it's been quite slow in lots of areas and a lot of governments and particularly chancellors haven't chosen to prioritise it. So, yeah, I think, you know, any, any plan needs to look at how you have a sort of accountability mechanism that ensures right across government. This is sort of made a top priority. And I think one of the problems for the UK has been the fact that it so far it's been given to a fairly weak department. So first of all, DEC, partner energy and climate change and latterly base, which is the business department. The business departments don't really have the power to say to the housing minister, or the transport minister or the chancellor, or anyone else that you really need to be focusing on this so so I think that's a big problem. It's really interesting to hear Rachel talk about the local government perspective. That's certainly an area that came up for us as, you know, a lot of the enthusiasm for addressing the climate emergency is developing and fermenting at a local level. A lot of the groups that are discussing this a lot of the declarations and net zero targets and things like that. But unfortunately in the UK, our sort of local government capability has been really stripped over the last decade and we've all sort of seen the cuts to budgets have happened and things like that. So I would build that back up if those local sort of politicians and authorities are going to be able to actually design this at the local level and there's going to be many different pathways to net zero. So that's a really important role. The other bit I would just mention is the public engagement in this. I think, you know, the progress so far in terms of reducing emissions in the UK, and we've reduced quite a lot, but it's all been in the energy sector basically switching away from coal towards first gas and now renewables. But the changes that are coming are going to be changes to how we travel to the way we heat our homes, the way we eat and drink, you know really fundamental changes to people's lives. It requires politicians and sort of governments that that really engage with the public and get their views about how these changes should happen and how the costs of those changes should be spread. Because if I think if a government tries to sort of do this all very quickly without seeking public consent and it will quite quickly actually lose people support. So you really need real need to sort of communicate with the public and build that support and I'd be interested to hear today about what kind of role civic engagement and sort of digital tools can play in some of that engagement as well. That's great. Thanks, Tom. I think we'll come back to exactly that point of thinking the next question just your both how we create that space for politicians to make the type of decisions that are required, but in your also how you actually enable that access. And Natty, the work you do obviously the open data charter is completely focused really I guess on on educating your public sector bodies, your campaigners and so on to be able to make data more open and you've done some work. I guess you released a report earlier this year in relation to work in Chile that you were involved in but maybe just give us a flavor for the work that open data charter is doing in this area. So, as you said, we work closely with governments and local civil society organizations whenever we implement a project and what we saw is was a big opportunity due to the Paris Agreement. Article 13 of the parties agreement actually asks the governments to report on their on their climate change data. But every government every signatory government was actually producing that data and then just reporting to the UN and there was public value that was contained within that data that wasn't being wasn't being exploded because of not that data not being open in reusable formats. So alongside with with the World Resources Institute, as I said, we created these these practical tool, I will ship the link in the chat room in a bit that we call the open up guide for climate action, which actually just highlights a set of data sets that governments should be able to open in a first phase of opening up climate change data. The tool that we then piloted both in Chile and in Uruguay, the Chile report is already out there the Uruguay report is going to be out in a couple of weeks. So what we did is work within with government with the open data offices, and the climate change offices to try to understand which of those those data sets were actually a climate change priority for for the country. So understanding the level of openness they they had so understanding which were open which were, which already exists, but but didn't that wasn't open there and which which data sets actually didn't exist nor where collected. Then we worked with with civil society organizations as I said in trying to understand what the priorities were from the demand side. So what what was what were they missing, both researchers civil society organizations, universities and journalists. And so we did a couple of workshops we we could do the in person workshops, unfortunately because this all took place last year. And we found that there were of course certain certain topics that that everybody was was interested in but then also understanding what the differences were. And with with that in mind, we helped to create a publication plan understanding the level of openness and the priorities for kind of both sides. And we did a proposal on an agenda to open up the data on climate change. We found this really really useful for for governments and for civil society just to understand and manage the expectations also. And we actually introduced this project in the COP meeting last year, the one that took place in in Madrid. And we had a whole bunch of governmental representatives coming to the workshop because they were trying to figure out new ways to to actually meet the demand of this article 13 from the Paris agreement. Which actually asked them to to be innovative in the way they reported the climate change data. So they came up just to see what we were doing at what open data meant, because as we know there's there's kind of the challenge between different governmental offices to work together. They work, they mostly work in silo so all the governmental representatives that were in this in this funnel were actually from climate change offices and have hadn't heard from the open data teams within their own governments. So, luckily we were able to to work maybe as a hub to connect offices and try to enhance this this project. We are now in conversations with a couple more countries to to work within this, this idea of the open up guide and trying to prioritize the local agendas and work as as Tom said, with a participatory overview understanding the demand side and the demand side priorities to to create these publication plans. Fantastic, thank you. And so turning to Louise. Obviously, I'm fairly familiar with the work we've been doing in my society in relation to opening up climate data maybe give a give a picture of the work we've been doing there in climate action plans and more generally. Obviously one of the, it's been touched upon already, I think it's it's it's known within the open data movement generally that just publishing data isn't sufficient it's it's how you actually make it usable is is the real critical element. I mean, I think what Rachel said, speaks very much to software developers because it's a sort of tragic story of the same work being done over and over and writ large that means the same money being spent over and over again. Our work on council climate action plans was really taking a very small approach, and initially thinking about citizens who are engaging for the first time so in the UK there's concern about the climate emergency has risen up people's consciousness and lots of people, either through the strikes or extinction rebellion or other other organisations were engaging for the first time on the climate and that was part of the wave of climate emergency declarations that were made. But then you, you're in the world of local government if you your councils declared a climate emergency and you want to get involved support them hold them to account find out what they're doing. And you're immediately in the world of council websites which are not the easiest information resources to navigate, and then not the most suggestive of institutions that want your input or want want to involve you in decision making. So you have to kind of then find your councils climate action plan and possibly read through pages and pages of information for the first time and try and figure out what you think about it and what you might do to kind of communicate with them about it. So what we built as a very kind of early prototype was we crowdsourced a data set of as many climate action plans as we could found, as we could find, and built a simple tool that would allow you to put in your postcode. Find out who your council are, which for many people is the first time they might be finding that out, and then see what their, their climate action plan is. And one of the things I think you get from a central approach there, almost for free is the ability to then search over the contents of all these plans which as far as I know is something that would have been extremely difficult before so there's certainly dividends that you get from from bringing all the information into one place. I think the other thing that strikes me in listening to the other panelists is the value, both in terms of talking to people who have all kinds of different levels of experience and knowledge about climate change and that question of kind of consent for for policy changes is the potential to pose this as a common problem, both to people inside and outside of the world government and whether there is a role Pacific tech in simply framing that problem. I think the climate assembly was a really good example of a very effortful but worthwhile process of really unpacking the route to net zero and say okay this is a problem with many other problems inside it. Here's a five minute description as best as we can kind of give you of each of those problems that we collectively have to solve. Fantastic, thanks Louise. I think to just listen to all four of you in your introductory remarks. I think the thing that always strikes me is really critical about this moment is we're asking people and organisations and governments to really act in a way that's different from the way they would previously be used to. We're asking citizens to take a much more active involved role. We're asking local governments to take a much more collaborative and facilitating role than they might be used to. The more used to providing services and we're asking national governments to create the conditions for those changes to take place rather than centralising mandate from that sort of national perspective solely. So huge number of challenges there. I mean what collectively do you see is the barriers there, what kind of strategies might we adopt to overcome some of those issues I guess and maybe come back to Rachel to provide some comments. Yeah, I think from a local government point of view and I'm sure this is definitely true of English local authorities that I work with but I'm sure it's probably true internationally as well is that there's a great deal of sort of tradition and culture in terms of how decision making occurs. And that doesn't change quickly. It's very hard to map on a new way of working on to these old decision making structures. So when you're dealing with an officer group who has Tom rightly pointed out is cut right back to the bone anyway because we've had 10 years of austerity. I mean as an example, planning departments across the country are 62% worse off in real terms than they were 10 years ago at a time which when the government has just released a planning white paper that says we're going to triple a lot of people's housing numbers you know massively deregulated this is this is a real problem but leaving that aside, we have officers churning through this approach of well if I need to get this done, then I have to produce a report that has to go through Cabinet and then through full council and then to do do do do. And actually what you're looking at is you want a quick decision and they're saying there's four months of work that have to be done to go through a decision making process that isn't really fit to make a holistic decision anyway because it breaks everything down and it's very granular level and what I've seen Cornwall council do recently and what I'd really like to adopt similar approach to the Cotswolds and I know others are is taking the donor economics approach to decision making. And rather than having these really old school decision making process that a lot of councils use that that we've almost we've been using them since the 40s or something is is creating an entirely new decision making framework that looks across the board and makes sure because most council making decisions are decision making is just looking at financial implications. And they aren't really set up to say well what are the carbon implications and what are the social implications beyond basic equalities legislation for example, or health and safety, or child safeguarding these things that feel legislatively bound to follow. There's no wider requirement for council decision making to say, what about the future well being of our people, you know the Wales future well being well being a future generations act is is a standalone example of that. So that kind of accountability that Tom was referring to needs a different decision making protocol and it's only for English local government absolutely but I'd be amazed if this culture and tradition that people guard very dearly isn't also a problem elsewhere, and it's a block on on quick action and then that also feeds through I think to procurement and and you know Louise mentioned it's the same money for the same work over and over again. But it's also the fact that procurement you can have all the best political desires in the world to have an action plan and to make things happen but when it goes back down through that procurement funnel. Then the decisions will be done in an old school way again because that that data is not there to allow procurement professionals to say, well what's the carbon implication of this contract I'm about to put out and that kind of thing so I feel like challenging these kind of embedded systems is is you know it's that thing about. Culture trumping everything at the end of the day, there has to be a written branch review of culture and about why why are we doing what we're doing as a local council here. Absolutely and maybe Tom you may have some thoughts on your your what what are the cultural changes within government and needs to take place to trigger these type of transition you think. Yeah, I thought that was a really great answer from from Rachel I really strongly agree with that and the I think another example of that at the central government level is the green book and you know we saw this being discussed this last week and the sort of idea that you know you can make a few tweaks and suddenly it's all going to support totally different goals, rather than just whatever ministers tell officials to make the answer sort of come out with. But that's another example where carbon is not factored in you know we can justify, you know road extension around stonehenge because it's only a marginal amount of our carbon budget. Well all the road extensions if you add them all up might not be a marginal amount of your carbon budget but we don't do that as part of our process. So I think Rachel totally right there's kind of a lot of these processes type things which sound very dull and arcane that are actually quite critical to how we make decisions and the carbon implications of those decisions. I mean a couple of things you could do differently is sort of force people to think about the carbon implications of every spending decision so that could happen at spending reviews in the central government and something similar in local government and then force it into the project appraisal process much more strongly as well. I wanted to pick up quickly on something Louise said as well because I thought that was really well put around the climate assembly as an exercise, which for those 100 people who were involved I don't know if everyone on the call is familiar with it but there was 100 people from the public there as a representative sample of different political opinions opinions on the climate etc. And they brought them together over about six weekends gave them access to the best experts from the CCC everywhere else and got them to discuss and debate how they would get to net zero, you know members of the public and they came out the other end of it, incredibly educated about as Louise was saying he's sort of complex into into play of different choices. Now what we need is almost like something like that to happen on a national level, because you know at the moment, there's some polling that was done it shows two thirds of people have never heard of net zero. You know they're just let alone what it implies they haven't heard of the term. So actually we need a big sort of public discussion about what this means and priorities some of that can happen at the local level but I think quite an interesting role for technology I could imagine as a way of sort of reaching people engaging people in the choices, you know, displaying them visualising them. Yeah, I think there's lots of options. Fantastic. You're natty any any thoughts really I guess so on. You started to touch upon earlier as well about your, your different governments in different countries and so on picking up the best practice is developed and what are they, what are the challenges in that area you obviously because what you develop in one country isn't isn't necessarily easily transferable where are they where are the common points and again, what needs to be in place for those, those type of changes to happen internationally. So yeah, from the open data perspective, one of the main challenges that we faced and and I think we will keep on facing as we progress with this work will have to do with data literacy and how open data is being taught and spoken of within governments. So, of course, when when reaching out to the open data offices, however, they are organised within within one of each one of the of the governments we had like super easy conversations, but then when we approached the climate change offices, they didn't know what we were speaking about whatsoever. They, and they didn't understand the need to open up the data that they were creating like they were creating the data just for reporting and for internal use. So it's like, why would somebody want this date like, and so we have to have all the, all the typical conversations around open data all over again. And which is it's not a problem but but we see that that literacy is still lacking throughout governmental structures in in everywhere and and so just having that those conversations and and and this data literacy programs throughout government structures it's something that we all we always promote, but we see that it's still, it's still missing. And then what we did is we celebrated the Open Data Day 2020 Open Data Day in Uruguay. We managed to do a person in person event it was in February. It seems like zillion years ago but we did a hackathon where we actually invited all the climate change office officials. Of course the open data folks were there and we invited civil society organisations from both communities also they hadn't collaborated yet. And it was amazing to see how the public officials, especially from the from the climate change office were kind of really understanding there what the value of the data was for for reuse purposes. So it's like, okay, so they wanted the data for this, you know, and it's totally different from reporting. There were apps that were with salisations, possible researchers. So, I know hackathons are kind of not that popular right now, but we saw what that meant for for those public officials like visualising what what their hard work in opening up that data meant. And so now we are keep we are actually moving forward with the second phase in Uruguay, because now they totally understand what this effort means. So I know I know it's it's setting like the agenda a little bit back but data literacy and properly explaining the added value of opening up data, it's it's still super important in this agenda. No, absolutely. I mean, I think we find that all over that you're the siloed nature of so many you're the responsibility is so siloed across different departments and individuals and you find that all levels of government. And you're just just lacking those those basic skills to be able to kind of translate concepts across those different silos is incredibly difficult, you know, whether it's open data level or net zero level or just understanding the carbon impact of any of the individual decisions up your public official might actually make. I mean Louise you've you've certainly we've discussed this as well just your the relationship between climate plans, climate emergency declarations and of course if they're not embedded within the economic plan of a council. You know they won't actually get active upon what what are the barriers they're stopping these actually leading to greater change. I mean one I think is the complexity. I mean, we're talking about a huge sort of tiered set of problems and there is a lot of data that you could kind of expose about that as Matty said but I think you don't actually want to expose that to everyone because it's difficult to understand it you need to give people a general understanding of what's happening and the problem we're all collectively engaging with, but then I think there's a big role for simple digital services that try and take these big national data sets and give people views through them that are actionable and simple and relevant to their lives so in terms of citizens answers questions of what's your council doing who's vulnerable in your area to the kind of the where are the areas that need adaptation in your area, and kind of give people a slice that they can actually take action on whether that's from within government or from from kind of the citizen or campaigner point of view. Excellent with that in mind or maybe open up to any of the panel that want to answer but your what's what's the, what's the particular role of the citizen amongst all of us what type of skills and literacy do they need to be able to create this corridors of power and actually influence that type of change and anyone want to jump in on that. Maybe Rachel go for it. I mean from the from my point of view with the political how I would like to hear more from citizens you know when we published our climate change strategy a couple of months ago at the Cotswolds, I had an email from a local resident who said that he was in tears I don't know what have we done wrong and and he was saying you know I'm so worried about climate change I'm so worried for me and my children and I'm so pleased to see my council putting this down in paper as something that's important you know I'll sleep well tonight and I thought brilliant. Are you the only one literally there's 85,000 people living here you really the only one that cried, because I hope more people did and I wish more people would write to me and tell me about it, because it can only strengthen your local politicians. I don't want to talk to them about it, but I think what particularly when people are agitated anxious there are their tendencies to talk angrily and anxiously so it's, it's having a go rather than providing support so citizens need to get involved in a supportive way up with politicians across the board it's too easy to be done tribal and ideal ideological about it and so write a nice letter to Boris Johnson and tell him please do this for me. But on the other hand I think the other thing citizens need and all councillors need as well and councils is carbon literacy use that phrase it's used as a throw away phrase but it is a sort of official does have an official meaning, because the other big barrier that that we face trying to get things done is constantly trying to sort of heard and corral people down the road of highest impact. You know if I had a pound for every time I've spoken to a parish council or someone who says we think we'll plant some trees. And I think that's great I have a forestry background I'd love to see more trees planted but then when you ask them why. And what will you be doing about retrofit and are you considering getting people out of their cars and all this is they haven't got a clue where their best impacts lie, or they're very worried about climate change but they want to therefore tackle plastic recycling. And there's no sense that those two issues whilst whilst both enormous and not necessarily entirely related. So providing data to directly to citizens to understand their impacts is absolutely crucial and we're doing a piece of work on that at CSA at the moment actually with government funding to produce a kind of community scale, funding tool that won't be all about massive spreadsheets and not because people are not qualified, nor do they have the time to spend time interpreting that. But there will be more gear to look this is what your village looks like or this is what your neighborhood looks like. These are your impact areas. If you could all come together and spend only time concentrating on one sector then in your place it should be buildings retrofit, or whatever that would be, which is very different to the way maybe national government is looking at things. So people need data so that they can help their policies but they don't need the actual data they need it interpreted for them in some way to some large degree. Absolutely. I'll just note there's actually quite a few comments in the chat just your number of different projects that are actually underway and you're obviously my society involved in some there's a whole bunch of your everyone on the panel are involved in different projects and there's clearly a lot going on. And we want one thing we're particularly keen coming out of this session is to your using this as a way of kind of connecting some of those projects together as much as possible so we'll certainly be keen to kind of follow up. And Tom, you maybe have some further thought the role of the citizen amongst all of this and we where can they best your how can they help create the conditions for that political change as well. You're right there's some really interesting comments in the chat I was just looking at a couple of links that Nick Perks posted around the sort of climate literacy projects and help help the future which is fantastic charity hope for the future rather. Yeah, I think there's quite a lot people can do to sort of, you know, tool themselves up for this, I think. Rachel's right that sort of the old sort of stayed public consultation where a sort of council or a government department sort of puts out a set of questions and it takes months to reply and then they don't really bother to always read the replies particularly when talking about central government at least is not really the way forward on this. What we want is something that's much more sort of iterative and agile in terms of people being able to respond to what those with decision making power are doing. I also wonder, and I'm sure there's lots of tools for this that are being developed, including by sort of people within this community. I wonder what there is in terms of, you know, we're all going to have to look at how to upgrade the sort of energy efficiency of our homes in the next, you know, 510 years. We're all going to have to think about those of us who do have vehicles at some point switching over to it to an electric vehicle. We're all going to have to think about replacing our gas boilers and there's real benefit and a lot of those changes sort of as Rachel's indicating a lot of those changes happening in a coordinated way at a local level. And in people who sort of live near to each other kind of sharing lessons sharing ideas, you know, that kind of thing. So I think there's probably interesting ways of thinking about actually not relying just on your local authority on government expecting them to do everything but sort of thinking about how people who really care about this agenda collaborate on actual kind of practical meaningful things about, you know, which builders are the best ones locally for doing this kind of skilled insulation work, you know that those kind of questions. I think are going to become really important and actually giving people a positive sense that they can achieve change within their own lives but also within their communities and not just feel angry about the kind of slowness of Westminster or Whitehall which can feel along their way. The aspect of all being in it together especially at a community level is is a really kind of important part of the answers. And Natty any thoughts especially in your where you've seen of turning or using data or using these tools to actually turn that into to real real world action as well I mean how do you, how do you connect connect it up to real activity I guess. So do I just want to follow up on what Tom was saying and then and answer your question because we've seen is not something that the open data charter has done but we're connected to to the project. Because we've seen it and just got in touch with them. We've seen a projects where they are actually involving citizens in for example leveraging air quality data. So if you want to you can volunteer and you can put it's a sensor that looks like a strawberry so it's like plant your own strawberry in your garden and help out with collecting the data and that that type of involvement where citizens are actually being part of the creation of the data, then results in them being involved with whatever happens with once the data it's out there and it's being analyzed and reused. So, on a local level of course there is a lot more of potential because on a national wide initiative it would be a little bit complicated but it can be done anyway. So that's that those kinds of initiatives are super interesting and we're trying to connect with with those when when we can. And then, as far as as we use what we've seen, at least in the in the hackathon and the apps that came out of that like the mock apps that came out of them. It's mostly visualizations as as we were speaking about Rachel mostly is is data from climate change is not that easy to to process if you're not from the climate change community. It was actually a challenge I had to face when leading this work within the open data charter I know about open data but not specifically about climate change and and there is a lot of names that I didn't know. So that's like an entry problem you know so the creation of this kind of mega community between open data and climate change folks actually resolved in them collaborating in this hackathon and each one explaining its bits to the other one we need to make better connections in to create and more public value, because it is, it is a problem. There's a lot of standards that are already exists that are very well known for the climate change for the climate change folks that have absolutely no level of knowledge in the open data world. And we are seeing more open data on climate change panels and discussions fortunately, but it's still really really small and for example as I said in cop last year out of I don't know how many zillion panels, we were the only ones talking about open data there, and it's a massive conference. So hopefully next year if cop is done again it will be in UK. We will have more panels on open data there. Fantastic. And one thing in this at Louise I'm sure you have some thoughts on this but just to pick up and pick up on some of the comments in the chat as well about your the connections that need to maybe between different organizations and your some of the different organizations we might rely on. I mean Rachel you're just commenting in relation to mhclg not the, you're finally taking climate change seriously in its role. What are the, what are the different connections that need to be made. I mean with some comments from Robert, Robert Spig as well in relation to linking up climate action plans with local plans, neighborhood plans and so on as well. I mean there's a, we're not short of plans, we're not short of declarations how do we, how do we turn this into action I guess. I think some of this is is also about knowing people and knowing the right people. I think the, the story of Rachel's constituent who got in touch. That person has already been through quite a process to find out who you are that you're the person in the council that cares about this. I think so people have carbon literacy challenges, but, but nearly everyone also has a kind of a challenge in understanding how the institutions work both at a national and local level. If I want to influence my council how do I do that you can sort of start to learn the people involved the issues involved the processes involved and and that's also part of the solution because this isn't actually about dry plans so in our work on the council climate action plans we spoke a couple of weeks ago to the Southeast Climate Alliance which turns out to be a lot of that is three people sitting with a spreadsheet where they collected all their council's local plans and marking cells in green that they think where they think the council's done pretty well and cells in yellow where they're not so sure and then having a conversation with the people in the council and getting to know them and saying, how can we help you so I think it is a combination of of all the things we've talked about before but also human connections across institutions and how do we build those and get a sense of a common problem to solve and work in a coordinated way in a way that we haven't done before. Fantastic. And just just to say as I mentioned already will be taking the comments from the chat and any links to any projects will make sure they are properly documented and we'll share them in some blog posts afterwards along with the recording of the seminar as well. So just just really, we've got about five minutes left of this more formal session and we can get into a bit more open Q&A if anyone wants to ask more questions, but I guess you're just just each of the panel really what's the most important thing that you think we should be working on and as a rival for technology to play within. Who wants to take that one on. I don't, I'm not sure it has to do with with technology in a seminar that I did last year. I made the joke about how important people interoperability is not just data interoperability. And I still do think it was a joke, but it ended up not be it's crucial, like making these connections between either or between governmental officials between government offices between government and citizens. It's still critical. Then then we can think about the technology to help empower that and to make it easier, but still that email that Rachel received it's still critical the connections between actors, it's, it's still the most important thing. I think that the biggest issue for me, both in my work and in in that with the political side of things is in is in showing people and it relates to what Natty says it's in showing people how the climate crisis is relevant to them and it comes back to carbon literacy. I'll put the link in the things you can circulate it if you're not familiar with it there are some fantastic resources produced about a month ago by Britain talk by the climate outreach information network called Britain talks climate, which kind of segments the UK population into seven groups I think it is. And it's thinking about, you know actually everybody is concerned about climate change in their own way, and people are concerned for different reasons. And we need to be providing information to people really about the different ways in which the actions we take at local government and that central government will be tackling the things that they're worried about because the one thing you do find as a local politician. I'm sure this is true as a national politician as well is that you're really only hearing from what that research were called progressive activists, people who are really worried, who do politics for fun, who campaign for fun. This is what they think about 24 seven. But actually that there are backbone Conservatives out there who are also worried about climate change but they're worried about the rural economy and they're worried about farmers and they're worried about food security and they're worried about migration. And it's being able to communicate to them that the things you're doing that seem a bit unconnected around housing, sort of creating that web and saying no this what this does ultimately is solve that thing that you're worried about. And we people get very hung up on the fact that people are worried about climate change for the wrong reasons. It's fine to be worried about migration or whatever it is, as long as you want to do something about climate change. So I think there needs to be some way of using data and using information to make those links between we do these actions because it has this impact, which isn't perhaps immediately clear. And that's, I think, something that councils are not set up to do, not capable of doing. And again, it's not the sort of thing every single council should be doing individually anyway. Shall I add to that so I was going to say my top priority would be would be public engagement as well I think Rachel set out the argument really well. And another another sort of potential way into that with with one of the some of those groups is something like air quality. So, so thinking about what which of these actions on climate change will deliver the kind of improvements that different different people prioritise in their lives and I think that's really, really important. And also for us all to sort of slightly maybe get out of our bubble of people who care about this place. I think another one, and I would say that the accountability question which has come up quite a bit today already. You know, if we look at where we are as, you know, a bunch of countries looking ahead to COP 26, you know, two thirds, nearly maybe a bit more of the world's world's emissions at the moment covered by countries with net zero targets. I was put out yesterday which showed that if you look at if every country that has a target was to meet it, we'd be looking at the sort of two degree warming situation where we were looking at 2.7 degrees, only a decade ago. So clearly actually we've got the really high level infrastructure of these kind of national level targets in place. So what we really need is to hold, you know, national governments and local governments cap to account for delivering that. And I think just to pick up on one interesting comment in the chat about the sort of emissions reporting, and how that happens, you know local government level but also lots of businesses are sort of saying that they are net zero. What does that mean, you know what does that mean in terms of their supply chain in terms of what they're responsible for so I think a really big issue is going to be how do we build tools so that people can evaluate the sort of climate and environmental claims that different actors are making and use that to inform their choices. Thanks, Tom. Just just one final question for me, I guess, from each of the panellists is, is, you know, this has been a really dark year and for all sorts of reasons you're still in the midst of COVID pandemic and so on. But, you know, even though the challenges facing in relation to climate crisis are really huge. What gives you hope amongst all of this? Maybe Louise put you on the spot. I mean, I think that the striking thing about the current moment to me is the way our response to a pandemic is very different from the previous pandemics we faced as humanity in a couple of different ways because it's informed by a great amount of knowledge about what we're doing and huge amount of flexibility on the part of people all over the world, although it is frayed at the edges and contested and difficult, people have done extraordinary things in our own collective interest. And I think that the energy of a really pressing common problem, you can see extraordinary things happen and that I think is hopeful and worth bearing in mind in the face of very big challenges. Same question to the other panellists. What gives you hope? Yes, probably sounds like the most awful nihilistic thing, but in a similar vein, it sounds dreadful. I was rather hoping we'd have a terrible drought and a heat wave this summer as well, because to some degree one of the problems that has always plagued us about why we won't act on climate change quickly enough is because it doesn't feel immediate enough, either spatially or temporarily. And I think we're just getting to that point where people are particularly when I do carbon literacy training and things with councillors and citizens and so on. I feel like when I'm asking the questions, well, who in your community will be impacted and how and when people are starting to say it's already happening and they see things like the news about what happened in California this summer. And as a classic example, I live quite near Worcester. You will remember it seems forever ago, but in February we had the floods. Half of Worcester, most of Worcester was underwater. They declared an emergency to do with the floods. They were not out of the back of that emergency when they had to declare an emergency for COVID, the local government there in Worcester. And had we had the heat wave this summer that was predicted, they would have declared three emergencies in one year and we get to the point where people begin to recognise that our resilience is stretched to its limit. And in a way, sadly, what gives me hope is horrible things happening because I think that's finally enough for people to say, right, actually this is here and it is now and we have to do something. Yeah, which is really difficult to square obviously for everyone. I mean, there's a certain inevitability about a lot of these things now because we've left things so late for this level of changes are required, but you're never wasting a good crisis, I guess. You've got to make the most of where we currently are and start from where we are and just work from there. So, Tom, any thoughts, what gives you hope? Well, I would say that we've seen, you know, I think that the pandemic sort of offers reasons for hope and reasons for these main things more difficult. In some senses, clearly, you know, we're entering a recession, we're going to have to make the arguments for prioritising investment all over again. But as the other speakers have said, we've also sort of seen a huge capacity for people to make sacrifices for distant or sort of for benefits that will accrue to other people, you know, and particularly for young people, but in general for society to come together. So I think there's going to be a moment where we kind of have an opportunity of multi-lateralism coming out of this pandemic. I also just think that the sort of geopolitical situation is hugely more encouraging than it was six weeks ago, you know, with the China net zero target and with the US election and with, you know, Japan and South Korea as well. So I think, you know, there is actually very good grounds for optimism. We've made a lot more progress in the last year than we might have done. And I think, you know, there's potential to do a lot more coming out for the back of the pandemic. I'm really sorry, but I've actually got to jump off, as I think mentioned before, but at the conversation and any follow up, I'd be very happy to be involved in. So sorry to fantastic. Thank you so much, Tom. That was fantastic. Natty, final thoughts from you on what gives you hope. Yeah, so adding on what everybody said, one thing that gives me hope is seeing global conversations around green recovery on COVID. So now that we are starting to see the light on the COVID pandemic, there's a lot of conversations on recovery and there's a lot of conversations around green recovery. So now that we have to stop a lot of the things that we've done, how are we going to do it more ecologically? How are we going to be more climate friendly once we restart a lot of the activities that we used to do? So that's what gives me hope. Thank you. So that's the end of the formal questions from me. We do have another 10, 15 minutes. There's a few questions from the chat that I can pick up. But if anyone does want to ask a question individually, so Lloralee, I saw you raise your hand there, so hopefully. Hi, yeah, I might have been. There's a huge opportunity right now in this. I think the challenge right now in the United States is that progressive activists and movement politics, they need to become friends of the institutions that they've run against. This is a classic problem for the left and for progressives. But the good news is that the rules have changed inside the institution to incorporate climate. I'm sorry to incorporate the pandemic that are unprecedented, like 200 years worth of modernization happened in one day last May, where they've put electronic documents submission into the workflow. And so the challenge now for us is to create a way for that's curated and trustworthy and authentic to input real people's civic voice into the supply chain of information that gets made into policy. And a big problem for Americans right is that the supply chain is captured by financial interests and really narrow private interests into policy and the data has come out on that and people are feeling so powerless. But I think that we actually have a chance right now by combining these crises to sort of do a lot of what has been put forward here today. So thank you. It's unbelievably helpful for me to be able to go to Detroit or Oregon or Texas and say this is happening in other countries. Hey look, somebody already came up with a schema and we can adapt it. Incredibly helpful and progressives really took a beating and as a progressive myself in this election with the House of Representatives and losing those seats and we have to get people interested in the complexities of the institutions now. So I know it's not sexy and fun and you can't really tweet about it. But that's the challenge. The hard work definitely starts now. There's no doubt about that. Thank you. That's all. I love examples of templates. Fantastic. Any other comments from anyone else or any other questions? Just raise your hand or wave if I can't see you. So go Chris. Okay, you should be able to unmute now. Okay, I'm new. Hi folks. I'm calling from Berlin, actually. I have a question for Rachel if that's okay. I was really interested in the discussion about understanding the kind of carbon footprint of different public spending decisions, because this is where one of the largest levers are. But this is also where the UK is one of the leaders in terms of basically publishing the models that the private sector is currently using to understand the embedded carbon of spend a kind of per sector kind of per pound or per euro basis. And these models exist. There are people in Leeds building this kind of stuff, and they're being used already by like startups and tech companies and everything like that. So I'd really love to hear about what is out there because we've been looking at this from myself, a spend network and we are currently doing a project to work out the embedded spending pretty much all the public spending we can find and we've kind of been creating it for the last 10 years. So yeah, that's my question. What are people using. Do you want to take that? Well, I think actually that's the that's the problem. They're not. And I think that goes public. I'm not saying companies aren't but at local government level, you've got this really distinct with the council side with across the country. You've got this really distinct split where you've got what we call the core cities big places like Manchester and Bristol, you know with the combined authorities where they potentially multiple local authorities put together with many, many pounds of budget, and they make up obviously relatively high numbers of population, but they don't cover very much of the country. And then you've got the vast majority, probably over 300 local councils in the country who have no team devoted to this no expertise. They don't even know what questions to ask when I came into the Cotswolds. I was doing officer level work for about nine months because we had to get budget in place to hire ahead of sustainability to advertise a job to do you know, and get someone in and when that's not unusual. So you've got public sector decisions being made, you've got political will in some cases to have declared a climate emergency. And then you've got to some degree the blind leading the blind. So I think this is a crucial place where if there are citizens out there like yourself who are working on these topics with in the commercial sphere, for example, who know that certain tools and templates are being used around Greenhouse gas protocols and around measuring the carbon footprint of different choices in procurement, then that's what those kind of constructive and helpful approaches to your local politicians to introduce them to these things is what's needed because not only they don't understand in a lot of cases but neither do their officers, and they don't have the budget to take someone on to do this work. And again, then we're back in the position where if Cotswolds District Council needs this then our neighbouring authority in Tewkesbury and in Stroud and wherever else probably needs the same thing. So why can't we have the same tool or a shared officer or whatever it is, you know, so I definitely think that the problem is a lot of councils are not doing it outside of the really big core cities, and often where they're doing it they're doing it on bespoke stuff because they've got a team of 20 people for one city, and everyone else has no one. It's a challenge of both capacity and capability and everything else together, I guess. So any final questions from from the rest of the attendees. See. Well, with that in mind, I think we'll bring it to a close. Incredibly grateful for your taking an hour of your time this afternoon for such an important topic. Again, whilst this is the last tic-tac seminar of this year, we certainly got a busy program planned for next year. Again, we're assuming we might be able to actually meet in person like we used to in the old days at some point. But we'll certainly be taking advantage of the current situation and you're expanding the work we do for these remote seminars as well. Again, grateful to Natty and Rachel Louise and Tom as well. Thank you for your wonderful contributions. Really great answers to many good questions as well. Do join us on the 16th if you want to for a bit of lighthearted end of the year, wrapping up for our virtual Christmas party at three o'clock GMT on the 16th of December. I hope to see many of you at these type of events are in person over the next few months to come and best of luck fighting the climate crisis. We need all the support and help that we all give each other. So thank you.