Emma Bland on co-creating climate tools with local communities

Associate Professor Emma Bland, is a founding member of the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, and is a Co-Director of Business Engagement and Innovation for the Department of Public Health and Sports Sciences. In this article she discusses her work with local governments and stakeholders, developing the Local Climate Adaptation Tool (lcat.uk), to assist local decision-makers with climate adaption in their area. 

The Local Climate Adaption Tool (LCAT) is a digital tool to support local service providers take climate change adaption action informed by the available evidence. As well as helping users to understand current and future climate change models for their local area, LCAT gives users recommendations for action to address climate risks. The tool has been co-designed and developed with stakeholders to address their needs, with information presented in ways that they find most informative and actionable.

One example of risk is the effect of extreme heat a local community. Not only might we see increased demand on health services as a result of overheating, we may also see increased anti-social behaviour as higher temperatures affect behaviour. We may see disruption to transport networks due to infrastructure buckling in high temperatures affecting both the mental health of transport users and the effectiveness of services as workers struggle to get to work.

By understanding the risks and pathways by which a change in environment can affect us, we can take adaptive actions to reduce the impacts of the change. Actions on heat may include, putting in more water stations, providing shading to buildings to reduce indoor temperatures, changing the materials used for infrastructure to more heat resilient materials and creating ‘cool havens’ in public buildings for the vulnerable to retreat to in hot weather.

Developing a co-designed tool is not without its challenges. It takes time; it would be easier to simply decide what users need and produce it, but it would be a lot less useful. We have learned a lot from our stakeholders and their feedback has really improved and focused LCAT to deliver to their needs.

It also takes funding; we have secured multiple grants to support the work involved in developing the tool. We have been fortunate to secure support from a number of funders Local Government Association’s Net Zero Programme, the Turing Institute, The Schroeder Foundation and through BlueAdapt, a Horizon Europe project. The big challenge now is how do we secure and sustain funding for the long term?

But fundamentally, the big takeaway in doing these collaborative projects is that you’re tackling real-word challenges, making differences to real people.