The De Montfort University team for GreenerFuture Leicestershire have been developing a new spreadsheet tool to help local authorities decide which climate resilience projects will be most desirable in their local areas. Initially focused on Leicestershire, through collaboration with Energy Systems Catapult, the DMU team have expanded the focus to be relevant to English local authorities looking to develop climate resilience or climate mitigation projects.

The spreadsheet examines 13 "narratives", specifically those identified under the Local Area Energy Plan, and ranks them against 34 separate indicators, covering a wide range of considerations that local authorities need to make when choosing a technology or sector to pursue for climate mitigation projects. These "narratives" are projects like large solar farms developed by the local authority, or in partnership with a private developer; heat pump programmes for social housing residents, or electric vehicle charging infrastructure installations, to name but a few. For our indicators, we included both "maximising" indicators, where a higher rank is desirable, and "minimising" indicators, where a lower rank is better. For example, "Potential Return on Investment" is a maximising indicator, where higher returns are better. "Complexity of Technical Solution", on the other hand, is a minimising indicator, where a less technically complex project is better. Users can then weight each individual indicator on a four-point scale, from 0% (not relevant) to 100% (essential), and assign scores for each individual narrative against each indicator, on a scale from 1 to 3.

The spreadsheet then calculates, based on the user's rankings of the indicators, and their weightings, the highest-scoring narratives for the user's context. This then demonstrates that these projects would be most viable in the local area, as assessed against the 34 indicators. Remember, viability comes in many forms! Some projects might have higher carbon emissions reductions but less social impact, while others may have greater financial returns but less overall emissions impact. These factors, in aggregate, are what this spreadsheet tries to condense into a user-friendly framework for assessment.

You can download and try the tool for yourself here, and we hope you find it useful!