Join the Dots: Embedding climate action in local authorities

Effectively integrating climate action

Councils play a key role in shaping a place’s housing, transport, social care, education, environmental health, and economic prosperity. This report shows how delivery against all these areas improves when climate action is embedded across an organisation, rather than treated as a standalone agenda competing with statutory duties.

The report builds on the Net Zero Living Programme’s “Enable, Embed, Enact” thinking, which highlights that the most crucial aspect of local net zero planning is often the change it creates internally, by building understanding of the challenge, generating support across teams and partners, and helping resources flow to the work that will make the biggest difference.

This report uses interviews with local planning officers and a review of their strategies as a window into what’s working, and what’s still needs improvement. Encouragingly, climate features in all the economic, transport, and health and wellbeing strategies that were reviewed. It also found, however, that strategies vary widely in how they frame climate action. Some lead with growth and jobs, others with resilience and risk, while many focus narrowly on organisational emissions rather than area-wide change. This variability matters, because differences in approach and capacity can create a risk that some places are left behind without clearer roles, responsibilities and support from central government.

From the interviews, this report distils a set of tried and tested mechanisms that councils are using to embed climate goals into their broader strategies. Firstly they are making the local benefits of climate action a driver for cross-functional collaboration. They are positioning climate as a strategic corporate priority. They are upskilling their teams beyond those with core climate responsibilities. And they are reviewing and improving decision-making processes so carbon and climate resilience are considered early and consistently.

This report also stresses why it is important for councils to act now. Devolution, new governance arrangements, and local government reorganisation are already prompting many places to refresh strategies and processes. This offers a practical moment for local authorities to join up their priorities and embed climate responsibilities across their planning, so it benefits local places, people, and businesses.

Key findings

• Climate action becomes easier to embed and sustain when councils connect it to broader place-based benefits, such as health, growth and resilience.
• Plans are increasingly mentioning climate, but tend to suffer from a lack of integration or limited skills and capacity to deliver them.
• Those councils who are progressing fastest are those that are investing in upskilling their teams, integrating their processes, and aligning climate goals with their broader strategic priorities.