At a recent meeting of the House of Lords National Resilience Committee, a perhaps controversial statement was made that preparing the UK for climate impacts the last thing we need is more data. Indeed, in the UK we have a wide range of data available, from Government statistics, environment bodies and social data repositories to specialist organisations like Climate Outreach and Friends of the Earth.
While the data is generally available, the challenge that local governments, community groups and civil society organisations face is that the data is not user friendly. Datasets are not joined up, they can be time consuming to work through, and they are rarely available at the scale needed to comprehensively address issues such as access to and use of local resources.
We are addressing these issues through creating a ‘JUST Readiness Tool’, which brings data together in a user-friendly interface to help communities grapple with the transition to net zero in a just and equitable way.
This is no easy task. Data come in different shapes and sizes, use different units of measurement (individual or household for example) and rarely present variables in precisely the format that answers the question being asked by communities or policy makers. Crucially, they don’t have all the same spatial coverage. Some are national, some are regional and some cover more localised organisational boundaries such as Local Authority or Health Boards.
Our tool will not only show neighbourhood carbon footprints but align this with people’s behaviour and attitudes towards environmentally friendly lifestyles and set this within the context of local social and physical resources. These layers of data represent the resources, barriers and enablers neighbourhoods face in the shift to low carbon living.
How we developed the readiness tool
At a conceptual level, for us ‘readiness’ reflects the combination of social and spatial factors that shape a person, household and community’s capacity to act. We were keen to ensure the tool identifies the strengths that already exist in communities and what support is in place to make change possible, as well as identifying places where people are likely to struggle or risk being left out of the transition.
At regional JUST Centre launch events in 2025, we reached out to a wide range of stakeholders from campaign and community groups, local and regional government, social enterprise and academia, and asked what information, features and capabilities are currently missing from the data sources or tools they are currently using? This helped inform how we developed our tool and ensured we weren’t reinventing the wheel.
For these groups the main challenges included:
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Data coverage (e.g. information not available on attitudes, or renewable energy in private households)
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Data format (e.g. data at neighbourhood level)
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Use and functionality issues (e.g. ease of getting access to data or being able to combine different data)
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Practice or operational information (e.g. power relations or management of public land)
Other issues such as knowing which tools to use, or what a just transition means at the local level.
In response to these concerns, the readiness tool combines environmental, infrastructure, demographic and attitudinal data from reliable open sources. We will ensure data are available at the same localised scale (from the 2021 Census) and can be presented visually on interactive maps, enabling local community and regional comparisons. We will also provide transparency through clear descriptions of data construction and links to data sources.
How will the tool work in practice?
We see the JUST Readiness Tool as complementing other geography-based tools such as the Index of Multiple Environment Deprivation (IMED) and Environmental Equity Index (EEI) in providing a range of data to explain where climate change will impact the most. That said, our tool is unique in its broader consideration of ‘readiness’ for change and community capabilities to respond.
The tool does not aim to produce a single score to determine a neighbourhoods’ readiness. Instead, it will enable local and regional government, charities, community groups, campaign groups and academics to explore layers of data. Users can choose which dimensions and variables matter most to them, interpret them differently, and tell different stories with the same background data.
What is defined as ‘readiness’ is flexible and adaptable to users’ needs and contexts. For example, the context of readiness for retrofit may be very different from the context of readiness for recycling or active travel. It is this variation in the social, political and economic contexts that shape readiness that we are particularly interested in.
With functionality that allows flexible selection and combining of data layers, the tool also allows exploration of how variables interact, providing a more nuanced understanding of neighbourhoods. In this way we can discover how neighbourhoods can simultaneously be rich with agency in some ways, but poor in others, moving away from stereotypes based on limited or assumed information.
How can I learn more or get involved?
Across summer and autumn 2026 we will begin reaching out to communities across England and Wales to engage with the tool and think about the content, potentially challenging what it shows and helping to reshape it. This sharing - or ‘ground-truthing’ - phase is vital to ensure the tool is meaningful, accountable and responsive to the people and places it seeks to represent.
In the meantime, we are keen to hear from any potential users of the tool, and indeed sceptics, to ensure that it is fit for purpose and gives communities the information they need in a format that is useful. As the tool develops, there may even be ways to use it that we have not yet envisaged.
Concluding thoughts
While the usual academic debates remain around what this tool is (a measure, an index, a neighbourhood typology?) and what to call it (a measure approaching ‘readiness’ or demonstration of ‘already-ness’?), we don’t want this to detract from its potential to help users understand more deeply the challenges and opportunities that places face in the context of justice and climate.
We hope the tool will enable users to evidence characteristics of their place, in comparison to others, to argue for additional support, facilitate learning across communities and providing the information to identify what, and where, additional support is needed to engage in low-carbon living.
If you would like to provide feedback on the tool or are interested in user testing, please contact Diana Ivanova at D.Ivanova@leeds.ac.uk
