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Carbon Dashboard

If you've been following @ODILeeds on Twitter, you'll know that we've recently been given the suggestion of building a live 'carbon dashboard' for the UK. I'm Patrick, an intern at ODI Leeds, and I'd love to take a look at this.

Why?

An ever growing number of organisations and individuals are seeking to understand and reduce environmental impact. Carbon emissions are a key indicator of this impact, so the data is pretty important, yet is lacking at present.

I'm no expert on carbon emissions, but after doing some light research it seems that there's a lack of up-to-date, comprehensive data on the UKs carbon emissions as a whole. Most of the data I can find is historic and sometimes quite disjointed. The energy sector seems to have the most frequently updated data, but that only deals with carbon emissions from that sector - admittedly the biggest contributor to the UK's total emissions, but that still doesn't give us the full picture.

How?

What we want is a 'carbon dashboard', showing live data which gives us the full picture about carbon emissions in the UK.

Some questions I'm considering are:

  • Is there enough open data available to produce a live dashboard showing total carbon emissions across the whole UK?
  • How often is the data updated?
  • Is there location specific data, maybe from local authorities or universities own monitoring? Could we start by looking at building a Leeds carbon dashboard?
  • Is there enough data about carbon emissions from individual sectors available to build up a picture ourselves?

We'd like everyone to get involved and collaborate on this - please add any ideas, thoughts, questions, data sources, etc, to this google document.

There'll be a micro-site available soon with some resources and links, which will be kept updated as the project progresses. You can also engage with us on Twitter at @ODILeeds or use #carbondashboard to comment, send links, etc.