Cardiff’s plan, developed following its declaration of a climate emergency, scored 70%, against an average UK-wide for single-tier local authorities of 50%.

In Wales, the next-best rated councils were Denbighshire County Council, and Vale of Glamorgan Council, both with a score of 46%. Cardiff’s score also put it in the top twenty single-tier councils in the UK.

Cabinet Member for Environment, Cllr Michael Michael, said: “The council’s direct carbon emissions have reduced by 17% every year since 2016/17 and since declaring a climate emergency in 2019 we’ve accelerated that work massively, taking some significant steps towards our vision, set out in our One Planet Cardiff strategy, for a carbon neutral Cardiff by 2030.

“We’ve opened a new 9MW solar farm, continued with the retrofit of council-owned buildings, started switching our fleet of vehicles to electric, developed plans for our low-carbon district heating network which will cut gas emissions in connected buildings by 80% once it’s built. Our Coed Caerdydd project to increase tree canopy cover is gathering pace, our network of cycle lanes continues to grow, and we’ve allocated capital funding to accelerate schemes around public EV charging points and heat recovery at Thornhill Crematorium – on top of that we’ve also been looking closely at how we can drive down the carbon consequences of council procurement – and that’s to name just a few of the actions we’ve taken in the last year alone.

“But there’s more to do. Much more. With Cardiff as a whole producing 1,626,059 tonnes of CO2e every year we can’t afford to rest on our laurels, so as well as driving forward the carbon reduction projects in our plan, we’ll also be looking closely at the results of these newly published scorecards to see where we can learn from other local authorities and further improve our plan, so that we can lead the way, not just in Wales but across the UK."

For more detail on One Planet Cardiff, including information about reducing your carbon footprint, visit: www.oneplanetcardiff.co.uk

For more detail on the Council Climate Scorecards, go to: https://councilclimatescorecards.uk/