Professor Andy Gouldson
School of Earth & Environment, Faculty of Environment
Data Science for Low-Carbon Cities
LIDA Data Scientist Internship Programme
The proposed project would build on the existing work of the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and by the new ESRC Place Based Climate Action Network and will leverage the new data sets that have been created by those projects. It will identify, map, and visualise the opportunities for energy and carbon saving in different sectors across two cities: Leeds and Belfast.
The required data on energy use and energy/carbon saving potential have been well developed in Leeds, so Leeds will be the initial case study area (for the first internship project). The main aim for this project will be to analyse the data in order to identify which low-carbon measures will be the most beneficial and, importantly, create tools to allow others to re-produce the analysis. In effect Leeds will act as a pilot to develop a framework that can be applied in other cities.
The second project will leverage these findings, and the new software tools, to repeat the analysis in Belfast. The required data have not yet been analysed to the same extent in Belfast, so the initial data analysis will form a more challenging part of the work. As the tools will have already been developed, these can be applied to the new datasets once they have been cleaned and prepared.
The project will initially focus on housing, with a particular emphasis on the social housing stock. This work will thereby enable Leeds City Council (and stakeholders in Belfast and other cities) to prioritise its significant investments in upgrading the social housing stock to reduce energy use, carbon emissions, deprivation/poverty and to improve public health. By combining data on energy use, energy saving opportunities and socio-economic data the project will develop a new capability for targeting/prioritising investments and policy interventions.