What is it?

The Tool to Identify Climate Opportunities consists of a series of indices that summarise information to facilitate decision making and advance adaptive pathways toward increasing climate-resilient development.

A great number of scientific literature has identified aspects that predispose people to be adversely affected by climate-related hazards. Factors such as health, income, education, neighbourhood safety, environmental conditions, employment, how exposed we are and social support networks can strengthen or undermine the way we face climate-related events. For instance, people with already poor-quality housing would not be able to afford insulation to protect the house from extreme winter storms. Or flood incidents increase anxiety affecting, even more, the people with current mental health problems.

The tool consists of robust indices that combine more than 50 datasets following a hierarchical approach (See: Sakai, 2021).

The indices and sub-indices aim to:

  • Measure the risk that the population of Leeds have to be adversely affected by various interlinked climate-related hazards: air pollution, heatwaves, flooding

  • It places particular attention to the conditions of life that influences our health/well being and how we cope/adapt

  • Useful for decision making at different scales (Ward, neighbourhood)

  • It aims to help unveiling intervention needs, and opening up opportunities for cross-council and cross-sectors collaborations with a significant positive impact on health and wellbeing

  • This assessment is also useful as a benchmark to monitor future progress. So if we make interventions we can see how the indicators are progressing over time.

  • The methodology has been standardised so it can be replicated in other parts of the UK