SPOTLIGHT
Meet your Future Ready peers
Insights Knowledge Exchange
The potential for interoperability of carbon emissions management platforms for local authorities
With Net Zero Living participants:
South Downs National Park Authority & OnePlanet – Pioneer Parks
Peterborough City Council & edenseven – Peterborough Accelerated Net Zero (PANZ)
Representatives from the Net Zero Living Pioneer Parks and PANZ projects came together in early 2025 to share knowledge and expertise on the successful use of digital platforms to support carbon management and accounting for their local area. OnePlanet and cero.earth are tools that enable local authorities to monitor and analyse carbon emissions and manage net zero pathways across the council, local businesses, organisations and community groups, and communicate this data through an interactive digital platform.
Through Future Ready peer networking, the two project teams identified potential synergies and interoperability between their tools, leading to a two-way platform demonstration and knowledge sharing session to understand the potential benefits of cross-platform collaboration. Here’s what was shared:
What are OnePlanet and cero.earth?
OnePlanet is a systems-reimaging platform that uses an alternative database structure, known as graph databases or ‘network databases’ – which holds climate and other data on the basis of its interconnectedness to ‘co-benefits’ of health, biodiversity, jobs, etc. The platform takes any policy, strategy, plan or project and breaks it down into individual elements or its atomic structure of Outcomes (what you want to achieve), Actions (what you will do to achieve the Outcomes) and Indicators (metrics you want to track). It is shown through mind-mapping, which is not only a key visual tool, but it organises data on the basis of interconnectedness and its interaction with people’s understanding of co-benefits. It’s more than just how data is organised – it leverages the latest in neuroscience and the different information processing that happens in the two halves of our brains: right half (big picture, more intelligent) and left half (detail, less intelligent), unlocking more intelligent and joined-up user responses to Net Zero.
edenseven’s platform, cero.earth, is a climate platform to enable local authorities to manage their end to end carbon emissions experience. It helps them to identify where the greatest emissions are coming from and to map pathways to net zero. The platform addresses key areas that local authorities face in net zero delivery:
- Standardisation: the tool can capture, track, and report emissions at the council-owned assets and area-wide level, enabling organisations to meaningfully baseline and benchmark and collate their emissions, whilst being flexible enough to allow tailoring.
- Strategising: the tool allows organisations to capture decarbonisation opportunities and model and forecast their impact on the net zero pathway as well as on economic and social indicators, supporting informed decision making.
- Collaboration: the tool captures, tracks and reports on climate interventions across the council, integrating seamlessly with project management tools and other council systems. It allows in-platform sharing of best practise and insights without the need to write and produce case studies.
Communicating: a flexible reporting and collaboration tool, it can automate importing of data from internal and external stakeholders and produce any standardised report, business case, social media communication etc – freeing up the climate team’s time.
What can the platforms do and how can they support each other?
The OnePlanet platform can be used as a strategic planning, collaboration, project management and stakeholder engagement tool, that allows an organisation to gain a more systemic view of carbon emissions across an area and who the key stakeholders are. It aids organisations to establish an emissions baseline across the authority boundary and understand the interconnectedness of carbon data, while helping to mitigate the potential of double counting emissions between different groups.
OnePlanet’s ability to highlight gaps in strategies has been a most useful tool during this Pathfinder project. Across the entirety of those strategies met in our area, it does highlight areas, objectives or outcomes that aren’t being addressed individually or collectively. It enables you to have discussions with other LAs about the entirety of our strategies.
cero.earth allows any LA to have visibility of what their climate change programme looks like over the years, both at the organisational and area level. It has the ability to analyse projects, includes a central repository for tracking and monitoring various projects and enables LAs to track funding and investment. It has the functionality to demonstrate the carbon saving trajectory of implementing carbon reduction measures, supporting prioritisation and pipeline development.
It simplifies aspects of net zero delivery including across 4 main categories: accounting, strategising, actioning and communicating.
OnePlanet and edenseven want to explore how the two platforms can be used in collaboration to integrate very issue specific data into the bigger picture strategies in a more systemic way.
What’s next?
The Pioneer Parks and PANZ project teams are continuing to collaborate and explore the two platforms in tandem, with a shared goal of creating an end-to-end digital experience for LA carbon accounting that gives users the benefits of both platforms.
South Down National Park’s Pathfinder project works with OnePlanet’s tech platform to see how we can collaborate effectively to highlight shared outcomes and objectives across multiple climate strategies and nature recovery strategies within the patch. This seems complimentary to what edenseven and Peterborough City Council are doing by making strategic connections between authorities and the strategies they’re developing.
The group are meeting again in May to discuss learnings and continue the discussion on platform interoperability as part of the Data and digital platforms focus group.
Get in touch with the teams here if you would like to find out more!
Pooran Desai, OnePlanet
Kat Wilcox, edenseven