CO-BENS develops methodologies and models to understand how climate action complements and conflicts with the wider set of economic, environmental and social challenges we are facing.
A net-zero society needs net zero homes, buildings, and transport networks but GHG emissions are rarely the reason we retrofit our homes, refit businesses, or improve our transport networks.
CO-BENS develops methodologies and models to understand how climate action complements and conflicts with the wider set of economic, environmental and social challenges we are facing.
The purpose of this work is fundamentally action oriented: in the face of competing and conflicting challenges facing households, businesses and government, finding the ways climate action can lead to greener, healthier more economically resilient communities is critical to expanding the scale and scope of climate action.
Climate co-benefits are the positive effects that come from actions taken to reduce carbon emissions. While the primary aim of climate policy is to tackle the climate crisis, these actions often bring about immediate, local, and tangible improvements to people’s lives. For example, encouraging walking and cycling not only cuts vehicle emissions but leads to cleaner air, fewer road accidents and better physical and mental health.
In many cases, these co-benefits are experienced more quickly and more widely than the climate impacts themselves. As climate action increasingly focuses on homes, transport and lifestyles, rather than just energy production, these broader impacts are becoming more visible and more valuable.
By clearly demonstrating these additional benefits, co-benefits help to make climate action more relevant, cost effective and publicly acceptable. They help to shift the narrative away from sacrifice and towards shared gain, showing that climate-friendly policies can also reduce inequality, improve public services and strengthen communities.
The UK Co-Benefits Atlas is a powerful new mapping tool to help policymakers and communities better understand the wide-ranging social benefits of climate action, based on data modelling by the CO-BENS team at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI) and developed in collaboration with the School of Informatics.
The UK Co-Benefits Atlas is designed to support smarter, fairer and more effective climate decision-making. It can be used in three key ways;
The tool also highlights potential ‘hassle costs’—such as longer journey times or behavioural changes—that might act as barriers to adoption. Including these factors offers a more realistic and balanced view of the challenges involved in reaching net zero, while also helping to design policies that are more practical and inclusive.
Understanding and communicating these co-benefits is crucial to building public support, securing funding, and delivering effective, joined-up policies. The UK Co-Benefits Atlas was created to help visualise these wide-ranging impacts in different parts of the UK and help to deliver the outcomes communities want to see, as well as delivering on greenhouse emissions targets. It shows that acting on climate is not just the right thing to do for the planet, but an incredibly effective way to invest in our collective wellbeing and building a fairer and healthier society.
Explore the data Atlas to further understand connections between a wide range of social, economic and environmental priorities:
The CO-BENS project is funded by the Data Lab, Scotland’s innovation centre for data and AI.
For more information, contact project lead Andrew Sudmant: andrew.sudmant@ed.ac.uk.
Find out more about the team involved with this project.
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Data Programme Manager, Climate Partnerships
Senior Carbon Analyst