Cambridge City Council is celebrating Cambridge being recognised by CDP as an ‘A’ list city for the third year running for our work to mitigate and adapt to climate change – being one of only 120 A list cities worldwide.
Achieving an ‘A’ score places Cambridge among leaders demonstrating transparency, ambition, and bold action in addressing climate change.
CDP operates the world’s only independent environmental disclosure system, with over 1,000 cities, states and regions reporting environmental data through CDP in 2025.
We have been recognised because of projects including:
- our work to manage water courses and improve biodiversity, including a partnership project to understand and address the many threats to our internationally rare chalk streams including Cherry Hinton Brook, Vicars Brook, and Coldham’s Brook.
- a £5 million project to upgrade 50 council homes to net zero carbon standards, improving how comfortable tenants’ homes are and bringing down energy bills, while also supporting installers to specialise in zero carbon retrofit work locally.
- every new council home we build meeting or exceeding the ‘Cam Standard’ – meaning all of our 700 new council homes have low energy usage, high levels of thermal comfort, and strong resilience to future climate impacts.
Looking ahead, we’ll be introducing new water recovery and rainwater harvesting systems at three council swimming pools to significantly reduce water use. Funded through the Greater Cambridge Water Efficiency programme, these projects will cut water use, lower carbon emissions and help make our leisure facilities more sustainable for the future.
And we recently broke ground at our Waterbeach Renewable Energy Network project, which will massively increase the number of electric waste collection vehicles we operate, powered by clean, renewable energy generated at our own depot. This will significantly reduce carbon emissions from our waste and recycling service.
These are a few examples of the work we do that helps the city to achieve an A score, alongside showing leadership, maintaining a comprehensive city-wide emissions inventory, publishing a credible climate action plan, completing a full climate risk and vulnerability assessment, and setting a clear climate adaptation goal that outlines how we will address current and future climate hazards.
