Reducing council emissions

As the largest local council in Europe, reducing our own emissions is important for us to demonstrate leadership in responding to climate change.

We have made good progress in quantifying, understanding, and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

You can find more information about these activities in our Route to Net Zero Annual Report.

Organisations use greenhouse gas accounting to quantify their greenhouse gas emissions, and because these emissions are usually presented as CO2 equivalents (CO2e), based on their global warming potential, their emissions are often referred to as an organisation’s carbon footprint.

The council’s emissions include those that we emit:

• directly – such as burning fossil fuels to heat our buildings and power our vehicles
• indirectly – such as buying goods and services from others

We can control our direct emissions, but we can only influence our indirect emissions.

Direct emissions

In 2024 to 2025 Birmingham City Council’s direct emissions were ~41,000 tonnes CO2e, with around half of our emissions arising from heating and powering our buildings. The remaining emissions were from powering our streetlighting and running our vehicles

The 53% of our emissions which make up our buildings and estate emissions, come from the following sources:

To reduce these emissions, we are taking the following actions:

• buildings – improving how we manage our buildings, making them more energy efficient and supporting their transition to net zero
• streetlighting – upgrading sodium streetlights to more efficient LED versions, reducing energy consumption and improving safety by making streets more well lit at night
• vehicles – improving how we manage our vehicles by:
  • optimising their use
  • reducing our mileage
  • delivering value for money for the city

Indirect emissions

Our indirect emissions are driven by our activities, but are created by others in our supply chains and fall outside our immediate control.

This makes them much more difficult to quantify, however our early analysis suggests that our indirect emissions are significantly greater than our direct emissions. The main causes are:

• procurement of goods and services which we use to support our citizens
• heating and powering of council housing which some of our citizens call home
• operation of the city’s energy recovery facility, which is used to manage Birmingham's waste

To reduce these emissions, we are taking the following actions:

• procurement – improving our understanding of our procurement activities and supporting our suppliers to reduce their emissions by providing training and advice
• housing – improving the performance of our council housing to reduce our tenants’ energy consumption and their emissions
• waste – improving Birmingham's waste management system to plan for how we collect waste, increase recycling rates, and reduce emissions

Page last updated: 14 April 2026