TRACK-UK: Synthesized Census and Small Area Statistics for Transport and Energy

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With the 'Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener' [1], the transport, energy, and building sectors in the UK are undergoing a paradigm shift. While this has clear environmental benefits, its potential impacts on social systems are often overlooked and there is no consistent approach for assessing equity impacts of net-zero initiatives. Yet, persistent inequalities are of significant concern in the UK, with the 10% richest households hold almost 50% of the country's wealth, in contrast to the bottom 50%, which holds only 9% [2]. Schemes and interventions that have untreated or unfair equity impacts rightly cause political issues, sometimes slowing or even stopping progress. With pressing climate change and energy crisis, it is crucial to create data products facilitating social science led research to guide an equitable net-zero transition.Social scientists have access to increasing amounts of data; however, the diversity of data structure and limited data integration tools pose challenges for effectively utilising available datasets [3]. New strategies are needed to integrate data from the UK census with the vast information collected via other channels to unlock novel research purposes. Providing research-ready data requires new methodological approaches in combining and creating data infrastructures and training resources that are specifically tailored for social scientists considering their interests and skills.The overall goal of this project is to develop methods, datasets, and training materials for facilitating social science research on impacts of UK's net-zero strategy. While the primary integration will be with the 2021/22 Census, earlier census data will also be used to analyse changes over time. The objective is to combine UK-wide socio-demographic data from the Census with metrics from existing surveys on energy use, efficiency, and mobility demand in smaller population samples. Objectives are:Define and compute metrics to track energy demand from households and individual mobility based on comprehensive evaluation of data availability in different UK regions,Develop and apply methods for generating small-area statistics at output area level (LSOA and MSOA) from energy and travel surveys.Update and augment population synthesis methods with latest census, energy, and mobility data.Demonstrate application of developed methods through case studies and publications focusing on equity in net-zero transition.Create open-source tools and training resources specifically tailored for social scientists.Execute dissemination and outreach activities to ensure researchers are well-informed about the developed data tools and methodologies, promoting wider use of Census data.This proposal fits within ESRC's funding opportunity scopes:services are in place to support researchers who wish to use UK census 2021/2 data for social science-led research.tools and research-ready datasets that enable research with census data have been created.researchers are more aware of the wide variety of census data that will become available and understand how to access and maximise their use of it.