Net zero data standards for the Isle of Wight using a community data portal

The Challenge

The Isle of Wight has committed to a fully carbon-neutral island by 2040 under its “Mission Zero” strategy, but the biggest obstacles are not technological. The island’s retrofit supply chain has significant shortcomings, many residents and businesses are unaware of the home and business upgrades available to them, industry jargon compounds the confusion, and the sharing of knowledge, data and best practice across sectors and departments is disparate and unstructured. The Isle of Wight Council needed a way to surface these non-technical barriers and give stakeholders a common footing to act on them.

The Solution

In this two-phase engagement, NquiringMinds worked with the Isle of Wight Council, Future Isle of Wight (FIOW) and partners to develop common data standards and reporting for net zero. NQM built a community portal that encourages collaboration and interoperability between stakeholders and authorities: it provides shared file access and discussion forums and acts as a central repository for shared data and API standards, so that strategies and tools to address non-technical challenges can be developed on shared evidence rather than fragmented documents.

Outcomes

Future Isle of Wight fed the portal with research data and case studies drawn from its community events and local home-upgrade retrofit projects, giving commercial stakeholders and the local authority inside knowledge of local supply chains. The project identified concrete non-technical barriers — retrofit supply-chain gaps, low public awareness, unstructured data sharing — and its findings are intended to feed into actionable whitepapers for local and national distribution at the end of the 18-month research phase.