This statistic shows the ten cities with the fastest growing business base in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2016 to 2017. The number of businesses located in Warrington increased by **** percent during this period, with Aberdeen and Slough in second and third place respectively.

In 2024, the population of the United Kingdom was estimated to have grown by approximately 1.1 percent, with the population growing fastest in North West England, which grew by 1.4 compared with 2023. By contrast, growth in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was below the UK average, with the population in these countries growing by 0.7 percent, 0.6 percent, and 0.4 percent respectively. Four countries of the UK Within the UK, South East England had the highest population of the regions that comprise the United Kingdom, at more than 9.6 million people. In terms of the four countries of the UK, England had by far the highest population at over 58.6 million people, compared with Scotland (5.5 million) Wales (3.2 million) and Northern Ireland (1.9 million) which have comparatively smaller populations. Of these countries, Scotland was the most sparsely populated, with 71 people per square kilometer, compared with 5,782 people per square km in London. Largest cities in the UK With over nine million people living there, London is by some distance the largest city in the UK. Other large cities in the UK include the West Midlands urban area, centered around the city of Birmingham, as well as Greater Manchester in North West England. With similar populations of around three million people, these two cities, generally considered as the main contenders for being England's second-city. In this year, Scotland's largest city was Glasgow, with Cardiff being the biggest settlement in Wales, and Belfast the largest in Northern Ireland.

Our networking project on the alignment of Sustainable Development Goals with local climate actions collected relevant data as follows: 1) We engaged with officials in selected cities in the UK and Japan. Data collected through interviews and meetings with such officials provided useful information. 2) An online survey was conducted to understand local authority engagement in the SDG and climate actions in the UK. The data collected and created through the above activities is made available through this collection for use in research purposes.

We are requesting the funding to develop social science research collaboration between De Montfort University (UK) and the Institute for Global Energy Strategies (Japan). We are proposing a series of networking and knowledge exchange activities on the timely theme of making climate planning more sustainable in cities in United Kingdom and Japan. The world is urbanising rapidly and more than 50% of the global population now lives in cities around the world. As the economic output is concentrated in cities, their contribution to climate change is significant and growing rapidly. While many cities have climate action plans and city administrations are seemingly well-positioned to align their climate change plans with other sustainable development concerns, little is known about the sustainability of city climate plans. Relatively little is known about the steps cities are taking to make climate plan sustainable. In fact, whether and to what extent cities are making links between their climate and sustainability objectives remains an open question.This proposal aims to fill this knowledge gap through this networking and knowledge exchange activity. This would help us in identifying and developing a larger action-oriented, multidisciplinary research programme on the integration between climate planning and the SDGs in cities. We are proposing the work in a number of distinct phases. In the networking phase, we will develop a list of cities that have already produced climate change plan. In the scoping phase, we aim to develop screening criteria to help identify the links and gaps between that climate plan and the SDGs. The screening criteria will be used to create a shortlist of cities in both countries to determine the status of integration of Sustainable Development Goals in climate action plans, identify the reasons for weak alignment and find ways of improving the linkage. This scoping exercise would consist of interviews and surveys with a manageable number of cities in both Japan and the United Kingdom. In the final phase, the research teams in both countries would develop a set of knowledge products and learning materials that would summarise the preliminary results of the networking and then scoping phase. The main outputs would consist of an introductory paper that outlines the objectives, key questions, scope, methods, and relevant literature on the themes covered in the project. This would then be complemented by two additional papers-one each for Japan and the United Kingdom-that lays out the main results for both of those countries. An additional paper would focus on some of the comparative insights from looking across the results of cities in the two countries. We plan to develop collaboration through two-way researcher exchanges, joint workshops, scoping studies in UK and Japanese cities, developing an online platform to share ideas and solicit inputs into a full research proposal around the integration of climate and SDG planning in the UK and Japan. Both the teams are well placed to undertake the work given their respective strengths in energy systems (for DMU) and climate policy (IGES) and their existing networks with the local city administrations as well as other stakeholders. The work is planned for 18 months and both the teams are committing significant financial resources in addition to the requested fund.

Projected population change varies across Scotland. Over half of Scotland’s councils (18 out of 32) are projected to increase by mid-2028. These are mostly urban areas, located in the central belt. The fastest growing areas are in the East surrounding the City of Edinburgh. Population decline is projected to mainly be in the West and South West of the country. More councils are projected to experience population decline than in previous projections (14 councils now, compared to 8 councils in the previous 2016-based projections). Migration continues to drive projected increases in population in most areas. By mid-2028, 30 council areas are projected to have more people arriving than leaving. Overall 18 councils are projected to increase in population, as natural decline (more deaths than births) exceeds net migration in some areas. In most areas, there is projected to be more deaths than births, contributing to population decline. Only five councils are projected to have natural population growth, with more births than deaths over the 10 years to mid-2028. Scotland’s population is projected to age, with the population of people aged 75 years and older projected to increase in all areas.