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A year of open data in the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority

Data portal launched last year to boost transparency and investment includes first local nature recovery strategy (LNRS) published by a local authority in England 

Launched in January 2025, the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority (WECA) open data portal is the result of a partnership with leading solutions provider Opendatasoft.  

green and red light wallpaper

Photo by Pietro Jeng

WECA was established in 2017 to make decisions and investments on behalf of Bath and North-East Somerset, Bristol and South Gloucestershire. As part of this remit, the data portal was devised with aims that include boosting transparency, demonstrating the region’s economic strength so as to attract investment, encouraging the transition to net zero and accelerating the recovery nature. 

A year since its launch, the portal now provides 90 datasets from across WECA, its partners and the unitary authorities that it works with. These include data on energy performance in buildings, access to green space, pollinator projects and information on how money is spent. The homepage lists the latest updates to data held on the site. 

The site has seen significant and increasing demand, and currently experiences more than 600,000 application programming interface (API) calls per month.  

One key area of the portal is the region’s local nature recovery strategy (LNRS), the first such published by a local authority in England. With its accompanying interactive toolkit, this provides an intuitive resource to help a range of stakeholders – farmers, landowners, businesses, local authorities, community groups and citizens alike – to take effective action to restore nature and natural habitats.  

Via a drill-down map, users can zoom in to specific, detailed areas, click to see current biodiversity levels and pictures of local species, and link directly to resources. These include available environmental grants and programmes to aid nature recovery. Local authorities in the region can use the toolkit as part of the planning process, where there are requirements to increase biodiversity. 

WECA is the first organisation to release this kind of underlying data in an open format that enables users to access it in multiple ways. They can, create compelling visualizations on the platform itself, download the data for analysis offline and integrate it into their own applications.  

The team behind the open data portal hope to add a range of new elements in the near future, including data on energy planning, dashboards on economic opportunities and transparency on performance when responding to requests under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. 

Jean-Marc Lazard, CEO and co-founder of Opendatasoft, says: ‘Making environmental data seamlessly available to all is central to understanding and improving biodiversity within the natural world and helping species recover and thrive. The pioneering work of the West of England Combined Authority demonstrates how data can be used to involve a wide range of stakeholders – their work provides a template that other public bodies across the globe can learn from, helping them build data products that deliver positive environmental change in their regions and areas.’ 

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Simon Guerrier
Writer and journalist for Infotec, Social Care Today and Air Quality News
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