Ministers have announced the seven projects that will receive a share of £30m under the ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads programme.

Funded by the Department for Transport (DfT), the three-year, UK-wide programme has been developed by council directors’ body ADEPT.

The successful projects were selected after pitching their ideas to a ‘Dragons’ Den style’ panel of independent experts drawn from the highways and transportation sector.

The DfT said Live Labs 2 is focused on tackling the long-term decarbonisation of highways infrastructure and assets across local roads and that the winning teams all put forward programmes that will create centres of excellence or bring new models and innovation to a sector that is ‘traditionally risk adverse’.

The projects to be awarded funding are:

• Devon County Council: A382 (Including Jetty Marsh Link Road) - Carbon Negative Project.
• East Riding of Yorkshire Council (in partnership with the Department for Infrastructure, Northern Ireland; Cambridgeshire CC; Derbyshire CC; Hull City Council; Lancashire CC; Oxfordshire CC; Westminster City Council and York City Council): High Visual Efficiency for low carbon lighting - decarbonising street lighting.
• Liverpool City Council (in partnership with Aberdeen City Council, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Newcastle City Council): Liverpool ‘Ecosystem of Things’ driving a low-carbon economy.
• North Lanarkshire Council: UK Centre of Excellence for Material Decarbonisation in Local Roads
• South Gloucestershire Council and West Sussex CC: Greenprint – a net carbon-negative systems model for green infrastructure management. Transport for West Midlands: Highways CO2llaboration Centre for materials decarbonisation.
• Wessex partnership (Somerset CC, Cornwall Council and Hampshire CC): Wessex Live Labs - Net Zero Corridors.

Roads minister Richard Holden said: 'We are supporting this vital agenda to help level-up through £30m funding for ground-breaking projects and boosting regional connections to support growth.

'The Government is determined to create good, well paid jobs - via innovation and investment across the UK - as we accelerate the road to net zero.'

ADEPT president Mark Kemp said: 'Live Labs 2 has a huge ambition – to fundamentally change how we embed decarbonisation into our decision-making and to share our learning with the wider sector to enable behaviour change.

'Each project will bring local authority led innovation and a collaborative approach to create a long-lasting transformation of business as usual.'

The DfT said the panel was looking for ambitious projects that would ‘not only accelerate decarbonisation across highways infrastructure, but also transform local authorities’ approach to delivering net zero local roads right across the UK’.

It added that to enable close collaboration some projects will be working closely together in four interconnected themes developed from the successful applications:

A UK centre of excellence for materials – providing a centralised hub for research and innovation for the decarbonisation of local roads materials, developing a knowledge bank, real-life conditions testing and sharing and learning insights: North Lanarkshire Council and Transport for West Midlands.

Corridor and place-based decarbonisation – a suite of corridor and place-based decarbonisation interventions covering urban through to rural applications, trailing, testing and showcasing applications within the circular economy and localism agendas: Wessex partnership (Somerset County Council, Cornwall Council and Hampshire County Council), Devon County Council, and Liverpool City Council.

A green carbon laboratory – examining the role that the non-operational highways ‘green’ asset can play in providing a source of materials and fuels to decarbonise highway operations: South Gloucestershire Council and West Sussex County Council.

A future lighting testbed – a systems-based examination of the future of lighting for local roads to determine what assets are needed for our future networks and how they can be further decarbonised across their lifecycle: East Riding of Yorkshire Council.

The successful groups will now move into a funded mobilisation stage running until March to develop fully specified and costed programmes that will include procurement, legal and communications strategies.

This article was originally published by Highways.