Candice Luper
Creating a climate and sustainability action plan can help your group or organisation to ensure that steps are taken to minimise environmental impacts and risks at all levels of your activities. Having a plan helps you to maintain focus despite competing priorities, and to demonstrate to your members, staff, volunteers and stakeholders that you are truly committed to taking positive environmental action. It can also help when applying for funding by showing you are already actively reducing your impacts.
A Sustainability and Climate Action Plan sets out your environmental objectives, assigns responsibilities, and explains how you will monitor progress. It allows you to demonstrate that you are making ongoing improvements over time. Whilst the steps you take might seem small, they add up. Our energy efficiency work at the Council has now halved our energy use compared to when we started action planning.
The depth of your action plan will reflect the complexity and scale of your activities. For a small group, it might simply be a list of 10 actions you commit to taking this year. For a larger business you may need to create a more formal environmental report each year for your investors or implement a formal and verified environmental management system to ensure ongoing monitoring and improvements.
If you don’t have a plan yet, you could start by thinking through what your existing impacts are, both directly and indirectly and then categorise these within themes such as:
- Energy and Buildings
- Transport and Air Quality
- Water consumption and Flooding
- Purchasing, Materials and Supply Chain
- Chemicals and Pollution
- Food and Health
- Climate Adaptation
- Nature and Biodiversity
- Education and Engagement
- Governance and Leadership
- Waste Management
- Circular Economy
You will then need to work with those involved in these activities, to identify which actions are feasible to create an improvement. Your action plan needs to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and completed within a set timescale.
Working across the organisation is crucial and ensuring that there is leadership support and investment directed towards identified changes.
At the Council we have been committed to making environmental improvements since our first Agenda 21 Action Plan which was developed in 2005 by a small group of individuals concerned about the environment. Over the years, our environmental action plans have proven fundamental to maintaining momentum and commitment from everyone at operation or management levels.
Our current Sustainability and Climate Crisis Action Plan 2024-27 is a key priority for the Council and we are taking numerous actions across the organisation to ensure that we continue striving to make bigger improvements.
As the Council’s lead officer on Sustainability, I’d like to offer my support to any St Albans Greener Together member to develop your own Sustainability and Climate Action Plan.
To arrange an appointment to explore how I can help, please send an email to St Albans Greener Together indicating what stage you are currently at and I will gladly share my experience of creating organisation-wide action plans.
“A journey of a thousand miles starts with just one step”. Let’s work together to ensure we are all taking a step together.
Candice Luper
Sustainability Officer,
St Albans City and District Council