We are pleased to have launched our 2024-27 Sustainability and Climate Crisis Strategy and teams across the Council are now busy thinking about how they go about putting our ambitions into concrete action. Our goal is not just to transform the environmental sustainability of our own operations and services, but also lead and support others in the District to do the same. We hope that through St Albans Greener Together, local groups and organisations will also take the time to think about their own impacts and develop their own strategy for making necessary changes.
Whether your strategy is a one page set of actions, or a very detailed multi-site 10 year plan, what’s important is that you have started and are extending yourselves beyond actions which are quick and easy. Here are tips for getting an effective strategy in place.
- Ensure that your [] management, CEO or leader is fully in support of the strategy and taking sustainability seriously across all areas of the organisations activities. It is important to show leadership and to set clear expectations of everyone involved. At the Council we have a clear priority to address the climate emergency in our Corporate Plan. Staff are provided with training on sustainability and climate and are expected to report progress on their actions regularly and Managers regularly review this progress.
- Get everyone in your organisation involved in contributing ideas and discussing the plan as it develops. This will save you failed projects later and you could get some very good ideas about where changes need to be made. The cleaner may not be the expert on climate change but he or she may know exactly where the electricals are being left on or where waste isn’t being collected properly.
- Honestly review your impacts. Where do you use energy, transport, water, food, products and materials? Where could there be a pollution impact or an impact to nature and biodiversity. Gather ideas on how you may create change. You can use the St Albans Greener Together network to get ideas and input. Perhaps your waste could be valuable to another organisation or the local community. Perhaps there are alternative products you can use that create less environmental damage.
- Beware of greenwashing. We all want to do the right thing but make sure your actions are consistent with your messaging. Also check that your suppliers credentials are as positive as they say they are. For instance we all want to reduce plastic but are some of the alternatives really green options? For example, compostable plastic alternatives are only actually compostable if they are put in a home composter. Most people place them in the plastics recycling bins where they cause problems with the recycling process.
- Consider how you could create additional benefits through your activities. We installed some swift nesting boxes on our Council Offices building. Is there some way you could add benefits to what you do? Perhaps through education?
- Develop your smart actions. Make sure that you have allocated responsibility for the tasks, timescales and the resources needed. If you don’t have the resources yet then that might be an action itself for someone to find.
- Set yourself some short and longer term targets and a process for monitoring progress towards them. In the Council we report on our greenhouse gas emissions and progress against our actions plan annually but we internally review progress every 6 months.
- Shout about your progress, your learnings and also your failures so we can all learn from your work. Decarbonisation is a grand challenge for society that we are all in together. From water less urinals that didn’t work, to sensor lights that turned off whilst staff were half way up the stairs, we have made our mistakes to and by sharing our experiences we can save you from making the same mistakes.