Case studies

Forest of Dean Climate Action is a climate emergency community partnership that is currently being established to coordinate a district wide community-based response to the climate emergency. It will bring together communities, businesses and organisations from across the district to deliver community led climate action through collaboration, empowerment and knowledge sharing, with the imperative of driving the district to become carbon neutral by 2030.

Forest of Dean District Council is implementing a range of measures to decarbonise its Coleford office building, including installing a solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage system and replacing existing lighting with LEDs. The project aims to demonstrate how decarbonising assets and operations can be economically viable and deliver long-term financial benefits to organisations.

In December 2020 Gloucester City Council set a target to ensure its estates are net zero by 2030. They applied for Salix funding to carry out a project at a sports centre, known for its high operational emissions.

West Sussex County Council has a long-standing commitment to action on climate change and has pledged to make the authority carbon neutral by 2030. In the past decade, WSCC has almost halved its carbon emissions and dramatically increased the amount of renewable energy it generates.

City of York Council is creating an extensive community woodland on 78 hectares of land to the West of York with the ambition to plant 50,000 trees by 2023 as a nature based solution to climate change mitigation.

The Council has purchased 20 Section 106 affordable housing plots as part of consented residential scheme in the village of Bishops Tachbrook. The budget for the purchase of these plots included over £200,000 towards the delivery of a climate upgrade specification.

Entrust, a joint venture between Capita and Staffordshire County Council has worked with numerous schools and district councils to deliver ambitious decarbonisation programmes across Staffordshire.

Lancashire County Council recognised that a planned highway capital surfacing programme was a highly carbon intensive programme of works, so begun a journey to ascertain the carbon output of the surfacing programme, record and measure changes made to reduce it, and develop tools to allow them to integrate carbon usage into the asset lifecycle modelling.

Twenty five partner organisations, led by Devon County Council, including all eleven councils and two national park authorities, are collaborating on the production of a Devon Carbon Plan to show a pathway to getting Devon to net zero by 2050 at the latest.

In an effort to embed the Climate Emergency across our organisations, Torbay, South Hams and West Devon joined forces to arrange Carbon Literacy Training for 48 key officers, senior leaders and key councillors across Torbay Council, South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council.