Ten steps to updating your climate action plan

When it comes to updating your climate action plan, there are many approaches you can take. In our work, we’ve found that the best processes vary depending on the size, type, and mission of the organizations with whom we work.

But whether you’re gathering just a few key stakeholders or organizing a major effort, updating your climate action plan will likely involve the following ten steps.

1. Re-engage

As with any climate action planning process, the update’s success will ride on stakeholder involvement. The optimal level and type of engagement varies depending on the institution and its mission.

At the Concord Free Public Library, for example, primary stakeholders engaged in their sustainability efforts include staff, Library patrons, and representation from the Town of Concord. CFPL’s sustainability committee reached out to Concord’s schools and was lucky to find students from Middlesex Academy and Concord-Carlisle High School involved in their schools’ green teams. Participation from these students in Library climate action planning update discussions brought an entirely new perspective about the partnerships and collaborations the Library and its staff could foster.

Higher-education institutions, however, are much larger, more complex, and have a different mission than most nonprofits. Thus, their approach to updating a climate action plan may be more akin to going through a more thorough stakeholder participation process, especially because student bodies change every year, and conversations about climate change are so closely tied to the academic experience at a college or university.

Note that some individuals experience “engagement fatigue.” That could be from being more task-oriented than theory/vision-oriented, having too much on their plates, or feeling like their ideas are ignored. Whatever the case, be sensitive to how much you are asking individuals to contribute to a fresh planning process and be ready to pivot.

2. Inventory

If your institution is coming up on an expiring climate action plan, it’s helpful to do a thorough review of what was created before. Who was involved? How was the plan developed? What else was going on at the time the CAP was created? How far did you get with your goals? Did your original plan have metrics of success, and how would you rate your institution’s progress based on those metrics?

One way of performing this inventory, particularly for more qualitative goals, is to survey the folks who have been most closely involved in your implementation efforts and ask for an assessment on “percent complete.” You can also ask for commentary on what more needs to be done to achieve these goals.

Perception is an important component of this. If some goals have actually been achieved, but stakeholders are saying it’s only partially finished, that’s a missed opportunity to communicate and celebrate.

3. Share

With inventory results from your previous CAP in hand, you’ve got some great data to discuss in a stakeholder meeting. This is an excellent opportunity to evaluate the original goals and strategies as written. How realistic were the goals? Was the language clear to everyone during the implementation phase? Did everyone understand what success looked like? Has anything changed within or outside of your institution to make some goals unattainable as written?

4. Baseline

Typically at the start of any planning process GreenerU performs, whether that be sustainability, climate action, or decarbonization planning, we look for or perform an inventory of baseline data. This can include data on electricity, natural gas, waste, water, purchasing, vehicular fleet, commuting, air travel, and more. Your institution may have originally gathered this data and recorded it in terms of their specific values (British thermal units for natural gas, for example, or waste data in terms of weight), or it may have been converted into a common emissions factor: metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e).

If your first climate action plan included a report-out of this baseline data, you’re in luck! Even better will be if your collection methodology was documented and you can replicate that process when updating your climate action plan. The best scenario of all would be if your institution has been tracking its sustainability or emissions data annually and is able to show a comparison of data over time, particularly relative to interventions that would have improved your data, such as a new recycling and composting education program or the installation of air-source heat pumps. Regardless of what your institution has or has not tracked since the last plan, make sure you have up-to-date data before moving forward.

5. Dream

Now is a good time to schedule a get-together of your stakeholders, share your findings, and host a brainstorming session about where your organization could be headed. This is a great moment to think big! One question we like to ask is “what would you do if you had unlimited resources?” This question can lead to some insightful answers when your stakeholders start thinking about your institutional mission and creative ways to integrate climate action into achieving your overall goals.

As an example, our client, Concord Free Public Library, was the first library in Massachusetts to earn a Sustainable Library certification from the Sustainable Libraries Institute after developing its first sustainability plan in 2021. Now in the midst of developing firm plans to decarbonize its buildings and acquire an electric van, and after having implemented a substantial number of internal sustainability measures such as waste reduction and greener procurement, the Library has begun to envision a role of bringing together the broader Concord community and activating climate change on a deeper level.

Parents, teachers, and administration members participate in a planning process at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School in Washington, D.C.

6. Align

Your institution likely has other mission-oriented initiatives, projects, and goals. While you have your stakeholders gathered, take a moment to think through what else is happening internally. How is the institution’s financial health? Are you launching any new programs? If you’re at an educational institution, how is enrollment? Are there external conditions affecting your programmatic or physical operations?

While this conversation may deflate your dream scenarios a little bit, helping your stakeholders recognize and prepare for the different priorities your institution may be juggling. On the other hand, learning that a major institutional anniversary or milestone is on the horizon or that your institution is hosting a conference may be an opportunity to piggyback onto that momentum and weave your updated climate action planning and messaging around those efforts.

7. Envision

After dreaming and aligning, you and your stakeholders should begin to craft a shared vision for your updated climate action plan. A vision statement is a declaration of an organization’s long-term goals and aspirations, serving as a guide for its internal decision-making and a communication tool for stakeholders. This should be an aspirational, long-term look-ahead statement that captures what climate action success looks like.

If you developed a vision for your first CAP and it still resonates, congratulations! Skip this step. But if it’s feeling stale, or your momentum has lagged, this is an important step to help motivate your stakeholders anew.

Vision statements are extremely difficult to pin down. Finding the right language to express oneself on an everyday basis is challenging enough, but developing a vision that resonates with a large group of stakeholders, captures everyone’s intent succinctly, and doesn’t get too bogged down with minutiae is Olympics-level tough. Here are some examples of vision statements we like:

• Oxfam: “A just world without poverty”
• Ben & Jerry’s: “Making the best ice cream in the nicest possible way”
• Cero Bikes: “We envision a world where you don’t have to sacrifice convenience, or the planet’s health, to get where you’re going and do what you need to do.”
  

8. Strategize

Now that you’ve set your big-picture thinking and vision for a more sustainable organization in motion, how can you accomplish your dreams?

In this stage, you and your stakeholders will revise your previous plan’s goals and strategies—or draft new ones. Remember, the best goals are SMART: strategic, measureable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

There are a few approaches to developing goals and strategies with your institution if you are updating a climate action plan. One would be to take some of these tasks offline after you’ve heard your stakeholder group’s visions and ideas. In this method, you can develop a set of draft goals and strategies and present them to your group to react to, edit, and vote on. Another option is to undergo a more comprehensive planning process in working groups, as you might if a group was starting from scratch—this option works best in large academic institutions. And a third option is to distribute the work of goal and strategy development amongst staff members who have the most familiarity with those key areas, as we did with Historic New England.

For strategies, it’s a good idea to be somewhat flexible in your language. There can be a lot of different ways to create and implement strategies, but remember that your organization is primarily accountable for goals—strategies are roadmaps to achieve them. If you find, for example, that a strategy for achieving carbon neutrality in your old plan was “install air-source heat pumps” but you discover that ground-source heat pumps are a more viable solution, you can pivot! Also, you may choose to write future strategies with unexplored possibilities in mind.

9. Publicize

Once you’ve gained agreement (hopefully consensus!) on your vision, goals, and strategies, get the word out! The best way to share your climate action plan is by developing public-facing, institutionally branded materials and publishing it on your website in an ADA-accessible format. Making your plan publicly available can hold your institution accountable, help your stakeholders stay aligned on achieving your goals, capture an institutional memory of your process, and provide documentation for potential grant makers and funders to support your efforts financially.

Keep the public plan succinct. Let’s face it: we live in an age of constant distraction. Our attention is persistently pulled in every direction. Brevity is not easy, and in fact often takes longer to achieve, but it’s an enormously helpful communications tool to help people engage, remember, and act.

And on that note, create a one-pager of goals and strategies. We like this because you can print that one page and keep it handy throughout implementation.

10. Implement

Finally, the last step in updating your climate action plan is to draw up an implementation plan. This component is not typically made publicly available, as it can change over time. Think of an implementation plan as a set of suggested first steps to achieve your goals. It’s also a way to break down the tasks involved in completing strategies.

Implementation plan development should include breaking down the steps to achieve each strategy, assigning a responsible person or department to each task, determining whether funding or other resources are needed, and deciding on a timeline for completion. Some organizations find it helpful to turn to project management software such as Smartsheet, Jira, or Trello to keep track of tasks. Others may prefer embedding plan-related responsibilities into job descriptions and annual performance reviews. Whatever the preferred method may be, developing and activating a well-thought-out implementation plan is key to ensuring that your climate action plan does not gather dust.

In our experience, even the very best laid plans take a number of twists and turns. Circumstances change. Staff and students turn over. Resources ebb and flow. And that’s okay. The process of updating your climate action plan is an excellent opportunity to reflect, dream, and develop an exciting new vision for a greener future.

We love guiding our clients through the climate action planning process, whether starting from scratch or updating a retiring plan. Contact us for more information.

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