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Once your Principal or Head signs the Go Green Pledge it’s time to get on with getting the four Go Green Goals in place. Here’s how to go about it.
Pick a focus
To be effective, it’s best for a campaign to be focused, and that means not trying to do everything all at once. So, although there are four Go Green Goals, we advise you to pick one of the Goals as a campaign focus to start with.
To choose your focus, the first thing to do is to find out what is already being done at your school or college. There might be a committee or a member of staff already in charge of environmental issues, or there might be an environmental or carbon reduction policy. Once you know what’s already in place, you can choose which of the Goals is the best place to start to really improve your school or college’s climate impact.
For example, if your school or college has a carbon reduction policy already, your campaign could focus on Goal 2, putting the policy into practice and actually cutting emissions.
On the other hand, if you find there isn’t much climate activity going on, you could start with Goal 3, and make a big effort to increase awareness and support, which will help with achieving the other goals.
Go Green Goal 1: Set up a climate action group
The climate action group is important because it’s where people who care about your school or college’s climate impact can get together to plan and implement the actions needed to reduce emissions.
The group should include students, teaching staff, support staff and other relevant people, such as governors, or contacts in the local authority. There should be a clear system to recruit members to make sure that the group becomes permanent. For example, student members could be elected in the same way that Student Council or Students’ Union officers are.
The group should meet regularly, at least once a term, to consider progress towards the Go Green Goals and decide how to continue to improve each area of the school or college’s carbon emissions.
Go Green Goal 2: Cut your emissions
Be the change that you want to see in the world.
Ghandi
One of the hardest things to overcome when campaigning on climate change is people not believing that they can make a difference. For that reason getting stuck in and making a start to practically reduce CO2 is really important. This could be by making sure lights and monitors are turned off, improving recycling or getting green electricity.
To prove that your campaign has actually reduced carbon, you need to measure your school or college’s emissions, so that you have evidence that your actions have made a difference. Two tools to help you do this are:
Display Energy Certificates
Display Energy Certificate
Carbon Detectives Toolkit
The Carbon Detectives website is designed to measure schools’ carbon footprints, but can also be applied to colleges. Using this website, you can calculate emissions from all areas, including transport, food and drink, products and waste. The website tells you what information to collect and converts it into carbon emissions. It’s been produced for younger students, but the calculations backing it up are sound and it’s a good way to get a comprehensive picture of your college or school’s carbon emissions.
Measuring your college or school’s carbon emissions can not only demonstrate any reduction that your campaign achieves, but also help to identify where cuts need to be made by highlighting the largest areas of emissions.
Go Green Goal 3: Get everyone on board
It’s essential to make sure that everyone in your school or college, students and staff alike, are aware of the problem of climate change, and motivated to do something about it. This is not just important at the beginning of your campaign, but needs to be a continual process, so that going green becomes part of the culture.
Your People & Planet group can do lots of awareness raising activities directly, such as putting up posters, holding events, doing assemblies for other year groups, or even just talking to people face-to-face. If you’ve got your climate action group set up, why not work with them to put on a whole school or college event.
Every year People & Planet holds a national Go Green Week, when students across the country put on activities and events to promote the Go Green campaign. The next Go Green Week will be 9-13 February 2009. This is a great opportunity to increase the profile of your campaign.
Go Green Goal 4: Adopt a carbon reduction policy
A carbon reduction policy is important because it is a formal statement of the college or school’s commitment to reducing carbon. The policy should be publicly available (eg on a noticeboard, or on the internet) so that everyone in the college or school knows what is going to happen and how they can get involved.
A carbon reduction policy should include:
- A statement of commitment to the principle of continual carbon reduction.
- Targets for reducing overall carbon emissions, in both the long and the short term. As a guide, a recent report recommended that schools should aim to halve emissions by 2020, leading to an 80% reduction by 2050.
- Objectives and action plans for each area of carbon emissions, eg heating, electricity, water, transport, waste, buildings and procurement.
- Commitment to raise awareness of climate change and how to reduce emissions.
- Provision for extra staff time to implement the policy. This could be part of an existing member of staff’s role, for larger colleges and schools it could be a completely new post, or it may be possible for the local authority to provide support for carbon reduction.
Get your head to sign the policy
The policy should be signed by the Headteacher or Principal, to demonstrate senior support, and approved through the college or school’s formal decision-making procedures, such as the Board of Governors. Students should have input into the policy, and have the opportunity to debate and approve it through the Student Council or Students’ Union.
This may seem like a big task, but it should be easier once you’ve achieved the other Go Green Goals. Ask the People & Planet office for advice on producing a carbon reduction policy, email us.
Whichever Go Green Goal you choose to start with, you can keep using the windmill petitions, and use the same action ideas to get loads of petitions signed. At this stage it’s important to avoid changing the campaign from one involving lots of students to one which involves just two or three of you going to meetings. Don’t drop the awareness raising actions as countless examples have shown that this pressure can be crucial to winning your Go Green campaign.
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