A new Sustainability Planning Toolkit from by ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA establishes best practices for developing a local sustainability plan. This toolkit fills a major need: Across the United States, a rapidly growing number of cities, towns, and counties are eager to create sustainability plans or expand the scope of existing plans, but find the task daunting and disorganized, and lacking standardized methods and metrics.
With ICLEI’s toolkit, jurisdictions of all sizes can now follow a proven, straightforward, and flexible process to create long-term sustainability plans that bring together their individual environmental, economic, and social initiatives under one holistic vision. The toolkit, which has been developed for ICLEI’s 600 U.S. local government members, is based on the planning model pioneered by City of New York for its renowned PlaNYC sustainability plan.
To reach their chosen sustainability goals, local governments can follow ICLEI’s Five Milestones for Sustainability process:
- Conduct a sustainability assessment
- Establish sustainability goals
- Develop a local sustainability plan
- Implement policies and measures
- Evaluate progress and report results
By following this process, local governments can create plans with strong, measurable goals that can be tracked over time. The ability to measure performance has been a key to the success of PlaNYC.
This implementation tool offers guidance on how to structure planning processes, what types of strategies and measures should be included in plans, step-by-step guidelines to achieve each of the Five Milestones, examples of best practices, checklists, templates, and guidelines for organizing a team to develop the plan.
