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Sustainability Planning

What is Sustainability Planning and why is it important?

Sustainability Planning: Developing a blueprint or roadmap to prioritize, implement and measure sustainable best practices within an organization.

A written Sustainability Plan provides a road map for staff and key decision-makers as they work on sustainability efforts. Creating this plan can strengthen buy-in and understanding of the efforts needed to ensure that your sustainability efforts are continuously improving.

There is no single formula or approach to sustainability planning. Some governments have taken an organization-wide planning approach while others have taken a work-unit specific (e.g. bureau or department) approach, and still others have done a mixture of the two. The key is to develop a planning process and functional documents that add value to the work of the organization — rather than creating a binder that just sits on the shelf.

Important components of developing and implementing a Sustainability Plan

Create a Vision

Creating a shared vision is a key first step that establishes the foundation of your sustainability efforts. Once you clearly articulate where you are trying to go with your sustainability efforts, you can more easily figure out what actions you need to take to get there.

A clear vision also helps to identify the key sustainability priorities of an organization, so that everyone will be pulling in the same direction. The ability to convey your vision clearly to others is essential for maintaining and attracting support.

Build Collaboration

Some of the most successful sustainability planning approaches have resulted from collaborative efforts that utilized the unique skills and resources of a wide variety of staff, as well as community partners.

Collaboration helps to engage more people and organizations in your sustainability efforts, and can provide access to funding opportunities or other resources.

Prioritize Your Impacts

When beginning the sustainability planning process, many organizations step back and take inventory of all the impacts associated with the activities, products or services of your organization (or department, etc.).

Tools such as "flow diagrams" can help you identify all
positive and negative impacts of your organization

The next step is to prioritize your impacts, looking at which impacts are most significant and which impacts you have the most control over.

Set Goals

Consider engaging a diverse, cross-functional team of staff, key decision-makers and external parties in the discussion of goal setting. Ask the group: How have you used specific goals in the past? What worked about that? What needs to change?

Use the inventory of your prioritized impacts and your vision to guide you in your goal setting process. Challenge yourself to develop specific goals at all levels and functions of your organization (bureaus, departments, work units, key committees, etc.) to engage the most people in working toward your overall goals.

Many organizations set stretch goals, and then work backward by establishing interim goals or milestones to achieving those stretch goals (known as "back casting"). Using this process, you will likely discover a wide variety of key actions that can be taken to make progress toward your goal.

It is advisable to limit the number of high-level stretch goals to a manageable amount (5 to 7 goals per key area).

Instead of "Can we?", ask yourself: "How can we?"

Develop Baselines and Metrics

Developing baselines (a standard or starting point against which progress is measured) and metrics is a useful tool in monitoring your progress. Often, the most important metrics are those that relate directly to your sustainability goals and vision.

Many organizations establish metrics related to issues like waste generation, electricity use and water use. Others create metrics for issues like greenhouse gas emissions, employee commute modes, employee accident rates, diversity in the workforce, etc.

The collection and processing of data is a time consuming process – be sure to keep things manageable and focused on your key priority areas.

"What gets measured, gets done"

Identify Actions

Once you have your vision and your goals established, you need to articulate the specific actions to move your organization forward.

Evaluate Progress

Set up a system or process to evaluate your progress on a regular basis. Depending on the complexity and scope of your sustainability plan, you may want to do this exercise informally (once per month or once per quarter), with a more formal review on an annual basis.

Ensure Continuous Improvement

Think of your sustainability plan as a "living document", something that is always growing and being fine-tuned.

Set up a process for re-evaluating the components of your plan. This review should be done by a broad group of stakeholders with diverse viewpoints (see Building Collaboration above).

Revise and update your sustainability plan as a result of this review process.

Communicate Results

As a part of your sustainability plan, consider including a "communications strategy" for partners, stakeholders, City Council, County Board or the public. Developing a communication strategy early in the process will help you to maintain buy-in and support for your organization’s sustainability efforts.

In your communications, clearly articulate your vision and provide meaningful updates on your progress toward your goals. Be sure to communicate your successes, but don’t be afraid to include the challenges you have encountered, and how you plan to address those issues. This is also an excellent opportunity to share your future actions and plans – what is going to happen next.

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