The paper provides guidance for building a local authority’s approach to community partnership around climate change.

Key recommendations:

Local authorities should:

• Draw on their existing strengths and experience and knowledge of their communities.
• Find out what action community-based organisations are already taking and their interaction with mainstream CO2 reduction programmes.
• Clarify their CO2 reduction objectives. 
• Decide on the balance of priorities between stimulating new community-led action and supporting existing community initiatives, in dialogue with communities. 
• Develop and deliver a programme of activities from which it is possible to learn and adapt future plans.

Community-led responses have the potential to contribute significantly to reducing CO2 emissions - from the smallest rural community to the centres of our big cities. This is the message from Nesta's Big Green Challenge – a challenge prize designed to stimulate and support community-led responses to climate change.

This paper sets out the lessons from that experiment for local authorities. Specifically it argues for the value of community-led responses and makes practical suggestions on how to stimulate and support them.

Authors: 

Clare Demuth and draws on contributions from Peter Capener and Jayne Cox, who with colleagues at Brook Lyndhurst undertook the independent evaluation of the Big Green Challenge.