Climate Emergency Visual Action Plan

Purpose

Climate Emergency Action Plans are highly complex, involving multiple actors from across sectors. The most immediate challenge, to enable collaboration both inside the local government and with external organisations, is to communicate the multiple lines of actions and operational objectives. This information is held in different parts of the organisations, and in documents with diverse format and languages.

This key innovation enables the delivery of Climate Emergency Action Plans by identifying which internal and external stakeholders are already involved, as well as those that should be, but are not.

Process

Public officers, policy researchers, design practitioners and design researchers collaborated to develop the innovation. Southwark Council’s Tom Taylor brought his deep understanding of local authority processes, whilst Alvaro Bravo Cole and Lara Salinas used their expertise to translate their understanding of these processes into visual diagrams.

Impact

The Climate Emergency Visual Action Plan gives a holistic overview helping public officers to collaborate internally and externally. The innovation facilitates communication of complex action plans that is required as a first step to enable collaboration with multiple stakeholders, which is widely recognised as a requisite to tackle complex challenges.

Southwark Council’s Climate Emergency Department found that the tool increased awareness of their role in achieving net zero, helping them plan and prioritise actions and activities. It also improved their ability to communicate policy intent and actions with external organisations, local businesses and residents, increasing awareness of the Council’s ambition to become net zero by 2030 and enabling new collaborations.

The Southwark Climate Emergency Visual Action Plan is now used by Southwark Council’s Climate Emergency department to continue with the iterative development of their action plan across the local authority. The innovation has been instrumental in identifying which of the 150 actions would be supported by UAL and has been employed to develop the brief for the UAL Climate Studio, supporting collaboration with external organisations around the development of the Sustainable Food Action Plan and leading to design-led public engagement informing local action plans.

Partners:

Southwark Council

Date:

2022

Funder:

UKRI AHRC

Team:

Dr Lara Salinas

Alvaro Bravo Cole (UAL)

Tom Taylor (Southwark Council)

Amy Powel