Manage and monitor implementation

You will need to establish mechanisms to co-ordinate implementation, monitor progress and generally maintain momentum.

Co-ordinating implementation

Many councils and partnerships have established inter-departmental and / or inter-partner teams to monitor and manage implementation. These may well be a continuation of the team(s) that was formed to develop the climate change strategy, perhaps with some changes in membership to fully reflect the sections and partners that are responsible for implementation.

If your Climate Change Action Plan covers several roles, it may be more manageable to have more than one implementation team, e.g. one to manage adaptation and one for mitigation, or one to focus on estate manager and another on community leader.

As well as an implementation team you will almost certainly need one or more persons to co-ordinate the work of the team and to act as the central point of contact. This role is often filled by a sustainable development, energy or climate change officer, but performance management and other council or LSP staff might also take on this role.

Monitoring progress

It is also essential to establish procedures to monitor how each task is progressing. Your council may already have well established performance monitoring systems. If this is the case, it would be preferable to incorporate the Climate Change Action Plan into existing systems.

If it is not possible to use existing performance monitoring systems, then new processes may need to be established. For example, this might involve monthly or quarterly reporting to the implementation team co-ordinator.

Monitoring reports should be regularly considered by the implementation team in order to resolve any implementation problems as well as celebrate successes.