Citizen's
Environmental Network
In the UK Strategy
for Sustainable Development, the idea of a 'citizen's environmental
network' was proposed as a way of helping communities make action
plans and tell others about their ideas and
achievements.
Factors that limit
action are that community-led environmental improvements are often
limited by the lack of:
-
a logical management structure which
links objectives with grass roots operations, particularly with
regards monitoring the success in achieving practical
targets;
-
a recording system for maintaining
year on year momentum, which also has an integral reporting system
for keeping all members of the community up to
date;
-
access to standard methods and
procedures which have proved successful in the past;
-
the inadequacies of paper systems to
centralise management, recording, and communication.
To remove these
limitations requires the national collection of feedback from
communities who are developing ideas and methods.
The Going Green
Directorate grew from a 1994 gathering of school teachers and
academics in Wales who came together to consider how schools could
help their communities move towards sustainable development. The
meeting was sponsored by the Countryside Council for Wales, Dyfed
County Council, and the local Texaco oil refinery. This partnership
was based in the St Clears Teacher's Resource Centre. From here, a
successful award-winning pilot was led by Pembrokeshire schools to
create and evaluate a system of neighbourhood environmental
appraisals, and network the local findings from school to
school.
The scheme adopted
the acronym SCAN (schools and communities Agenda 21 network).
SCAN's aim was to help teachers create systems of appraisal within
the National Curriculum to evaluate 'place' (historical,
geographical, biological, and notional). The practical objective
was to address environmental issues which emerged from the
appraisals in the context of their community's Local Authority
Agenda 21.
The objective of the
GGD is therefore to promote environmental appraisal and the
long-term management of neighbourhood historical assets, green
spaces and home and community services to promulgate a sense of
place, improve quality of life, reduce environmental impacts of day
to day living, and enhance biodiversity.y.