Environmental Sustainability Kit

The Environmental Sustainability Kit is a set of tools, ideas, procedures, and resources to help local leaders, residents, and businesses work toward making their own communities more sustainable.

The Environmental Sustainability Kit is focused on the environmental and pollution prevention aspects of sustainable communities' efforts.

While the examples in this Kit focus on pollution prevention as a strategy towards a more sustainable community, the inclusive approach of the Kit makes it useful for any sustainable community initiative.

Our social, economic, and environmental problems are interconnected. By inviting all interested parties to consider these problems, we have a better chance of arriving at enduring solutions that set our communities on a more sustainable course.

We believe that the best way to democratise decision-making and invigorate public involvement is to bring many interests to the table in a multi-stakeholder team. Using pollution prevention and multi-stakeholder strategies, this Environmental Sustainability Kit attempts to help you create sustainable change, one step at a time.

Environmental Sustainability Kit Table of Contents

1. Defining Sustainability
   Includes several definitions of sustainability, to help your community develop its own definition, and contains definitions of two other key concepts: pollution prevention and environmental justice
2. Multi-Stakeholder Process
   Introduces the consensus-building process that brings together all relevant parties to identify the core causes of community problems, forge creative solutions, andImplement those solutions
3. Developing a Project Idea
   Discusses different ways of generating potential ideas for a multi-stakeholder environmental sustainability project, and provides details on a community visioning process and on a community assessment
4. Stakeholders
   Describes how to identify and recruit stakeholders for an environmental sustainability project
5. Ground Rules
   Addresses how to develop ground rules to enable an environmental sustainability project with a multi-stakeholder project team to run smoothly
6. Shared Project Objective
   Explains how to create project ownership by all the stakeholders by developing a shared project objective
7. Strategy Development
   Discusses how to implement project and communication strategies that achieve project goals
8. Indicators of Progress
   Describes how to use environmental sustainability indicators and benchmarks to demonstrate and track the progress of an environmental sustainability project
9. Case Studies
   Includes examples of five environmental sustainability projects from the United States and around the world
10. Resources
    Describes how to assess environmental sustainability project resource needs, lists resources on a variety of topics, and includes ideas on how to create new resources for an environmental sustainability project

Follow this link to the Environmental Defense website to download the kit (pdf)

For further information

Contact	:	Environmental Defense National Headquarters New York, NY 10010
Phone	:	(212) 505-2100
Fax	:	(212) 505-2375
Email	:	members@environmentaldefense.org

WWW

:

http://www.environmentaldefense.org