March 20, 2023
Six Steps to Sustainable Community: A Guide to Local Action Planning
- Publish Date
- October 2008
- Type
- guide
- Author
- Partners for Climate Protection
- publisher
- Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Local action planning is the process of creating a strategic document that outlines specifically how your municipality will achieve a selected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction target. The resulting document, called a local action plan (LAP), is the third milestone in the Partners for Climate Protection (PCP) program.
This guide covers the development of a community-wide local action plan (LAP), that is, Milestone Three in the PCP program. The information provided here also applies to the development of an LAP for a corporation or similar organization — although with some minor procedural differences. (For example, internal working group meetings are held instead of public consultations.)
The step-by-step overview in the next section, Begin planning, shows how an LAP is developed. All of the steps are illustrated with examples from planning undertaken by PCP members. The subsequent section, Sustainability Snapshots, profiles 11 communities at various stages of the LAP process. All but one are PCP members. The remaining sections offer insights, lessons learned and additional resources to guide your municipality as it designs its own LAP.