Executive Summary
We have a central role to play in supporting the Government’s low carbon future aspirations. Our work spans a diverse range of activities including supporting economic growth, working in partnership with key stakeholders to lead, lobby and influence the low carbon agenda and being an environmentally responsible organisation. We are already implementing good environmental management practices and working to ensure the best use of natural resources, adopting renewable energy technologies and supporting the development of sustainable communities.
We have made significant progress to improve our environmental impact over the period of the previous Environment Strategy. For example, we have reduced our energy consumption and carbon emissions year on year through introducing low energy lighting, an energy efficient heating system, water saving measures and through our environmental awareness campaigns. We have installed electric vehicle charging infrastructure at Park & Ride sites and contributed to funding electric and hybrid buses operating in the West Midlands. We have also initiated, launched and implemented with great success our ‘Smart Network, Smarter Choices’ programme. We also attained over two consecutive periods the Carbon Trust Standard achieving a 28.7% reduction over the last compliance period.
Think Global: Act Local, West Midland Combined Authority’s Environmental Strategy (2014 – 2019) provides strategic direction for the environmental improvements we seek to implement and also serves to communicate to staff, partners and external stakeholders our commitment to reduce our impact on the environment. It considers the global issues and acts at a local level, focusing on West Midland Combined Authority (WMCA) activities and setting key priorities over five years. It establishes the foundations which will allow WMCA to understand, manage and minimise its environmental impacts as well as to govern day-to-day activities.
The first section of ‘Think Global: Act Local sets the scene; providing the context for the Strategy. It outlines our environmental vision and achievements over the last strategy period.
As environmental issues are intrinsically linked to sustainability, we illustrate how other internal and external facing strategies, plans and programmes, collectively champion the sustainability agenda.
The second section, the main body of the Strategy contains three sections:
- Being an Environmentally Responsible Organisation
- Providing Leadership and Influence
- Reporting and Benchmarking.
We have established objectives for each of these areas at three levels of priority; gold, silver and bronze. The level pursued and attained will depend on a number of factors including, the current business environment, resource constraints, proven business case, benefits of the initiative, and availability of the technology.
Our environmental management system will be the process by which we manage and deliver the actions to achieve our Strategy objectives. Progress will also be closely reviewed. The Strategy will be comprehensively reviewed after year two (2016) and year five (2019).