UK's Green Program is an Olympian Contender

I’ve been writing a weekly blog for GreenWorksGov nearly three years, and I’ve never run out of material.  Most of my resources are based in the US and Canada, but I’ve given more thought in recent months to going global.  I’m curious what other governments are doing on the sustainability front and what lessons we can learn from their work.  This week I felt like the time was about right to branch out and see what’s going on across the pond in the UK. 

My first foray produced a government website that offers some great resources for sustainability staffers anywhere.  The Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) is charged with the government’s sustainability program and collaborates with other UK agencies at the national and local levels of government , business and the public.  Defra has overall responsibility for championing sustainable development across government with the “Sustainable Development Programme”. Defra is responsible for developing policy, mechanisms and governance arrangements to ensure that all government policies, operations and procurement take account of sustainable development, balancing social and environmental considerations as well economic ones.

One of the first things I noticed on the website are two news items about the availability of Climate Factsheets from the Public Interest Resource Center, a non-governmental independent entity, and a report on the state of green procurement in the European Union (EU).  The UK has developed sustainable buying standards to guide procurement officers.  The standards are one product of the government’s Action Plan, which guides sustainable operations across the UK government.

There’s much more to see and learn and I recommend taking some time to browse the Sustainable Development webpages and links.  I also think it’s an interesting design model for an office Intranet and the office’s public Internet pages.  It is a universal site for anyone interested in the department’s goals and policies on a range of sustainability topics and includes policy and guidelines for those responsible for implementing the policies.  Links take the reader to reports on progress, areas needing improvement, and who’d doing what in Defra and other agencies. It strikes me as being very transparent and easy to navigate.