Becoming a Climate Friendly Park

Becoming a Climate Friendly Park entails completing three “Milestones”.  Once a park has completed these three Milestones, they are officially a Climate Friendly Parks Member Park.  To maintain this status, Member Parks are required to continuously engage in three “Ongoing Activities”.  The Milestones and Ongoing Activities are summarized briefly below.

Milestone 1 –Submit a CFP Application
The three page climate friendly parks application includes the necessary baseline information needed for the Climate Friendly Parks program to support your park in conducting a GHG inventory and action plan.

Milestone 2 – Develop a GHG emission inventory
Similar to an energy audit before retrofitting a building, an emission inventory lets you know what activities in your park are producing GHG emissions and the quantity of emissions that each of these activities is contributing, both currently and in the future. In performing an emission inventory, you will obtain some of the information that you will need in choosing strategic actions and designing an effective Climate Action Plan.
The Climate Friendly Parks program has developed the Climate Leadership in Parks (CLIP) Tool to help your park develop its emissions inventory. This tool takes data you collect on activities within the park that produce emissions (e.g., energy consumption and waste production) and converts those numbers into an emissions estimate (the compilation of all emission estimates produces an emission inventory). Technical support is always available at CLIPTool@icfi.com. 

Milestone 3 – Complete an Action Plan
A Climate Action Plan is a description of the actions—policies, programs, and measures—the park will take to reduce its GHG emissions.

An action plan should be based on a specific reduction target that your park aims to achieve by a designated year. The target is usually expressed as a percentage reduction below the quantity of emissions produced in the baseline year, e.g. 15% below 2005 levels by 2012. The Action Plan produced by the CLIP Tool is formatted to be compatible with your park’s Environmental Management (EMS) Plan

An action plan requires input from park staff and stakeholders. The Climate Friendly Parks program holds workshops at parks around the country in order to facilitate the development of the best mitigation strategies for your park.  A workshop application is required in order to hold a CFP Workshop.  However, a workshop is not required by the Climate Friendly Parks program. Your park can also choose to develop strategies with park staff and stakeholders and then work with Climate Friendly Parks staff to refine the strategies.

Once a list of mitigation strategies has been developed, Module 2 of the Climate Leadership in Parks (CLIP) Tool should be used to quantify the emission and economic benefits of each action and produce a synthesized action plan. Technical support is always available at CLIPTool@icfi.com.   

When the Action Plan has been finalized and signed by the park superintendent, your park is considered a Climate Friendly Parks Member Park. At this point, a page highlighting your previous climate friendly accomplishments, your inventory and your action plan will be developed and posted to the Climate Friendly Parks Website. Your park will also be featured in our listserv.

Ongoing Activity 1 – Implement the Action Plan.
The Climate Friendly Parks program works with your park to build the necessary relationships to ensure that support is available to implement your Climate Action Plan. Working with community members, schools, friends groups and our national partners is essential to secure the required resources to help you take the necessary actions to achieve your emission reduction goal.

Ongoing Activity 2 – Monitor progress and report results.
Monitoring progress and reporting results is an ongoing process. The CFP program has a simple monitoring and reporting protocol that is based on an annual questionnaire that feeds directly into the existing Environmental Management Systems structure that your park is already required to report on. Annual reporting requires only a few hours of time commitment a year.

Ongoing Activity 3 – Implement the Do Your Part! for Climate Friendly Parks Program.
The greatest potential for a national park to help reduce GHGs is to increase visitors’ awareness of climate change and its impacts, and The Do Your Part! for Climate Friendly Parks program was created to provide the visitors with tools to address their individual contribution of GHGs.  To do so, the program provides easy actions people can take every month to reduce GHG emissions in their everyday lives. Using an innovative database capture system to monitor and track individual’s emissions and report the results in real time, the Do Your Part! program allows each participant in the program to see how their individual efforts can make a difference.