contact
Sustainable Development Team
Planning Division
Directorate of Environment
Council Offices
Pontllanfraith
Blackwood, NP2 2YW
tel. 01495 235183 / 5141
calculate
Calculate your Sustainability Score
documents
Making events more sustainable (PDF, 1.3Mb)
Sustainable Development Team Annual Report 2009/10 (PDF, 2.2Mb)
the above documents are in .PDF format, if required download the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
What is sustainable development?
“The goal of sustainable development is to enable all people throughout the world to satisfy their basic needs and enjoy a better quality of life, without compromising the quality of life of future generations”
Securing the future: delivering UK sustainable development strategy 2005 (PDF, Kb)
For Caerphilly County Borough, that means working towards becoming a sustainable county borough where residents live longer, healthier, more fulfilled lives whilst consuming less resources so as not to compromise the quality of life of future generations or people living in other parts of the world.
Working with the New Economics Foundation, we have developed our Caerphilly Sustainability Index to calculate how sustainable we are. It works out how happy and healthy we are – our well-being, and divides this by the amount of resources we use – our ecological footprint. The Index is based on the equation:
Life expectancy X Life satisfaction
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Ecological Footprint
Caerphilly residents have the 3rd lowest ecological footprint in the UK at 4.81 global hectares per person. However, if everyone in the world lived like us we would need 2½ Planet Earths to support us all.
The ultimate aim of sustainable development is “one planet living” - for all of us to live happy and healthy lives without consuming more than our fair share of the Earth’s resources.
Whilst we consume less resources than other parts of the UK we also have some of the worst health and lowest life expectancy in the UK
Our aim is to improve health and well-being without increasing the amount of resources we consume.
Our Sustainable Development Strategy 2008 "Living Better, Using Less" (PDF, 2.3Mb) sets out the contribution that we will make to our joint goal of a sustainable county borough, and the principles that underpin our strategy and policy development, service delivery, partnership work, and the way the Council is run.
