York Without Walls - Building a future for York

Sustainable Wow

We aim to reduce our impact on the environment while maintaining York’s special qualities and enabling the city and its communities to grow and thrive.

Imagine the area of land that grows the food you eat. Then add more for the energy and raw materials you consume, and some more again for trees to absorb the carbon you emit into the atmosphere.  That area is your 'ecological footprint'.

It's a term we're going to hear more of.  If we add up everyone's footprints the total is greater than the available land surface.  So we are living beyond the capacity of the planet.  We cannot continue to go on like this and together we need to make changes to live more sustainable lifestyles. This is why we aim to reduce York’s collective footprint.

We can all do our bit to help make this aim a reality. By making small changes to live a more sustainable lifestyle we can collectively help to create a more sustainable York for everyone.  

The group who will guide progress on this are the York Environment Partnership.  They will encourage everyone in York to take responsibility for the impact their actions have on the environment and encourage individuals, organisations and businesses to measure and reduce their carbon and ecological footprints.  

Useful Links

• Carbon Trust
• Stockholm Environment Institute
• Carbon Footprint
• Ecological Footprint
• 10:10 is an ambitious project to unite every sector of British society behind one simple idea: that by working together we can achieve a 10% cut in the UK’s carbon emissions in 2010 - sign up
• York climate change framework and action plan
• University of York Sustainability Forum
• Connected York Partnership Directory