In 2025, Carbon Copy’s campaign, 25 Big Local Actions, set out to highlight what is possible when people and organisations work together locally for climate and nature.
Through this campaign, Carbon Copy advocated that the wider benefits of carbon reduction projects, such as community resilience, health and wellbeing, and education and training opportunities, are also important markers of success. As a result, they introduced the ‘Changeprint’ concept.
Changeprint encompasses the positive impacts and consequences of collaborative action beyond carbon reduction. It offers a new way to measure wider benefits and potential motivations for organisations or individuals to participate in carbon reduction projects.
Looking through this Changeprint lens, our research identified 12 success factors for place-based climate and nature projects and shared top tips for councils, communities, and organisations. Carbon Copy’s Big Local Actions covered six broad themes – buildings and places, circular economy, food and agriculture, renewable energy, transport, and nature – with the success factors relevant to projects across all six.
The research combined two approaches:
- Top-down analysis to check for known success factors; and
- Bottom-up analysis to uncover new insights from real-world examples.
We longlisted local projects from across the UK, and then shortlisted 15 case studies, for which we collected and analysed more detailed data and insight through interviews and surveys. We then conducted a wider thematic analysis to identify 12 success factors and 3 overarching characteristics for the success factors.
The report explores each success factor in turn, and how it can be applied across diverse local projects with case studies showcasing action. The report is designed to be a practical guide for future community action.
Access the report on Carbon Copy’s website here.