Your personal action plan and pledge

In this step, you’ll develop your personal action plan.

Building on your roadmap and PAC, you will create a step-by-step guide to the actions you can take to tackle the climate crisis and build the future you’ve envisioned.

At the end of this step, you’ll formulate a pledge of the actions you will take within the next year. Make the end of your journey on this course the start of your climate action journey in real life.

Personal action plan

Follow the steps below and start developing your personal action plan.

Step 1: Select your top 1-3 actions

Look at your Personal Action Compass and think about what might show up in the middle section. This is the overlap of all three dimensions. These would be the actions or groups that seem overall the most exciting, meaningful, fun, and suitable for you. Key considerations include:

• Do some of the groups or campaigns that interest you the most also align with some of the changes or actions you’re most passionate about?  
• Do some of the groups, campaigns or actions that you feel most drawn to match particularly well with your skills and interests? Are there any that seem particularly fun, fulfilling or aligned with what you’re good at or what you’d like to learn?
• Is anyone you know already involved in one of the groups, campaigns or actions that you feel most drawn to?

You can also think about what actions, changes or groups appeared in your roadmap and the role you saw yourself taking to achieve them. Any or all of these aspects would certainly make an action, group or campaign a particularly strong candidate for your action plan.

Based on the above considerations, choose one to three actions that are both exciting and realistic for you to achieve within the next year. Try to be ambitious but choose something that you actually think you will do and that you will enjoy.

Step 2: Outline concrete next steps

For each of the actions or groups you have selected, define practical and achievable steps:

Specific actions

What exactly will you do? What are the necessary steps to complete the action, and what is the very first/next step? For example, you could:

• contact your chosen local climate action group, or find out when and where they meet,  
• organise a clothes-swapping event in your community and use that to pitch ideas for broader community climate action,
• organise a meeting at your university, school or workplace to discuss ideas for emission reduction measures or other climate action.

You could also look at your roadmap for inspiration!

Timeline

When will you start, and when do you aim to complete it?

Resources needed

What tools, resources, information or support will you need? Where can you find these/who can you ask?

People

Who will you ask to join or support you, and how will you ask them?

Step 3: Formulate your pledge

Create a clear and inspiring pledge with the following structure:

• What you’ll do: Outline your chosen actions and their purpose.
• Why it matters: Share your motivation for these specific actions, and how they contribute to your vision.
• Your commitment(s): Specify your timeline and dedication to achieving these steps.

Your pledge doesn’t need to be perfect. What matters is that it helps you to take the first/next step to contribute to building the future you want and inspires others to do the same. You can find some example pledges in the Downloads section below if you need further guidance.

Optional step: Send an email to your future self

To reinforce your commitment, you can send an email to your future self. Write down your pledge as a reminder to yourself and emphasise how strongly you feel about this right now. Set the email to be sent in six months’ time. Imagine receiving this message in the future, reminding yourself of the actions you committed to take. How good would it be to see that you’ve made real progress on your pledge, and to reflect on the impact you’ve achieved?

You could include:

• Your pledge.
• A motivational note to your future self.
• A timeline with a few milestones to track progress.

Share your pledge

Post your pledge in the Comments section and also share it with at least two people outside of this course, to create accountability and inspire others to take action.