National Parks and AONBs are the UK's 'green lungs', providing a vital public service to help people access the countryside and protect and enhance our cherished landscapes and wildlife. They are also home to vibrant towns and villages, an important rural business community and form a lynchpin of the UK's ambitious nature recovery and climate change targets.

The South Downs National Park is the most populated National Park in the UK, with 117,000 people living here and 2.2 million living within 10km of our boundary. The South Downs stretch 100 miles across the counties of Hampshire, East & West Sussex, including 12 Districts and Boroughs and 176 towns and parishes. Over 18.8 million people visit the South Downs each year and the National Park is home to 8,000 businesses, employing 54,000 people.

With so many public, private and community-sector stakeholders, we need the tools to enable everyone to work together to move rapidly towards Net-Zero. This is a considerable challenge, with different organisations using different methods and indicators to plan, deliver and track their progress, making collaboration and knowledge-sharing tricky and time-consuming. We need to work smarter to achieve our climate change goals.

The SDNPA worked with Small World Consulting to establish a comprehensive, consumption-based, approach to carbon baselining for National Parks. This methodology is now applied across all 15 UK National Parks. Our Net-Zero Living Pioneer Places Award will allow us to work with OnePlanet to model a new cross-sector software platform, bringing together different organisations' strategies and action plans in one shared, easy-to-use, tool, identifying shared outcomes and tracking activity through common indicators that comply with the Paris Climate Change Agreement. This will allow stakeholders to collaborate, plan, manage, report on and share progress towards Net-Zero in a clear, consistent and agile manner.

Initially, **we will deliver a Proof of Concept**, working with Lewes District Council and Ouse Valley Climate Action - a multi-partner civil society project, including community energy businesses, NGOs and community groups.

We would then **scale up to produce a Park-wide, multi-sector pilot for the South Downs**, incorporating other Local Authorities across Sussex and Hampshire, members of the the South Downs Business Network and key projects. **Our long-term aim is to create** **a 'one stop shop' tool for all UK National Parks and AONBs to manage their carbon descent plans - bringing 18% of the UK land area (23% in England) under one common framework.**