Devon Climate Emergency: the platform behind the Devon Carbon Plan.
Won on competitive procurement. Built to WCAG 2.1 AA. Hosts the full Devon Carbon Plan and ran a multi-phase public consultation through it. Live since July 2023 — no rebuild, no replatform.
A climate platform, a public consultation,
and a published Carbon Plan.
Devon County Council declared a climate emergency in 2019. Devon Climate Emergency is the council's coordinated response — a long-running programme involving DCC, partner councils, and organisations across the county. The website is the public face of that programme.
The brief came through competitive procurement. The scope went beyond a brochure site. DCC needed a platform that could publish to the public, gather detailed citizen responses through a multi-phase consultation, and host the full Devon Carbon Plan — the document that sets out how Devon meets net zero. We also produced the Carbon Plan as a printable publication alongside the web version.
Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 made WCAG 2.1 AA a legal obligation from day one, not a phase-two add-on. The site also had to last. Climate work runs across council electoral cycles, not campaign windows. The technical foundation needed to support a programme that would evolve through consultation phases, expand its content base, and pick up new partner work without a rebuild every eighteen months.
The right platform,
chosen for the people who'd run it.
Public sector projects fall over when the technical decisions ignore who'll actually use the system after launch. Discovery time went into understanding the council comms team's working pattern, not just the requirements document. That shaped every platform choice.
Worked with the Devon Climate Emergency team — including programme leads Emily Reed and Will Jackson-Nichols — to scope content types, sign-off routes, and accessibility obligations. WCAG 2.1 AA established as the build baseline, documented against the procurement requirements rather than retrofitted to them.
Elementor Pro on Astra theme, chosen for the council comms team. Structured templates keep layout locked while letting non-technical editors publish news, campaigns, and partner updates. Accessibility tested through development, not patched in afterwards.
Built the multi-phase public consultation as a sequence of structured forms — each phase gathering detailed written responses from Devon residents and partner organisations. Devon Carbon Plan published on the site as a web document and produced as a printable publication alongside it. Site went live July 2023 with JSON-LD, GA4, and Velocity Bolt hosting. It has run continuously since.
Three jobs, one platform.
The site publishes the council's climate engagement work, gathers public consultation responses across multiple phases of the Devon Carbon Plan, and hosts the Carbon Plan itself as both a web document and a printable publication. The platform was chosen for editorial capability and longevity, not developer convenience.
Built to standard from the first prototype. Colour contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text, focus states, semantic structure. Tested during development, not retrofitted.
Elementor Pro with structured page templates. Locked content zones prevent layout breakage. The DCC comms team publishes directly without raising developer tickets.
Structured forms across consecutive consultation phases. Gathered detailed written responses from Devon residents and partner organisations as input into the Devon Carbon Plan.
The full Devon Carbon Plan lives on the site as a web-readable document. We also produced the printable publication version alongside it — one source, two formats.
Cloudways LiteSpeed infrastructure with Cloudflare CDN and WAF. Professional tier — the same managed hosting stack used across our DCC portfolio.
JSON-LD markup so the site reads properly to traditional search and AI-generated answers. GA4 with custom event tracking, reported alongside other DCC sites.
We get lots of compliments on our website. The team are always up for trying something new to meet our evolving requirements and are quick to respond when something needs sorting. They’re also a pleasure to work with.
The pages that do most of the work,
across the programme.
The site supports the council's climate engagement work — citizen-facing campaigns, partner content, downloadable resources, and progress reporting against the Devon Carbon Plan.
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