A co-designed interactive dashboard for sustainability-conscious schools

"Our Eco-Logbook” was born out of a collaboration between the UCL Knowledge Lab, Keep Britain Tidy, and seven primary and secondary schools across England. It aims to foster children and teenagers’ leadership in environmental sustainability and climate action in their school communities.

The Eco-Logbook has been designed with young people for young people, to support their climate action – what we call "eco-activities”. It does this by encouraging students to think about how they can monitor the progress of their eco-activities and evaluate their impact. It provides an accessible interface to log data, reflections, and photographs about their eco-activities, as well as visualise the data through simple graphs and charts.

In doing this, it helps schools and clubs keep track of their eco-activities in one central location, show off their work to the rest of their community, and encourage participation from other students, staff, and community members. The Eco-Logbook also lets other schools look at what you’re doing, so that they can gain inspiration and spread the impact of your climate action!

Our Eco-Logbook is FREE for any school or student-led eco-club to use!

We hope you enjoy using Our Eco-Logbook! For more information about the research underpinning this tool, please visit our research website.

Tracking your eco-activities by topic

When logging your eco-activities using the Eco-Logbook, there are 11 topics or categories to choose from, intended to help you organise your information and think about what other types of climate action could be tackled at your school.

Life on land

Activities to support biodiversity on land, including plants, insects, and animals.

Energy use & renewables

Activities to reduce the use of carbon-emitting energy and increase use of renewables.

Global citizenship

Activities that work toward the good of citizens worldwide.

Healthy lifestyle

Activities that promote better health, like plant-based eating, yoga, mindfulness.

Anti-litter

Activities that promote the cleanliness of our local outdoor environments.

Aquatic ecosystems

Activities that support the habitats and biodiversity of life under water.

Grounds & buildings

Activities aimed to make the grounds/buildings better for students, staff, and local wildlife.

Green transport

Activities promoting green modes of transportation, e.g., cycling, walking, car pooling, public transit.

Anti-waste

Activities to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfill.

Water use & quality

Activities to promote the conservation of water and/or preserve the quality of our water sources.

Mixed / generic

Activities that can’t be confined to a single category or that are very broad.

How was Our Eco-Logbook developed?

The very first version of Our Eco-Logbook was developed in partnership with seven primary school children in an Eco-Club at Europa School in Oxfordshire. It was designed through a series of four participatory design workshops, which ran from March 2023 to July 2023, and was funded by seed grant from the department of Culture, Communication & Media at UCL. Through this work, we saw that children were able to use the Eco-Logbook to think critically about their eco-activities, plan future actions, and involve others.

Based on the success of this first phase, we secured a UCL Knowledge Exchange grant in partnership with Keep Britain Tidy, the charity who hosts the Eco-Schools UK programme, to extend the functionality of the Eco-Logbook. We performed workshops in six primary and secondary schools across England to better understand the challenges schools face in supporting student-led climate action from a national lens and how the Eco-Logbook can be better designed to support them.

Based on the findings above, we refined and extended the Eco-Logbook to make it more accessible, widely available, and free for any school across the UK to use.