The Greening Communities campaign was launched today by the LGA in a bid to demonstrate the importance of council leadership in environmental management.

Linking with wider priorities such as reducing crime and improving health, the campaign highlights how councils can be creative in delivering projects to improve environmental quality.

Councils will have the opportunity to use the toolkits on offer from the campaign to run local greening communities campaigns, promote grassroots projects and be inspired by the case studies of best practice in vision documents available on the Greening Communities' website.

Chairing the launch of the campaign Cllr Paula Baker, Deputy Chair of the LGA's environment board said: "It is simply impossible to imagine how the environment in a local area can be improved without leadership. There are too many agencies and organisations involved with managing it.

"Many environmental services are offered by a whole range of agencies which are currently fragmented in their approach. Local authorities are the only organisation which can join-up environmental management locally in a meaningful way, link it to wider priorities like promoting health and reducing crime, and actually make a difference."

"The LGA is demonstrating what can be achieved when local authorities take the helm and join up all the services on offer and steer themselves towards becoming local environment champions."

"We owe it to our local electorate to make clear to everyone that if councils take a central role in managing and improving the environment in a local area then a real transformation can be achieved".

In his speech, Local Environmental Quality Minister, Ben Bradshaw welcomed the LGA's Greening Communities Campaign and highlighted how strong leadership, both nationally and locally was needed to create momentum, to invigorate communities and join with public sentiment to make communities clean and green in every sense:"Today the local environmental quality agenda is moving from a pure focus on some very important aspects of the immediate environment to one that is better aligned to deliver environmentally sensitive and sustainable communities in a much broader sense.

"Together, Government, local authorities, other agencies and the voluntary sector need to reinvigorate community action. We must join up to deliver this new "green sustainable development" led vision and to do it we need strong environmental leadership - nationally and locally.

"So my challenge to you is to keep pace with what is a citizen led agenda and work with us to deliver their aspirations and join the journey to clean and green.

"I welcome the LGA's Greening Communities Campaign as a response to this challenge."