Sustainable Development

Put the planet first. Help protect and restore nature and our environment.

In our Strategy 2030, one of our commitments is to ‘put the planet first’, by helping protect and restore nature and our environment.

To meet this commitment, we have developed a Sustainable Development Action Plan (2022–2024) for our family of seven museums and the National Collections Centre. This plan aligns the operation of our family of seven museums and our National Collections Centre to this commitment, and has four important areas of focus:

  • Decarbonisation and renewable generation – provides a focus on our physical built environment and our buildings, both historic and operational.
  • Land and nature recovery – collates activity already underway across Amgueddfa Cymru, but will enable better collaboration, awareness of activity and identify opportunities for longer-term investment to enhance biodiversity and opportunities for our renewable technologies to be incorporated on our land.
  • Staff and Volunteer engagement – supporting our people to participate in sustainable development activities, whether part of our staff, volunteering, or young producers’ networks.
  • Ways of working – initially, this will focus on improving our procurement and the circular economy / waste and sustainable business travel practices. In addition to our commitments and vision, we are encouraging our staff to align with the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act’s five ways of working. See how our work across Amgueddfa Cymru aligns in our Well-being Statement.

In March 2023, Amgueddfa Cymru successfully retained the BS8555 SEREN Scheme Phase 3 standard following a re-assessment of all our sites against this Environmental Standard. Through the Seren scheme, we track and analyse our gas, electricity and water consumption and renewable energy generation, waste generated and transport use. The scheme also helps us document our legal compliance, pollution prevention, and our governance activity including continual improvement, internal audits and management reviews. Our Environmental Policy is available here .

Also in March 2023, we secured our silver accreditation with the Carbon Literacy Project. This timeline from 2019 – when we a declared a global climate and ecological emergency – shows our journey to date. Developing a carbon-literate workforce will help Amgueddfa Cymru to move towards a low-carbon future, aware of the environmental impacts of our work, and help our national collections narrate the climate and biodiversity emergencies to our visitors and communities. To find out more about the Carbon Literacy Project, click here.

If you’d like to find out more about our sustainable development work, get in touch: sustainability@museumwales.ac.uk.