Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh places sustainability principles at the heart of all its activities. At RBGE, we have been developing an environmental management system (EMS) and actively running five environmental working groups since 2007. We also have 20 'Area Champions' across all four sites who give information to staff in their area. They encourage sustainability and good practice in their areas.

We have taken action to become more systematic in the way we address the environmental impacts of our activities by adopting an approach modelled on the international standard ISO 14001. This means that we have developed a comprehensive, high-level Environmental Policy for the whole organisation. The Sustainable Development Policy highlights our aims with respect to the impacts that the RBGE activities have on the economic, social and natural environment. We have developed a Sustainable Procurement Action Plan in line with Scottish Government strategies which guides our procurement choices.

The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets with the Climate Change (Scotland) Act to reduce Scotland's carbon emissions by 42% by 2020 and RBGE takes seriously the demand on non-departmental government bodies to assist in meeting this and contributing to the Greening Government strategy . The public sector is expected to play a leading role in improving its environmental performance and it is assumed that agencies such as RBGE will be at the forefront.

Our Environmental Policy resonates with three of the five Scottish Government Strategic Objectives to create a Scotland which is Smarter, Safer & Stronger, and Greener. It contributes to five of the Scottish Government National Outcomes.

We believe that it is important to encourage our many visitors to consider the environment as well as our staff, students and volunteers, and three of the four Gardens are members of the Green Tourism Scheme and have the highest - Gold - award under this scheme. These awards reflect our consideration for the environment not only in managing the visitor facilities and services, but also in looking after the Gardens as a whole and pursuing our research and conservation work.

For further details on our impacts and how we reduce these please look at the Sustainability at the Gardens page.