At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, we have been developing an environmental management system (EMS) and actively running an environment working group since 2006.
More recently, we have made concerted efforts at an organisational level to improve environmental performance through various initiatives (e.g. 'Switch Off' campaigns, promotion of recycling and public transport usage, biodiversity surveys etc).
We are also taking seriously the growing demand being placed on non-departmental government bodies by the Scottish Government and its Greening Government strategy. The public sector is expected to play a leading role in improving its environmental performance and it is assumed that agencies like RBGE will be in the forefront.
We have taken action over the last three years to become more systematic in the way we address the environmental impacts of our activities by adopting an environmental management systems approach modelled on the international standard ISO 14001. This means that we have developed a comprehensive, high-level environmental policy for the whole organisation, have identified our significant environmental impacts and have set objectives and targets to reduce these and demonstrate continual improvement.
Our first annual environmental report, published in June 2008, summarises our progress in reducing the environmental impact of our operations.
