The Royal Shakespeare Company’s mission is to bring people together to experience stories that deepen our understanding of ourselves each other and the world around us, and that bring joy. As part of this mission, we address the climate crisis through our creative programme, as well as work hard to embed environmental sustainability into our estate, operations and business practice.

We have already taken action to reduce our environmental impact from procuring green energy to developing modular design of sets and scenery and we are committed to continual improvement. There are significant challenges for us in doing so, and this Policy sets out our high-level aspirations. These will only be achieved through collaboration and engagement across the whole organisation and throughout our environmental journey, we will involve and empower colleagues to take action.

Our commitment is to continually reduce our carbon footprint year-on-year, minimising the impact our work has behind the scenes, whilst maximising the reach our messaging has on stage and across our creative learning and advocacy work.

We actively monitor and report on our carbon emissions from our use of energy, water, colleague travel and the generation of waste. As the most significant area of carbon emissions, we will target energy consumption as a priority, working within technological and financial availability. We aim to reduce carbon emissions from energy by 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2045 from 2018/19 levels.

This will be achieved by, among other measures:

• improving energy efficiency across our buildings

• continuing the procurement of energy from renewable energy sources

• promoting options to reduce the digital impact of our organisation

• considering what and how we store data and the technology and content used, and

• increasing onsite renewable energy generation.

Beyond energy, we know that we have wider environmental impacts and that every part of what we do needs to consider the environment; from decisions about what products we procure for our catering and retail offerings, to how we travel or how we manage our gardens. We are proud to be one of the founding partners of the Theatre Green Book and uphold the principles those environmental standards set for our industry. We will work:

• to incorporate environmental sustainability into the creative process and take it into account in the stories we tell and the way we tell them

• the stories we present and the places where we present them are powerful tools for climate advocacy

• to promote environmentally sustainable procurement from the food in the restaurant to the products in our shop

• to manage efficiently the use and disposal of resources across all activities so that we:

  • reduce and where possible, eliminate waste,

  • maximise reuse, repurposing and recycling of materials, and

  • prevent waste going to landfill

• to reduce the impact of touring and business travel; maintaining and extending where possible the use of electric and alternative fueled company vehicles

• to take steps to support nature and biodiversity on our estate.

Through these actions we aim to be advocates, providing example and leadership, sharing and building on our experiences and knowledge through collaboration with other arts and cultural organisations.