Our environment
How we manage our products, services and activities with minimal impact on the natural environment.
We are constantly looking for ways to minimise the environmental impacts of our operations and strive to meet sustainability objectives which include targets on energy consumption, staff business travel, waste, recycling and water consumption. Our performance against these targets can be found in our Annual Report and Accounts.
Our Environmental Management System
We operate an Environmental Management System (EMS) designed to help us manage our environmental impacts. Our EMS is certified to the internationally recognised ISO14001 standard of excellence. The certification covers our Exeter head office and selected frontline sites including observatories, research facilities, field service engineering centres and staffed offices across the UK.
Our commitments
We recognise the effects upon the environment that our operations may have and set ourselves clear commitments to minimise these by:
- Committing to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 aligning with Government policy and our own Net Zero road map.
- Committing to the protection of the environment including the prevention of pollution to land, air or watercourse through an uncontrolled event or discharge.
- Complying with applicable environmental legislation, including those relevant to biodiversity, and (any) other compliance obligations or requirements as appropriate to our business.
- Committing to continual improvement through minimising the environmental impacts associated with all the activities, products and services of the business, in particular reducing the carbon emissions from our energy consumption and staff business travel.
- Setting and reviewing our environmental targets and monitoring our progress against these through our Responsible Business Committee (RBC).
- Encouraging environmental awareness amongst those working for, or on behalf of, the Met Office through effective training, communication and commissioning.
- Promoting the efficient use of resources through the minimisation of waste, whilst encouraging recycling and re-use of materials.
- Sharing of environmental information with interested parties and adopting environmental best practice, where found to be relevant to our business.
In addition, we understand the importance of biodiversity within the environment and will seek to conserve, and where possible, enhance biodiversity performance through responsible stewardship of those landholdings over which the Met Office has effective control and/or influence including the elimination of unjustified pesticide use.
You can read more in our full Environmental Policy or via the pages below.