Environmental Sustainability Action Plan

Our Environmental Sustainability Action Plan 2023–30

The National Museum of Australia has been on a journey towards environmental sustainability across its many endeavours, since its opening in 2001. The Museum collects objects and tells stories that encompass the Australian experience and record and reflect the escalating cycles of fire, flood and drought, the changing relationships between people and their lands and Australians' increasing respect for long-held traditions of caring Country.

The next step in this journey is the launch of our inaugural Environmental Sustainability Action Plan. The Plan recognises the imperative that is incumbent upon us all to take immediate and decisive action in response to climate change.

The Museum takes great pride in setting out its vision of building audience capacity to sustain Australia’s rich natural environment and cultural heritage.

Through this Plan, the Museum commits to achieving its goals of carbon-neutral certification, reducing its impact on the environment, and engaging audiences with knowledge to promote a sustainable future.

The Plan enhances the Museum’s offering to all Australians to connect to Country, to invite Country into your family and to care of its lands, its waters, its skies and its peoples – to know its stories, so that we can say we truly belong here.

The Museum looks forward to deepening its connections with audiences and other institutions to work with them – and with its many partners and communities nationally and internationally – on progressing towards the targets that have been established by the United Nation’s Sustainability Development Goals.

Our vision

Create actions that care for Country and build hope and capacity to sustain life and cultures.

We live in a time of major human-driven challenges to our planet’s natural and cultural systems. It has never been more important for the National Museum, as a highly trusted voice in the Australian community’s national conversation, to look truthfully at the attitudes and actions that have brought us to this point and to mobilise our collections, relationships and activities to address these challenges.

The Museum’s efforts to protect natural and cultural heritage will flow through two interrelated areas of action: first, to engage and collaborate with our audiences to create and sustain a viable and culturally rich future; and second, to apply our expertise to the Museum’s own ecological footprint, including its building and services.

We will bring together the knowledges of Australia’s First Nations peoples with other traditions of cherishing nature from cultures across the world to connect the energy of the Australian people to the urgent and vital work of regenerating Country. We will also harness the endeavours of staff across the Museum to embed sustainability into every part of what we do.

Our commitment

Achieve carbon-neutral certification while caring for our nation’s heritage and telling its stories in ways that benefit the environment and promote a sustainable future.

The National Museum will focus on monitoring and reducing our ecological footprint, taking responsible custodianship of the National Historical Collection, and delivering engaging, participatory activities that contribute to the sustainability and regeneration of Australia’s cultural, social and biological communities.

Working in partnership with government, industry and other collecting and cultural institutions, and in dialogue with our audiences and the Australian people, the Museum commits to:

• continually develop its collections and programs in support of our cultural and natural heritage
• communicating with and empowering staff, partners and audiences to work towards a more sustainable future
• reducing the environmental impact of our operations and improving the efficiency of resource use and greater resource recovery
• achieving certified carbon-neutral status of its building and business practices by or before 2030.

Contact us

For more information on the Museum's Environmental Sustainability Action Plan email environment@nma.gov.au