Our vision for sustainability is to champion creativity as a force for planet-positive change.
Read our full Climate Action Plan.
‘Held in trust for the nation,’ is the promise we make as a museum when acquiring an object for the collection. This commitment defines the institutional mandate of stewardship and underpins the ethical responsibility to preserve collections forever.
To fulfil this obligation, the V&A uses an array of minimally invasive strategies to maintain objects on a system of permanent life-support. From display cases and conservation treatments to sophisticated environmental controls, and preventive measures designed to mitigate risks from mould, pollutants, and other invisible agents of deterioration.
Yet increasingly, the greatest threat to permanence is not microbial, but planetary. Climate breakdown now constitutes one of the most pressing challenges to museum practice. Rising temperatures, intensifying wildfires, flooding, and other climate-related hazards are reshaping the very conditions in which collections must be safeguarded. The museum environment — its galleries, archives, and storage spaces — can no longer be insulated from these wider ecological transformations.
Since the publication of our last Sustainability Plan, the acceleration of climate impacts in the UK and globally has underscored the urgency of decisive action. The coming decade represents a critical juncture: by 2030, we will have reached the halfway point toward our ambition of achieving net zero within ten years. This Climate Action Plan sets out the pathways by which the V&A will reduce emissions, embed sustainable practice across our operations, and strengthen the resilience of our collections.
Our approach is necessarily ambitious. We aspire not only to care for our collections in climate-responsible ways but also to demonstrate leadership in sustainable museum practice. To this end, we have been building foundations for action, focussing on measuring and monitoring our impacts, testing new approaches to develop a robust, strategic plan focusing on areas of biggest opportunities for change.
This work is both conservation and collaboration. It requires innovation, creativity, and partnership across disciplines and communities. In the spirit of Henry Cole’s founding vision, we seek to be a learning space – open to the exchange of ideas, committed to reimagining environmental responsibility, and dedicated to inspiring audiences through art, design, and creativity to shape a more sustainable future.
