Welcome to The Crown Estate
Our strategy and targets
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Sustainability is integral to our values of commercialism, integrity and stewardship. During 2009 we implemented a new sustainability strategy and the last 12 months have seen us put this into practice.
We have a well-established governance structure for sustainability that clearly defines roles and responsibilities and helps us implement our strategy. The sustainability committee, chaired by our chief executive, has overall responsibility for our strategy and performance.
We believe we have a responsibility to bring benefits to our business and at the same time benefit the economy, communities and the environment over the long term. To achieve this we have a four-pronged approach to sustainability - our four 'pillars':
Tackling climate change and energy security
- Mitigation - making our operations more energy efficient
- Adaptation - understanding and adapting to the changes in climate
- Energy security - enabling development of renewable energy.
Driving environmental value
- Promoting better estates - applying a systematic apporach for continual improvement
- Cutting water use and reducing waste - using resources efficiently and responsibly
- Managing biodiversity - acting in accordance with our biodiversity action plans.
Sustaining communities
Working constructively with communities in and around our core holdings on projects falling within one of our focus areas:
- Education - supporting appropriate educational initiatives
- Enterprise - helping to create lasting jobs
- Estate access and experience - enhancing the experience of visiting , living and working on our estate.
Working together
- Employees - creating a fulfilling working environment
- Customers - promoting quality service, choice and flexibility
- Suppliers - building relationships which create value for us and for the wider market
- Wider stakeholders - ensuring that we are good people to do business with.
The four sustainability pillars are each headed by a management board director supported by their own group of employee champions. Their remit is to drive sustainability within the business. Each group's progress is reported quarterly to the sustainability committee.
The standard we have set ourselves is to be an innovator. We recognise that we cannot be an innovator in everything we do, but we must be, in the key sustainability issues for our business. Each of employee 'champions groups' has undertaken materiality assessments of the sustainability issues for their pillar. Based on this, each group has developed a 'roadmap' of activities that guides their activities. These set out key themes, objectives and work streams. The roadmaps build on the many initiatives already in place and cover both the 'bold' innovator programmes, as well as the 'basics' - the things we need to do as a responsible company including ensuring compliance and measuring our performance accurately.
