How we’re facing the climate crisis

The climate crisis – and its potential effects on our operations and collections – is something that cuts through all the work we do. For over a decade we've been actively working to lessen our environmental footprint and aim to help the libraries sector take a leadership role in promoting sustainability.

We’ve already done a lot to improve the sustainability of our own sites, operations and services, and now we’ve developed our first sustainability and climate change strategy which will help us take concerted action, including working towards net zero carbon.

To mark the launch of our strategy, here’s a whistle-stop sustainability tour of the British Library to guide you through some of the ways we've been lowering our environmental footprint.

1. Using less energy and carbon

Like any organisation, the key for us has been to be lean, be clean, and be green. This means using less electricity and gas, and generating more energy on-site through things like solar panels.

The changes we have made have had a major impact; we’ve reduced our carbon emissions by 68% since we started measuring and reporting them in 2009.

Many of the changes aren’t things you would notice, like:

• energy efficient lighting
• more efficient motors in our heating and humidification equipment
• turning off the heating in our basement stores over the weekend.

When it comes to heating, burning gas causes greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to climate change. That’s why we’ve also secured grant funding to install a lower carbon alternative called a ground source heat pump, which uses free heat from the ground to warm up water. This will soon heat several of the buildings at our storage site in Boston Spa.

We also now have solar panels on the roof of three buildings at Boston Spa. And at St Pancras we’ve commissioned Naked Energy to deliver the UK’s largest solar heat project, which makes hot water from sunshine. The installation comprises 950 solar collectors across our roof. It is expected to reduce the building’s CO2 emissions by 55 tonnes and generate 216 MWh of energy annually – the equivalent of powering and heating a community centre or swimming pool for a year. Next time you wash your hands at St Pancras, remember we’ve got sunshine on tap!

Looking ahead, we’ve got three big transformation projects in London and Yorkshire, all of them with stretching environmental targets. Our newest storage building in Boston Spa is the first ever purely passive automated library storage facility, meaning that it’s not actively heated or cooled.

2. Making our food more sustainable

We’ve built sustainability into our contracts with our caterers, cleaners, printers and designers. You’ll see this in our cafés which offer delicious vegetarian and vegan food, while our chefs have partnered with Slow Food in the UK to save British food varieties from extinction. This year they are focusing on Dorset Blue Vinny cheese, Pink Fir Apple potatoes and Hampshire watercress.

In addition we’re:

• replanning our menus to minimise food waste
• composting our coffee grounds
• using metal and wooden cutlery, not plastic
• offering more recycling facilities.

3. Going green in our shops

Our shop has become a pilot retailer, trialling eco-friendly packaging alternatives for several of our suppliers. When sourcing products for our ranges, we prioritise sustainable options. For example, our range includes LeFrik bags made from recycled water bottles and reusable cups from Circular & Co., crafted from recycled coffee cups.

We also stock sustainable T-shirts from Teemill produced from organic cotton and prints using low-waste digital technology with vegan inks. At the end of any garments’ life, they can be returned to Teemill to be recycled into new T-shirts, ensuring zero waste.

Meanwhile online, we offer carbon-neutral shipping on every order which has helped us reduce shipping emissions by approximately 14 tonnes.

4. Sustainable travel

We’re big on sustainable travel, with the majority of our visitors arriving by public transport. We also provide cycle racks to encourage eco-friendly travel, and we've recently purchased our very first electric car, further cutting down on vehicle emissions.

5. Partnering with libraries

We've collaborated both nationally and internationally with libraries, galleries, museums and research institutions, while remaining deeply embedded in our local communities. As a founding partner of the Green Libraries Campaign and a signatory of the Green Libraries Manifesto, we actively support library authorities across the country by providing resources and participating in collaborative research.

Our Living Knowledge Network is a UK-wide network of public and national libraries, and through it, we’ve kick-started conversations about the role that libraries play in enabling positive climate action in communities.

Explore past talks on sustainability and nature from our partner libraries, all available to watch on-demand. From practical tips on greening your home to learning about the impact of the climate crisis, libraries can inspire you to make positive changes to help address the most urgent environmental issues of our time.

6. Telling stories through culture and events

Our exhibitions allow us to showcase our collection and share important stories. Our Animals exhibition last year, highlighted issues such as ecological damage and extinction, with an opportunity to listen to a reel of tape containing the song of a now-extinct songbird.

We’ve also run webinars, conferences and learning events focusing on different aspects of climate action.

We're making our exhibitions themselves more sustainable, by designing with lower impact materials and reusing where we can, for example using reusable partition walls and acrylic hoods.

7. Making sustainability part of how we work

Perhaps the biggest challenge, still work in progress for us, is making sustainability a natural part of how we work. We’re offering staff Carbon Literacy training to raise awareness and understanding. This year we are making sustainability part of our business case process and procurement policies.

We know there is lots more for us to learn and do but we are determined to play our part.

Want to know more? Read our sustainability strategy (PDF, 5mb).

This month marks the first anniversary of a criminal attack on the Library which, as we detailed in a report earlier this year, has affected almost every aspect of our public service. As our users and regular readers of this blog know only too well, the journey to recover full access to our collection and services has been challenging and sometimes frustrating.

It’s reassuring, therefore, to be able to report that as of this week, with the re-opening of the National Newspaper Building in Boston Spa – containing some 750 million pages of newspapers and periodicals dating back to the 18th century – we have now restored access to 100% of the Library’s printed collections that were available prior to the cyber-attack.

It marks the culmination of a busy month which has seen a rapid sequence of service restorations of different kinds. All of these are workarounds and remain somewhat different to our pre-attack offering, but together they represent a significant step forward after a very disrupted year, and I’d like once again to thank our users for your patience and understanding as we’ve addressed this major work of rebuilding and restoration.

• Remote ordering now available
• Access restored to the rest of our physical collection
• Online learning resources
• Digitised manuscripts
• Electronic Legal Deposit
• Looking further ahead

Remote ordering now available

Key among these services is the facility to request collection items online, rather than having to do so by filling in a paper form onsite, which had been the interim process since January.

Registered Readers can now order items up to 28 days in advance from wherever they are by visiting our updated web pages and following the online instructions. Your items will be waiting for you in our Reading Rooms in London or Yorkshire. As mentioned in my last blog, if your Reader Pass dates from before 21 March 2024 you will need to register for a new pass in order to use the restored service.

More than 400 orders were placed on the morning the service went live, and our staff will be able to offer any support that you may need in using the new process. I am extremely grateful for the patience Readers have shown in adapting to this new system, and hope that it goes at least some way to addressing what has been one of the key frustrations users have faced since the attack.

Access restored to the rest of our physical collection

Last month we restored access to more than 262 linear kilometres of collection items held in our automated Additional Storage Building in Boston Spa – and you can now request them to consult at Boston Spa or St Pancras using the remote ordering service.

Earlier this week, we restored access to the huge archive of newspapers and periodicals stored in the National Newspaper Building, also located at Boston Spa. This means that the entirety of our printed collections as they were prior to the cyber-attack are once again available to consult in our Reading Rooms.

Online learning resources

In September, at the start of the school year, we also brought back the 100 most-used articles from our Discovering Literature web resource for teachers and young learners. In the coming months we aim to add more of this sorely-missed content to our interim website.

Digitised manuscripts

Last week we restored access to 1,000 of our digitised manuscripts, with treasures such as the Sherborne Missal and the Eadui Psalter once again available to explore in full. It’s been great to make a first tranche of these unique treasures accessible to users around the world once again. More digitised manuscripts will be added to the site as we proceed with the careful work of data recovery.

Electronic Legal Deposit

The task of checking the vast core dataset of Electronic Legal Deposit content (also known as Non-Print Legal Deposit) is now complete, but for all of the partners in the Legal Deposit Library network (the British Library, the National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and the Library of Trinity College Dublin) there is now a further stage of work to test and set up access to the new local systems needed to make it available in a way that is both secure and compliant with the very specific access restrictions required by statute. Timings for this may vary somewhat for each institution, and each of us will be communicating about this directly with our own user communities: please bear with us as we navigate through this final hurdle.

As mentioned in my previous blog, this tranche of content will consist of e-journals and e-publications deposited prior to October 2023, and won’t for the time being include the UK Web Archive, for which a different solution is required.

Looking further ahead

Alongside all of this, we are also deep into planning the next phase of our recovery programme, which will take us into the new year. Areas of particular focus include our sound archive and our popular and much-missed Ethos resource of 600,000 digitised theses. There’ll be updates on these and more in subsequent blogs here.

In the longer term, as I’ve mentioned previously, work continues to implement a new end-to-end platform for all our library services – a vital project which was already in planning before the attack, and which will ultimately provide not just relief from the challenges of the past year, but a better and more integrated service than we were ever able to offer before.

In the meantime I would like to thank our users, partners and supporters for all of your understanding and support as we continue to restore our services to researchers and the public, across the UK and around the globe.

Sir Roly Keating
Chief Executive

Today marks the formal launch of our new Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy. You can read the summary (PDF 5mb), or for all the details view our full strategy (PDF, 4mb).

We hear from our Sustainability Manager, Catherine Ross, about the Library's journey to this point.

Why is sustainability important to the Library?

Climate change is real, urgent and serious. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. It’s easy to think it’s still a problem of the future, but we know from our international partners that they already experiencing the impacts of climate change. We’ve seen 40°C days in London. We know the Library needs to build our own resilience, and that we have a role to support society’s efforts to adapt to and address this crisis.

At the start of the new strategy, our Chief Executive, Sir Roly Keating, puts it very powerfully,

At the British Library, we are charged with safeguarding the national collection for generations to come. This naturally leads to long-term thinking about climate change. It is widely recognised that the scale of change ahead amounts to a planet-wide emergency, with devastating impacts. Our strategy reflects a sense of determination about our role; these are global challenges and, as one of the world’s great libraries, and proud signatories to the Green Libraries Manifesto, we are determined to play our part.

Is the Library starting from scratch?

Far from it. Here are just a few examples of things we have already done:

• Using heat pumps to get heat from the ground and air, reducing our use of gas
• Using sunshine to warm the water you wash your hands with in St Pancras
• Using less new materials to build our exhibitions
• Boosting re-use and recycling, sending nothing to landfill
• Working with suppliers to become more sustainable
• Offering greener choices in our cafés and shops
• Supporting new sustainable businesses
• Telling climate stories through our exhibitions, events, learning programmes and collections.

What is the sustainability strategy for?

This is our first sustainability strategy, and it is all about coordinating our efforts and aiming even higher. We were already doing a lot, but the new strategy pulls it together in one place.

When you read it, you’ll see the practical things we can do as the national library. It covers how we will get our own house in order, by reducing the environmental impact of our buildings and operations, while also showing how we will inform and inspire others, through our wider purposes.

What aims has the Library set?

In the strategy there are detailed aims under four broad headings:

Sustainable places

We aim to continue decarbonising our buildings and embedding best practice in environmental performance in our new spaces

Sustainable purposes

We aim to collaborate with people to open up the collection in new and interesting ways, to support work on solutions to the environmental challenges we face – from climate research and enabling sustainable business and enterprise, to engaging people through events, exhibitions and learning, and increasing climate literacy and visibility of climate science

Sustainable partnerships

We aim to embed partnerships across the sectors we work in to support wider change, share and encourage climate action, best practice and learning

Embedding sustainability

We aim to embed sustainability in how we work; our culture, policy, processes, governance, planning, collections and communications, ensuring it is seen not as an add-on, but as how we do everything we already do. This includes incorporating climate-related risks into our risk management, governance and conservation policies.

Who wrote it?

The strategy has been written by staff from across the Library. It’s been a real team effort, over the course of nearly a year.

We formed two working groups; one on our places and one on our purposes. There were members from Estates, our People team, Public Engagement, Collections Management, Supply Chain Management, Finance, Communications and Marketing, Technology and more. It was my role to coordinate this process. Both working groups reported in to the Sustainability and Climate Change Steering Group, chaired by our Chief Librarian.

How will the Library make sure it is actually implemented?

We are determined this new strategy leads to action, not just words. We have also created an action plan which will be monitored by the steering group twice a year, with annual reports to Direction Group and Board.