Sustainability

Overview

Sustainability is embedded at the heart of our strategy, and is one of our organisational values, highlighting our commitment to working to reduce the impact of our activities on the environment.

Integrating sustainability throughout our organisation ensures we remain orientated towards our long-term vision of people with rheumatic conditions, across the lifespan, receiving the highest quality outcomes and living well.

Practically, we enhance our sustainability through initiatives designed to improve our environmental impact. Our initiatives focus particularly on responsible resource consumption and production, greenhouse gas emission reductions, and adaptation to climate change, in alignment with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals twelve and thirteen.

This work has had many successes since we began embedding our sustainability strategy into our activity in 2023. This includes us winning Association of British Professional Conference Organisers (ABPCO) award for 'Best sustainable conference 2023' for our flagship event, Annual Conference. We continue with the sustainability focus for this, and our other events, and you can read more about what we had in place for BSR26 here.

Our current initiatives

What we are doing to be more sustainable as an organisation:

We hold core meetings online, including our AGM and many committee meetings, which reduces travel and improves accessibility.
We operate a paperless office and in 2024 our Journals also moved to online only, which was well received by our members.
We have been working on reducing our digital environmental impact. Our website meets Green Web Foundation's criteria for 'green hosting' and in 2025 we recycled our broken office computer hardware; in doing so we avoided emissions of 2525kg CO₂e. We also continue to use Microsoft products, which aim to be carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030.
As part of our sustainability strategy, we also aim to use local businesses where possible and take part in City of London events, including engaging in local ward elections.
To ensure our work on sustainability continues we have set the goal of ensuring that by the end of our current strategy period (December 2027), we aim to be able to measure our organisational carbon footprint.

'Best Sustainable Conference'

ABPCO Excellence awards, 2023

"We're so proud that the hard work of the past three years is starting to make an impact in the industry. This little gem of a team was also a finalist for Best Association Events Team, and we have left the awards so inspired to keep striving for excellence!" - Isabelle Hanley Timmins, BSR Events Manager