Sustainability

The RNLI is committed to saving lives on the water indefinitely, which means we need to make the best use of your donations and be as sustainable as we can in everything we do.

Sustainability is a fundamental part of our strategy to save more lives through prevention and rescue.

We recognise the need to manage the effect of our economic choices and our impact on the environment, on people and on the communities we serve, while maintaining and enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of our lifesaving service. 

To this end, we’ve developed our Sustainability Plan to keep us on track for a sustainable lifesaving future.

Our Sustainability Plan - giving more back

We are working hard to fully integrate sustainable principles and ways of working into the RNLI so that we can save lives at sea indefinitely.

Our sustainability vision is to create more value than we take. Put simply, this means we’re focussing on giving more back to people, society and the environment than we take out, so that our positive impacts not only reduce, but outweigh, any negatives to create long-term, lasting value.

By the sheer nature of what we do in preventing drowning and saving lives, we already have a really positive impact on many people and communities. But it’s the way we do this that can make a real difference to the future of our lifesaving service.

Our Sustainability Plan reduces the negative and optimises the positive social, economic and environmental impacts of all RNLI activities.

It clearly identifies our short, medium and long-term sustainability issues and opportunities locally, nationally and globally to ensure we eliminate, manage or mitigate them as we work toward achieving our sustainability vision.

Take a look at our sustainable ways of working.