Annual Review 2024-2025

We transformed our gardens into two outdoor galleries that tell the incredible story of 2.7 billion years of life on our planet. They’ll be one of the most intensively studied urban nature sites of their kind in the world. The inclusion of new technologies, including highly sensitive sound recorders, environmental DNA capture and the novel storing and sharing of large quantities of environmental data, will provide us with unprecedented insights into our changing world.

Prioritising sustainable construction, we found new ways to recycle building waste onsite and committed to a 100%-diesel-free build. We also put environmental considerations at the heart of the design, such as capturing all rainwater onsite to reduce our reliance on external water sources.

The creation of our new gardens was supported by Amazon Web Services, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Evolution Education Trust, The Cadogan Charity, Garfield Weston Foundation, Kusuma Trust, The Wolfson Foundation, Charles Wilson and Rowena Olegario, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, Clore Duffield Foundation, Workman LLP and Accenture.

Read about Fern, our new Diplodocus

Sponsorship from Amazon Web Services has enabled development of a biodiversity monitoring platform Data Ecosystem to store, combine and compare different types of environmental data at scale. It enables researchers to build a deeper understanding of the UK’s urban biodiversity, its composition, how it relates to environmental conditions and how it responds to direct conservation action.

In the future, data will be accessible to researchers at partner institutes across the UK, allowing them to access wildlife data collected from our gardens since 1995. They’ll be able to rapidly and accurately study biodiversity data types alongside environmental data, including soil chemistry, atmospheric chemistry and noise pollution.

One of the primary goals of our Urban Nature Movement is to connect as many people as possible with nature on their doorsteps. To achieve this, we’ve been exchanging ideas, insights and skills with individuals and organisations across the UK.

We created the Urban Nature Network to offer a way to develop nature-focused skills and to learn from and connect with people engaged in nature recovery around the country. The network is going from strength to strength with more than 800 members participating in 2024/2025.

We’ve been collaborating with members of our Urban Nature Network as well as with 12 national museums and more than 22 local community partners to better understand how to help people and nature thrive, reflecting diverse voices, lived experiences and collective ideas.

We’ve sought to amplify young voices by convening three Youth Advisory Panels across the UK. These panels tackled difficult questions about access to nature and focused on solutions to inequalities in access for people from culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds.

In addition to this, we’ve worked with community groups in London, engaged more than 80,000 people through our digital content and partnered with Groundwork. Supporting practical action to create a fair and green future in which people, places and nature thrive, Groundwork has an established network of engaged communities around the UK.

We successfully recruited 103 new learning volunteers, improving our cohort demographics and increasing the proportion of volunteers from a marginalised ethnicity from 26% in 2022 to 43% in 2024. So far, our new learning volunteers have engaged more than 40,000 visitors in our gardens.

Our national programme Nature Overheard: Tune Into Your Streets has been motivating people to collect information about nature in their local area. Created in collaboration with school students, we wanted to inspire people to get out, look at, listen to and record nature in order to better understand the impact street and road noise has on insect life. An incredible 97K people have submitted data which will contribute towards research being conducted by our scientists.

We’re the lead partner on the National Education Nature Park, which was commissioned as part of the Department for Education’s Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy. Launched in October 2023, this trailblazing programme imagines all education settings as an interconnected green space on a national map. It puts nature at the heart and empowers children and young people to contribute to nature recovery at scale.

More than one in eight schools and colleges across all regions of England have joined the National Education Nature Park programme in its first 18 months. Children and young people at more than 6,000 schools, nurseries and colleges have been exploring their sites, mapping habitats and making improvements, such as adding ponds to encourage wetland wildlife and creating green walls that mitigate hot temperatures in classrooms. They’re also collaborating with scientists on pioneering research, as the data they collect provides vital information on the best ways to tackle the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

In April 2025 we opened our Fixing Our Broken Planet Gallery, our first new permanent gallery since 2016. Combining groundbreaking research by our scientists with insights from environmentalists and young changemakers, it explores the biggest challenges facing our planet and empowers people to take action.

The gallery showcases more than 250 specimens, including a Sumatran rhino, parasitic worms and whale earwax. Each one tells an important story about our fragile relationship with the natural world, revealing how our own health is intertwined with the health of every living thing. Visitors are given practical, evidence-based choices they can make and actions they can take to combat the planetary emergency as our demand for food, materials and energy soars.

Situated in our Victorian Waterhouse building, the space’s original features have been revived and sustainable materials and methods used to bring it back into public use. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Public Bodies Infrastructure Fund awarded us significant funding to rebuild the gallery in a way that retained its heritage and charm.

Our Fixing Our Broken Planet Community of Practice now has more than 240 members. It enables museum and culture sector practitioners to share best practice on how to respond to the planetary emergency, with a focus on engaging and empowering young people. Our research combined with the expertise and reach of regional museums are inspiring conversations nationwide on topics such as biodiversity decline, climate change and pollution.

Generation Hope is an annual programme in collaboration with young climate leaders from around the world. It’s all about empowering young people to stand up for our future and to become planet fixers. It provides a space for scientists, activists and creatives to dive into the biggest challenges facing the planet and to discuss the boldest solutions to these through talks, workshops and storytelling. Participants gain the knowledge, confidence and skills to speak up and take action. This year we engaged with more than 1,000 people onsite and online.

Celebrating its sixtieth year, our flagship Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition opened in October 2024 and was supported by Associate Donor The William Brake Foundation. One hundred fantastic images from 79 photographers were featured, representing 29 different countries.

Through our touring exhibition and outreach activities, we engage millions of people around the world every year, inviting them to celebrate and advocate for the natural world.

Our Wildlife Photographer of the Year 59 touring exhibition closed in March 2025 having reached 1.3 million people across the globe. We were also proud to showcase the Wildlife Photographer of the Year content in several special international displays to spark conversations with policymakers about the importance of nature in the climate debate.

We delivered the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Global Academy Programme in collaboration with the British Council in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The academy empowers young creatives to confidently connect with nature and begin conversations on how the climate crisis is affecting the areas where they live. Alongside this, it’s teaching young, aspiring wildlife photographers an ethical approach to the discipline as well as environmental conservation practices and the basics of photography.

Following the Academies, some of the participants’ work was exhibited to the public at the Main Botanical Garden in Kazakhstan, and the Tashkent House of Photography in Uzbekistan – attracting over 65,000 visitors.

We’ve also been able to reach new influential global audiences through displays at COP16 in Colombia and COP29 in Azerbaijan as well as audiences in Ethiopia, Senegal, Pakistan, Argentina and Uruguay via the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. We also had displays at the United for Wildlife Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, as well as at the Earthshot prize.