Annual Review 2022-23

In September 2022, 15 Reception and 7 Nursery children became the first ever pupils of Sky Primary and Eden Project Nursery, which will grow to over 230 early years and primary children when the school relocates to its permanent home in West Carclaze Garden Village. Nature, sustainability and learning outdoors are at the heart of the new school’s ethos.

Our Schools Team launched a new series of free science lesson plans for teachers designed to go beyond the classroom and inspire children to connect with nature in their school grounds. The lessons, designed for the upper end of Key Stage 2, respond to DfE’s plans, announced at COP26, to introduce measures that enhance climate change education for children. 

There is a national crisis in the teaching profession: 25% of Early Career Teachers (ECTs) quit within the first three years. In response, our Schools Team launched the ECT Eden Project Weekender, a 3-day residential course designed to help ECTs rediscover through reflection, collaboration and adventure why they became teachers in the first place.

HotHouse, the Eden Project’s creative leadership programme, partnered with The Florence Nightingale Foundation to work with NHS Senior Nurses and Midwives. 

They have developed three new programmes covering sustainability, health and well-being, including a three-night retreat for Florence Nightingale Foundation Scholarship holders.

The National Wildflower Centre brought people closer to nature by providing new wildflower habitats in urban areas across the UK, including Morecambe, Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster University, and Dundee.

Eden’s therapeutic horticulture programme supported nature recovery by propagating and planting devil’s bit scabious populations on site with veterans from the Defence Gardens Scheme in collaboration with the National Wildflower Centre. These native wildflowers are the main food plant for the marsh fritillary butterfly, a vulnerable species with high conservation status.

We started two new corporate partnerships with Foresight and Canary Wharf, working with these significant landowners and managers to investigate and instigate new ways to encourage nature recovery and nature connection through their estates and investment portfolios.

We continued to develop our outreach programme, creating a strong year-round programme of activities for local families, individuals and groups of all ages that make the most of the whole Eden site, including our first baby yoga sessions to support and connect new parents.

The  Big  Lunch was the official partner of Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. 

Over 200,000 community events, big and small, are estimated to have taken place bringing together around 17 million people.

Morecambe Promenade hosted the longest Big Jubilee Lunch in the UK, stretching at least 2.5km with over 5,000 people taking part.

To mark the historic occasion, entry to the Eden Project was free over the Platinum Jubilee weekend, so that visitors could celebrate together, enjoying an array of special activities and entertainment, as well as a Big Jubilee Lunch.

Five hundred trees were planted on Eden's Outer Estate to repair gaps in ancient Cornish hedges dating back to 1600s. 

Twenty new charging points were added to our car parks in August 2022. There were 1,832 EV charging sessions this year, avoiding the equivalent of 3.5 tCO₂e* in transport emissions. 

Eden sent zero waste to landfill, and our recycling rate increased from 53% last year to 73% in 2022/23. 

Total carbon emissions across scopes 1, 2 and 3 were reduced by 20% compared to the baseline set in 2019/20, keeping us on track with the required target reduction. Read the report.

Spring 2022 saw the installation of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker, a new garden designed, planted and optimised for pollinators’ tastes, using a specially created algorithm and curated palette of plants. Pollinator Pathmaker was commissioned by the Eden Project and funded by the Garfield Weston Foundation as part of Create a Buzz. Additional funding supporters include the Gaia Art Foundation and collaborators Google Arts & Culture. You can plan your own at pollinator.art 

Our Super Natural exhibition looked at humankind’s ever-evolving understanding of ourselves as a part of the natural world and the systems that inform our varying perspectives. Whether through senses and signals or cycles of carbon, oxygen and water, invisible threads connect a complex, dynamic web of life – and we are all a part of this web. 

Commissioned as part of the Super Natural exhibition at Eden, Ingela Ihrman’s First Came the Landscape is a giant stick skeleton made from parts of a single beech tree brought down by Storm Eunice in 2022. The skeleton reposes in a quiet corner of the Eden estate, where it will slowly break down and return to the soil.