We have a responsibility to preserve and enhance our natural environment and are proactively working to improve biodiversity within local communities across our network.
We are using new technology and pioneering approaches to minimise our impact, alongside developing new green initiatives surrounding our infrastructure. Our decision-making works hand in hand with local and national government strategies to ensure our biodiversity ambitions are met.
Starting in 2023, we will move from working to mitigate detrimental impacts to actively improving the stock of natural resources on our land. This is known as natural capital enhancement.
Human activity is driving a decrease in biodiversity across the globe. Around 25% of species worldwide are threatened with extinction and natural ecosystems have declined by almost 50% in relation to their baseline condition. Without intervention, this will reduce the resilience of ecosystems to the effects of climate change, as well as causing significant consequences to human industry. Land-based ecosystems currently remove 30% of carbon emissions associated with human activities. A reduction in these natural resources would therefore endanger our attempts to limit global warming
We mitigate biodiversity loss most significantly through our actions to connect low carbon generation for societal decarbonisation. This leads to benefits in terms of climate change mitigation, avoidance of additional land use and pollution reduction. We protect and enhance ecosystems affected by our operations by mitigating the impacts of construction in line with the Iberdrola group’s target for no net loss of biodiversity by 2030. The avoidance of the introduction and population of non-invasive native species also falls as a priority under this.
Our biodiversity ambitions go further still, beyond mitigation to create a positive legacy, enhancing habitats to achieve biodiversity net gain. This ambition is necessary, due to the UK and Scottish Government’s increased requirements and aspirations for biodiversity enhancement. Our stakeholder feedback also routinely reinforces our need to tackle the biodiversity crisis. While current maturity in this area is low and uncertainty lies in achieving our targets across our portfolio of projects, our current focus is to quantify our impact and trial enhancement approaches to ensure the right solutions are implemented. These will be both cost-effective and provide value to customers.
For more information about our most recent initiatives, check our case studies!