These environments are vital to stabilising climates by providing natural solutions to capture and store carbon emissions.
As signatories to the Nature Positive Business Pledge, created by IEMA, UK Business and Biodiversity Forum, the RSPB, Aldersgate Group and ICC United Kingdom, we have committed to halting and reversing our impact on nature. To do this we are implementing a biodiversity protection hierarchy which has three steps to help us manage our impact on nature, as shown in the below diagram.
To find out more, see pages 8 and 9 in our Building New Futures Sustainability Strategy.
We are also undertaking work to gain a deeper understanding of the impacts that we have on nature across our value chain. As this work progresses and our understanding of what we need to do to halt and reverse nature loss matures, during 2025, Balfour Beatty will set clear and measurable UK targets to halt nature loss.
By 2030, we will be delivering our target to halt nature loss and by 2050, we will have embedded nature positive principles across our UK operations to support nature recovery.
Our early progress in this area has been driven by our UK in-house team of ecology, biodiversity and arboriculture specialists. They have been working closely with our customers to survey, analyse risks and deliver mitigation strategies to protect and enhance biodiversity in and around projects we are delivering. Across all our UK SCAPE framework projects, we provide every customer with a report detailing project-specific feasible options and available measures to achieve biodiversity net gain on or off site.
After extensive reconstruction on Millbrook Roundabout, our teams acknowledged the significance of local air quality in Southampton. They installed ‘Living Walls’ to mask the stark nature of the concrete pillars. Biotecture, a specialist living wall company, fabricated ten wall panels offsite and installed them on the roundabout. These living walls provide numerous benefits to the public and the environment, featuring over 11,000 plants from 17 different species.
¹ targets to be set in 2025