Today, we’ve published our Annual Environmental Report 2023/24 highlighting our environmental achievements and challenges from 2023/24. Greg Forde, our Senior Real Estate Manager, writes about the work of our Real Estates team as part of our Environmental Action Plan (EAP).
A key element of the EAP is our biodiversity improvement programme, which is aimed at improving and restoring biodiversity on the sites we own and manage.
Since the start of the GD2 price control, we have completed 102 biodiversity baseline studies across selected sites in both our Scotland and southern networks. From these studies we have developed site-specific improvement strategies to increase the biodiversity value of the site and leave the natural environment in a measurably better state than it was before. To add context to this, across our land portfolio so far, we have planted over 1,000 trees, 621m of hedgerow, over 11,000m2 of wildflower seeds and created multiple wildlife habitats.
To date, we have implemented 19 biodiversity improvement projects and I’m delighted to say that one of those projects is now award winning!
At the ‘BIG Biodiversity Challenge’ awards on Wednesday 25 September, our project carried out on the open land at our liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage plant in Oban, Scotland won ‘Habitat Creation: Project of the Year (Medium to large scale)’ and was highly commended in the ‘Client Award’ category. The project also won an ‘International Green Apple Environmental Award’ in the category of ‘Environmental Improvement’, which we will receive in November.
They’re well-deserved wins for an incredible project which has seen vast ecological improvements including the planting of new trees and wildflowers, the creation of reptile habitats, bird boxes, kingfisher boxes and an artificial otter holt on the river bank. The project was expertly managed by Graeme Walker as well as behind the scenes support from Jack Porter and Scott Harvey.
Carolina Karlstrom, our Head of Sustainability, said: “Well done to Graeme, Greg and the whole Real Estates team! Great teamwork and such a fantastic project that will bring so many benefits to the local wildlife. It was tough competition at the Big Biodiversity Challenge Awards, and it makes me proud to work in a company that goes above and beyond to take action to tackle the climate and nature crisis. The Oban biodiversity project brings our whole Environmental Action Plan to life in an inspiring way!”
This external recognition demonstrates the success of the project and the positive impact our EAP is having and over the coming year we will continue to carry out improvements on more sites across both our Scotland and southern network areas.
You can read our Annual Environment Report 2023/24 here.
