From the wild moors and limestone dales of the Peak District to the river valleys of the Severn and the lowlands of the Trent, our region is blessed with rich, diverse and beautiful landscapes and habitats.

This is important, because in the next decades, the health of our environment will be reflected in the health of our business. When they thrive together, they will set our region apart.

The actions we take now to protect nature are more important than ever. Globally, we are facing a ‘sixth mass extinction’, with more than 1 million species at risk. The UK, too, has failed to reach 17 of the 20 biodiversity targets set by the UN in 2010, and 25% of mammals and 50% of birds are in danger of extinction. Climate change is only exacerbating this predicament.

As managers of land and water, we believe we have a part to play alongside our statutory duties, to work with our partners and plot a course to nature recovery.

When we look after nature, we look after water.

Investing in expanding and improving the natural environment is more than just the right thing to do, it is also a practical business imperative. Our environment is the vital partner to our reservoirs, treatment works, and pipelines; capturing, holding, cleaning, and carrying our water. Without nature, we could not do our job, and a flourishing environment plays an important role in helping us deliver our core activities more effectively and efficiently.

Our natural environment and biodiversity strategy is holistic, because nature doesn’t operate within boundaries. We start with our own rural estate, following an evidence-based plan to protect and improve ecologically valuable habitats and species, including at our visitor sites.

Beyond our own land, we work with an extensive set of partners organisations to improve biodiversity across a range of natural habitats in our catchment; we offer biodiversity grants to a wide range of community organisations like schools and community groups; and we work with thousands of farmers across 432,000 hectares to improve their land for nature and reduce agricultural effluent to help protect raw water quality which means we have to treat it less.

To do all this requires an approach that sees the landscape as a whole, understands and respects the multiple life support functions delivered by ecosystems, and delivers joined-up interventions to support natural cycles and connectivity.

We have expanded our in-house ecology team over recent years to support this aspiration.

Underpinning our efforts, we need useful ways to quantify the health of natural ecosystems now and the progress we make over time, so that we make sure that on our watch nature is constantly improving.

Biodiversity Net Gain tools provide one part of this picture, and as a business we are committed to Biodiversity Net Gain, so we will always leave nature better than we found it. On capital projects that require a preliminary ecological appraisal we are challenging ourselves to deliver 15% net gain.

As biodiversity increasingly rises up the international agenda we will incorporate the latest thinking on how to report corporate performance on nature, including developing our natural capital accounts and closely following the progress of initiatives like the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).

As well as familiar wildlife, the Midlands is home to a number of protected species such as great crested newts, water vole, otter, white claw crayfish and bittern.

The open spaces, including wetlands, are also important to migratory birds, large numbers of which pass through the region in spring and autumn. Each species is dependent on others for its survival. The web of biodiversity itself is an integral and significant part of the Earth’s life support system.

Our estate - half in Wales and half in England - covers a wide range of habitat types, from urban areas to woodland and grassland, tenanted farmland and forestry.

Protecting and enhancing biodiversity across all of the land that we own is a natural place for us to start, and is at the core of our contribution to nature recovery.

We focus our efforts in three key ways:

• Understanding and monitoring what we have
• Looking after designated sites
• Integrating our diversity aims across all our land management activities, through nature-friendly forestry and farming
  

Between 2015 and 2020 we improved the diversity of 244 hectares of land, but we saw such good results with our work that we set a bold new ambition – and have embarked on one of the biggest nature projects in the UK. We are now aiming to improve biodiversity across 5,000 hectares of land in the Severn Trent region by 2027, significantly exceeding our regulatory commitments. Our Great Big Nature Boost will see us working to improve an area that’s bigger than Gloucester.

Through the Great Big Nature Boost, we will plant 1.3 million trees, sourced and grown from UK nurseries. The trees we plant will provide homes for our incredible native wildlife, contribute to natural flood management and sequester carbon. We will establish wildflower meadows, encouraging beneficial insects and birds, which are natural predators of pests that would otherwise damage farmers’ crops. This helps farmers to use less pesticide and fungicide, reducing the risk of chemicals running into lakes and rivers.

Restoring moorland in our region is valuable in many ways. Healthy moorland is vitally important, providing dense and diverse vegetation and provides much needed habitat for birds such as curlew and skylark.

Along with tree planting in gullies and on valley sides, healthy moorland helps make soil less prone to erosion and reduces the impact of flooding. Recovering bog and peatland and creating healthy peatbogs, traps and stores millions of tonnes of carbon and will hold vast quantities of the water, acting like huge sponges. Without this investment, the degraded peatland releases carbon back into the atmosphere and allows sediment to be washed away into watercourses. With restoration we can re-wet and reset the system.

We cannot do this without our partners, and we are proud to work with some of the leading conservation organisations nationally and in our region, for example our work with the RSPB to preserve and enhance ancient woodland in Sherwood Forest, and coordinating with the Wildlife Trusts on the development of Nature Recovery Networks.

We also know that action for nature needs to happen at multiple scales, and we think there should be opportunities for the full range of organisations and individuals to get involved. So our Boost for Biodiversity grant scheme specifically targets smaller projects, enabling local authorities, councils, schools, NGOs, local conservation groups and community groups to carry out their own projects to enhance the natural environment.