Severfield’s commitment to biodiversity

In today’s fast-paced world, it is easy to forget the importance of nature. But at Severfield, we understand that any successful business thriving into the future needs to understand its interaction with the natural world.

This is why we have decided to take action and look at our impact on nature and how it affects everything we do. We appointed Nature Positive, a group of nature consultants and specialists, to develop a better understanding of the biodiversity risks, impacts, and dependencies from our direct operations, and across our value chain.

We broke our project down into three parts:

• Understanding our impact: We collected data to see how our actions affect nature. This helped us figure out where we are doing well and where we need to improve.
• Looking beyond: We didn't just focus on our sites. We looked at our whole supply chain to understand what their impact on nature is.
• Making plans:  Armed with information, we made plans to continue to protect nature and make sure we are doing our part.

The results of our biodiversity impact assessments revealed that:

• None of our sites were deemed as ‘high’ risk sites. Most of our offices and manufacturing sites received a direct biodiversity risk rating of ‘low’ risk.
• Two of our sites were classed as ‘medium’ risk, due to a presence of protected species recorded within the site boundaries.
• Whilst small risks to nature exist in general, for example potential disturbance to wildlife and water pollutants, the assessment found we are doing well at protecting nature with the correct mitigation measures implemented.
• We will continue to monitor our impact in case anything changes in the future.
• None of our offices or sites are in areas with high water stress, but the majority of our impact is in sourcing of raw materials (mining) and water used by our suppliers.

Taking action together

Adopting nature-positive approaches in business helps not only to protect and enhance biodiversity but also has many additional benefits. Those can include mitigating natural disaster risks, engaging community stakeholders, enhancing reputation, and improving employee health and wellbeing.

For this reason, we’re not just talking about it; we’re doing something. Our suppliers play a key role in the impact on biodiversity in our value chain, and we continue to engage with them on this topic regularly.

Some examples of this include working with our top 10 suppliers to make sure they care about biodiversity, spreading the word on biodiversity to others in our industry, and highlighting its importance.

Join us on our journey

We're just getting started! We will continue to take steps to improve our relationship with nature, which will include training on biodiversity awareness and looking at enhancing biodiversity at our factories and offices in line with best practice. We want you to be part of our journey too. Together, we can make a difference for nature and build a better world for everyone.

If you have any suggestions, or questions about our sustainability strategy please get in touch with us at sustainability@severfield.com.