Our responsible business commitment is to introduce natural capital accounting.
We plan to adopt a natural capital approach to ensure we value our impacts and dependencies on nature in the decisions we make. Natural capital accounting is a tool that can help measure the full extent of natural assets, such as water, air and woodland or other natural habitats. Giving us perspective on the link between the economy, ecology and our environment. This will help ensure the decisions we make are right for the long term sustainability of our region.
Desired impact – For South East Water to ensure our impact and dependencies on nature is valued in all decisions we make.
How have we performed?
Using a set of natural capital metrics we’ve completed a baseline natural capital and biodiversity assessment across all of our sites. This evaluates their contributions to:
- Water quality regulation
- Air quality regulation
- Biodiversity
- Pollination
- Flood regulation
- Climate regulation
- Social benefits (e.g., visual amenity, recreation)
This baseline enables us to evaluate and protect our natural assets against future impacts, and helps us quantify how we can enhance their overall benefit to the environment, such as by increasing biodiversity. Going forward we are working with our consultants and our environmental, asset management and engineering functions to embed this approach into the design and selection of our future investment. This will help us select the most beneficial solutions for the environment and our communities by looking at a much wider range of factors. Our assessment of natural (and other capital) was incorporated into the assessment of resource options for our WRMP24 as additional evidence.
An important aspect of our 25-Year Environment Plan is to deliver nature-based catchment management solutions. Natural accounting will be a very useful tool we can use to demonstrate the benefits of the nature-based solutions we proposed compared with other solutions such as engineering schemes.
Read more about our 25-year environment plan
This initiative is part of our wider approach to governance and ESG which is set out in our corporate governance framework and was developed jointly with our purpose. It is also closely linked to our core purpose of providing tomorrow’s water supply solutions and long-term planning, in that is promotes a holistic assessment of investment in our water supply system. It is also one aspect of the implementation of our strategy set out in our strategic direction statement.
