Biodiversity, water and environment

Our industry has an important part to play in restoring our environment and bringing nature into communities. Our aim is to enhance the environments in which we work.

Biodiversity net gain

We continued to work with our customers to identify projects suitable for piloting our biodiversity net gain approach ahead of it becoming a statutory requirement as part of the Environment Act. Biodiversity net gain is an approach which aims to leave the natural environment in a measurably better state than beforehand.

We started our first biodiversity net gain pilot project at Dorset Country Hospital, where so far, the actions we’re taking will help us to deliver an 11.74% biodiversity net gain. Subsequently, a further 20 pilot projects are now underway. We continued to collect information on what is being done on our projects to improve our performance and inform our approach in the future.

Tree Planting

Now or Never sets out our ambition to plant 100,000 trees by 2030. This supports our customers and their local communities to tackle climate change and create green spaces for people and nature.

In 2021, we formed partnerships with a range of local charities and organisations and began planting. All our projects have arrangements in place to ensure the success and longevity of planting. Our novel approach sees us planting trees across the many communities in which we work, enabling us to deliver environmental and wellbeing benefits for local people and wildlife.

During 2021, it was not possible to plant our target of 10,000 trees due to limitations of the planting season. However, by forming these partnerships, we have secured nearly 90% of our target to be planted in 2022.

Water

Now or Never commits us to halving the volume of water we use on our projects by 2030, from a baseline of 2018. We measure and report the water used on our sites every month which helps us identify anomalies and opportunity for improvement.

We are not yet achieving the water reductions required to meet our target. This will be an area of focus for 2022 to 2025.

Water Use