SAP Landscapes is a landscape construction and maintenance company based outside Dublin which employs around 330 people. Here, Janice Leonard, the company’s ESG lead, explains how they are growing the importance of nature and biodiversity within landscape management.
From creating space for wildlife, to encouraging pollinators and carefully managing the natural resources we use, bringing nature into our work is something we have been doing for several years.
As well as our landscape creation work, we manage businesses’ grounds, and as more organizations are embedding nature into their business models, there’s been a groundswell of interest in customers asking us how they can improve biodiversity on their sites, rather than simply make them look functional and tidy.
We work with landscape architects and developers and are increasingly seeing nature embedded in new developments, from pre-construction and landscape delivery to ongoing care and maintenance, creating more schemes that promote nature and biodiversity in the built environment.
In many ways it’s a natural progression for us because a lot of the work we do is already designed to have a positive impact for people and nature. This includes installing green infrastructure such as Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS), an environmentally friendly way of managing rainwater, as well as urban greening and other nature-based solutions.
But when we looked into turning this way of working into a formal nature strategy, we realized we needed to take a broader approach. It’s more than just making operational changes at a site-level and is something that needs run across the whole business.
We knew we had a lot to learn and that’s where Business for Biodiversity’s Ireland’s It’s Now for Nature Accelerator came in.
Understanding our impacts
One of the first steps was building a business case for nature and embedding it at the heart of the company, supported by a governance structure that brought strategic thinking about nature into the boardroom.
The Accelerator helped us to carry out an in-house materiality exercise, involving workshops with our senior management team, that ranked the topics where we interacted with nature. We also surveyed our stakeholders to find out what their nature priorities were.
As a business that works closely with nature, we’ve always been aware of our impacts, whether it’s the emissions from our vehicles or the resources we use such as timber and aggregates.
But working with the ACT-D Framework (Assess, Commit, Transform and Disclose), laid out in the Nature Strategy Handbook, gave the whole process a new structure and helped us develop a nature ambition statement for the company that openly acknowledges our impacts.
As part of this process, we carried out a deep analysis of our value chain to better understand the type of materials we use, and what to focus on.
We have now highlighted five key dependencies and impacts around nature and biodiversity: material resources, chemical use, carbon transition, waste and the circular economy and invasive species management. For carbon, we have an active program and have transitioned much of our fleet and equipment to use the biofuel Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) as well as increasing our use of electric vehicles.
I think clients, as well as the general public, are becoming more aware of these potential impacts and are asking questions and expecting transparency.
We are putting in place action plans to address these five areas, introducing methods to monitor and measure progress, and ultimately disclose on them.
Making everything more relatable has also made communicating ideas to colleagues and clients easier. The structure of the handbook helped give us clear goals, endpoints and outcomes, so that people know we’re working to a set timeline and understand the need for objectives and KPIs.
Because of our size, we don’t have to comply with regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), so any reporting we do is voluntary. But the whole process is making the business more resilient and competitive.
Support network
The Accelerator brought together a wide range of different businesses as part of an open and collaborative process, where people felt free to speak and share their thoughts. You soon realize you’re not alone, and you all share many of the same concerns and challenges. In this sense, the Accelerator creates a group where people can share ideas and learn from each other.
There were plenty of larger organizations in the workshops, from state-run businesses to financial institutions and construction companies, and while many of these are great role models, I think smaller businesses are equally important. SMEs make up such a large percentage of businesses across Europe, they’re the engines of the economy.
Even on a smaller scale, you still have impacts which need to be managed. And if that’s on a local level, all the better, because you’re likely to be employing local people, and if they, along with your neighbours and your clients, can see you’re conscious of your impacts and prepared to do something about them, then that’s great for the company’s reputation.
Ultimately, what we have discovered is that a nature strategy is about making your business resilient. But it’s also about making sure your business operates in a way where you’re benefiting nature. It’s about operating ethically and responsibly within planetary boundaries, which is why we’re proud to consider nature to be a stakeholder.
To find out more about the current series of Accelerators, visit: https://nowfornature.org/accelerators/