Nature

3. The Orkney Skate Trust is a volunteer-led organisation set up to specifically monitor and record the number of skate around the Orkney isles.jpg

Protecting and restoring nature

We are privileged to operate in the unique natural environment of the north of Scotland and its islands, and this has motivated our ambition to protect biodiversity and restore nature. In our first Sustainability Strategy, we made a commitment to no net loss of biodiversity and to start delivering biodiversity net gain by 2025, leaving the natural environment in a better state than we found it. We have exceeded those targets, bringing forward our biodiversity net gain (BNG) target by two years, and embedding BNG in all our major projects.

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Alongside our commitment to nature restoration, we have also followed a mitigation hierarchy for irreplaceable habitats like ancient woodland and peatland, avoiding impacting such habitats wherever possible, and restoring these vital habitats across Scotland. Our compensatory planting program also replaces every tree we have to remove through our construction and maintenance activities, and we have built partnerships with local conservation and environmental groups such as the Orkney Skate Trust and Argyll Conservation Trust.

Over the rest of this decade, our approach to protecting and restoring nature will continue to grow from these strong roots. We will align our approach with global best practice and support global goals such as the Global Biodiversity Framework which aims for 30 per cent conservation of land, sea and inland waters and 30 per cent restoration of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

Our Priorities

Protect nature

We will continue to deliver excellent environmental management, and evolve our approach to minimising impacts on nature. We will assess the cumulative impacts of our activities on nature and take steps to minimise these through the materials and construction methods we use. We will continue to follow the mitigation hierarchy for irreplaceable habitat and deliver no net loss of woodland through compensatory planting.

In the coming years we will also develop nature reporting in line with global best practice and assess the natural capital of assets on land owned by SSEN Transmission.

Restore nature

Grounded in the success of our biodiversity net gain (BNG) approach, we will deliver BNG on all projects gaining consent. We will improve monitoring and maintenance approaches to ensure restoration projects are maintained and continue to undertake works in relation to contaminated land. We will also expand our restoration efforts beyond habitats to include location-specific initiatives including species protection and restoration projects.

In the marine environment, we will continue to lead on the development and adoption of marine biodiversity metrics and build partnerships to undertake restoration at scale. Finally, we will work in partnership with others across the energy and environment sectors to grow the nature workforce of the future.