Embedding Nature into Our Strategy: SAP Landscapes

It has been a pleasure to work with SAP Landscapes and the 20+ other businesses engaged in our Nature Strategy Accelerator Programme, applying the Business For Nature It’s Now For Nature Accelerator in the Irish context. Their leadership and commitment to embedding nature into their business strategy demonstrates how to build resilience while delivering positive outcomes for biodiversity.

As they progress through the Evolution Track stage of the programme, ESG lead Janice Leonard writes about SAP Landscapes’ journey in a new blog on the Business For Nature site, showing what’s possible when nature becomes part of your organisation’s business decision-making…

“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 organisations 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 realised 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.

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…”