Nature Positive Report Wsp

10 May 2024

It is our responsibility and also in our interest to ensure that the resources that are available to us today will be available for future generations. This includes striving for a Nature Positive Future, where we halt and reverse the loss of nature to put it on the path to recovery.

WSP is committed to achieving positive environmental change. At a global level, we started by re-affirming the importance of addressing nature loss through our Future Ready programme. In 2022, WSP released a Biodiversity Statement, which is a set of guiding principles aimed at enabling WSP to engage with our clients to protect, restore and enhance ecosystems. Our 2023 materiality assessment identified biodiversity and ecosystems as a material topic.

In 2023, WSP in the UK signed up to the Nature Positive Business Pledge – committing us to follow a framework that helps businesses to start acting in a Nature Positive way, followed by a regular ratcheting up of these ambitions.

In the first year of the Pledge, we have:

Conducted a materiality assessment to understand how the services we provide to our clients impact and depend on nature;
Undertook information sharing activities with colleagues;
Followed the Nature Positive Business Pledge Principles whilst working on the other elements of the Pledge; and
Published this report to share our progress and learnings.

The WSP Nature Positive Report explains how our projects impact and depend on nature, and how we have started to embed Nature Positive thinking into our business-as-usual. This has helped us to understand what opportunities we must start taking advantage of to achieve the next steps in our Nature Positive journey.

Our materiality assessment highlighted 10 key sub-sectors that make up the majority of WSP in the UK’s total revenue, and one sub-sector – Highways and Railtracks – that makes up almost half of this revenue.

We identified that our projects depend on nature primarily to regulate the local climate and to stabilise water and ground features.

Our projects also have the potential to significantly impact nature in a variety of ways, particularly by directly affecting areas of land, freshwater and ocean by removing existing stable habitats that species live in and creating barriers to movement. Our work could also impact nature by releasing emissions and pollutants into the wider environment, and the production of materials for construction can result in impacts up the supply chain.

In the coming year, we will:

Use our findings to target priority areas for upskilling and internal knowledge sharing;
Take the lessons learned by WSP in the UK during this process and build on them for WSP’s first global TNFD assessment in 2024; and
Expand our knowledge sharing activities with wider industry communities.