Bespoke BNG Metric for a Forestry Portfolio

Challenge

Foresight Sustainable Forestry (FSF) aims to generate sustainable financial returns for its shareholders by investing in a diversified portfolio of UK forestry and afforestation assets.
It is committed to delivering meaningful impact throughout its value chain and operations, including biodiversity. It discovered that there was no widely accepted tool suitable for assessing biodiversity in UK upland forestry and afforestation projects. However, without baseline data and suitable biodiversity quantification methodologies it would not have been practical for Foresight to understand the impacts of its activities, such as afforestation, on biodiversity.

Solution

SLR worked with Foresight to develop an approach to biodiversity monitoring at a portfolio level. The forestry activities involve specific types of habitat change such as afforestation (new planting) and natural tree regeneration, and has different motivations and timescale from the property-development projects which, for example, the statutory BNG metric in England was produced. A slightly different approach to biodiversity quantification was therefore considered proportionate in order to give a realistic estimation of the likely biodiversity outcomes resulting from forestry management practices than could be achieved using existing metrics.
The new metric SLR developed in collaboration with Foresight is called HAB-CON Alpha. Unlike other available metrics, HAB-CON Alpha acknowledges the transitional habitat value that afforestation provides. It predicts outcomes over a 30-year time periods and can be extended in 30-year intervals e.g. to 60 years. This is a more realistic timeframe for woodland to reach good habitat condition, by using the expected outcome for the preceding 30 time period as the baseline for the next.

Impact

Following the design and testing of HAB-CON Alpha, SLR undertook BNG calculations for 27 of FSF’s forestry and afforestation sites. The data from this was used by FSF in their 2023 Sustainability and ESG report.
SLR will continue to work with Foresight to support them in refining their approach.