Biodiversity net gain for water and energy utilities at scale

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Welcome to the AiDASH Evolve 2024 podcast. AiDASH makes critical infrastructure industries climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI. Evolve 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana was our inaugural event. We gathered industry leaders, innovators and visionaries to explore how cutting edge technology and satellites and AI is safeguarding critical infrastructure and fostering biodiversity to ensure a sustainable future amidst climate change challenges. In this podcast series, we are recapping the entire event, every speaker and session. You can find it all on our content hub at ai-dot-com-slash-evolve2024 or check the show notes for all pertinent links. This episode delves into biodiversity net gain, or BNG. Biodiversity net gain is an approach to development and or land management that aims to leave the natural environment in a measurably better state than it was beforehand. Last year, the UK enacted BNG rules as part of its Environment Act 2021 legislation. AiDASH Vice President of EMEA, Shashin Mishra, also moderated this discussion, which focused on how utilities balance the needs of critical infrastructure with sustainable environmental stewardship. They examined the challenges and opportunities of embedding biodiversity into utility operations, including regulatory compliance, partnerships with landowners, and the use of technology to monitor and enhance natural capital. The panelists included Jack Lomas, Emerging Technology Lead, Capital Design and Delivery for Severn Trent, Carolyn Cadman, Director of Natural Resources for Southwest Water, and Kathleen Fillier, Environmental Analyst for Newfoundland Power. They talked about how utilities can build success by breaking technology and information silos and fostering digital maturity. They talked about how balancing biodiversity goals with operational goals is a must. Key approaches include aligning timelines and governance, leveraging price reviews, and tracking and communicating impacts to stakeholders. And they discussed how natural capital and sustainability initiatives enhance public trust and engagement. Once again, here's Shashin.

**Shashin Mishra** (2:20)
In the previous session, we talked about achieving gain at a scale, and the challenges on doing that at a national level, at a state level, and how do you overcome that. In this session, we're going to talk to the panel to understand how some of the utilities that are using our technology are actually delivering the value on the land that they manage or own, and how they're interacting with their communities towards delivering that value back to the users. So before we start, I just want the guests to introduce. Carolyn.

**Carolyn Cadman** (2:54)
Hi, everyone. I'm Carolyn Cadman. I'm Director of Natural Resources at Southwest Water. We own about 6,000 hectares of land on 2,000 sites across the Southwest, and are actively looking to deliver a biodiversity net gain.

**Shashin Mishra** (3:09)
Kathleen.

**Kathleen Fillier** (3:10)
Hi, everyone. I'm Kathleen Fillier. I'm from Newfoundland Power in the Environment Department. So Newfoundland is located off the East Coast of Canada. We're an integrated utility, so we take care of transmission and distribution, as well as generation for the all-in-one portion of Newfoundland and Newark. We're an investor-owned and a publicly regulated utility, so that means that we have to justify our investments with our investors, as well as have them approved by the Public Utilities Board in our province for public best interest, as well as environmental stewardship.
Yeah, that's all I have power.

**Jack Lomas** (3:49)
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Jack Lomas, Emerging Technology Lead at Severn Trent. So Severn Trent, we provide water and wastewater services to about four and a half million homes around the Midlands within the UK. We are a FTSE 100 publicly listed company, and my role was to bring in new forms of digital transformation to help us deliver our circa £5 billion capital program faster and more efficient.

**Carolyn Cadman** (4:20)
Great.

**Shashin Mishra** (4:21)
So what's interesting about the panel is that you're all using the technology, but you're using it from slightly different points of views. So the first question I want to ask each one of you is how does measuring and improving biodiversity, natural capital, or just the condition of habitats, how is it crucial for utilities, and how does it contribute to the industry goals?

**Carolyn Cadman** (4:46)
Who are you asking first? Would you like me to go first? Okay. So the tool is really, really important to us because we need to be able to demonstrate to our investors, to our customers, and to our stakeholders and partners that we are actually delivering a measurable net gain, both in terms of when we're doing net gain that's triggered by the planning system but also when we're looking at the land that we manage and the enhancements that we've committed to deliver. So it gives us that ability to show a baseline and then to demonstrate an improvement in the measurability of that net gain that we're delivering, so it's really important.