Preserving biodiversity with adaptive actions

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Taking the lead to safeguard biodiversity in forests

Biodiversity is the variability of life on genetic, species, and habitat levels. It is fundamental to the planet and people, maintaining natural balance and providing functioning ecosystems that supply oxygen, clean air, water, and food. Globally, biodiversity has been decreasing for decades, and more actions are needed to reverse this development. As a renewable materials company and one of the largest private forest owners in the world, we have the responsibility to safeguard biodiversity in all our operations.

Our renewable materials grow in forests that act as a carbon sink and help to mitigate climate change, but by enhancing biodiversity we can likewise ensure that nature is also able to adapt to the changing climate. Forests with abundant species are more resistant to various disturbances, such as storms or pests, for instance. Therefore, we need biodiversity to keep our forests healthy and thus be able to substitute fossil-based materials with renewable ones, but more importantly, it is crucial for making sure our planet’s nature values carry on for future generations.

Committed to a net positive impact on biodiversity

At Stora Enso, we have been working actively with biodiversity measures for decades, but we need to do even more, and we have stepped up our ambitions in 2021. We are committed to a net positive impact on biodiversity within and beyond our own forests and plantations by 2050 – through active biodiversity management.

Biodiversity Leadership Programme guides our work

Stora Enso’s Biodiversity Leadership Programme forms the core of our biodiversity ambition: it combines our biodiversity actions, research collaborations, and cross-organizational work under one umbrella to ensure we drive biodiversity in an integrated way.

The programme takes a science-based, data-driven, and adaptive approach to enhancing biodiversity. We want to find and innovate biodiversity solutions that work in practice. This means that when we choose and implement actions, it’s integral that we follow up with data ana analytics to monitor our performance and adapt our actions accordingly.

The Biodiversity Leadership Programme is put into action when we manage our own forests in Sweden and those of other forest owners in Finland, the Baltics, and Sweden, offering biodiversity services and support. These targeted action programmes go beyond legislation and certification requirements.

Read more about our biodiversity management in forests

We manage biodiversity  on landscape, habitat, and species levels

Biodiversity Leadership Programme is built on four streams

Biodiversity actions

Biodiversity actions

Data, modelling, and analytics

Data, modelling, and analytics

Global advocacy and alignment

Global advocacy and alignment

Value innovation

Value innovation

Monitoring biodiversity with two sets of selected indicators 

Our biodiversity action programmes are based on adaptive biodiversity management, which means that we measure our performance and adapt our actions to benefit biodiversity according to the needs of each environment. Our science-based indicators monitor both the state of forest biodiversity as well as the impacts of our forestry operations in order to minimize our impact on nature and biodiversity.

1. Impact indicators measure the quality of forestry operations annually

Impact indicators
We have six biodiversity impact indicators to measure the quality of harvesting operations in our own forests in Sweden as well as private forest owners’ forests in Finland, Sweden, and the Baltics. Biodiversity is slow to develop, but by measuring our operations we can get insight into our operational performance and development areas throughout the year.
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2. State indicators measure the long-term conditions for biodiversity

state indicators
In our own forest in Sweden, we can take actions to manage and develop biodiversity as well as test different methods to promote nature values. The results of these actions are slow to develop, and we have developed a separate set of indicators to monitor the state of biodiversity and forests’ structural variation in our own forests in the long term.
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