Our business model is to develop, construct, operate, and own renewable assets, and we are committed to doing this in an environmentally and socially sustainable way. However, we recognise that expanding our operations also implies a greater pressure on natural ecosystems. Therefore, protecting and restoring these ecosystems must be part of the solution, and we remain fully committed to effectively manage our impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems. Biodiversity management is an integral part of our business model and decision-making processes throughout the full life cycle of our projects. This ranges from early-stage site selection and planning, over project design, construction, operations, and eventually to decommissioning.

We have identified material negative impacts in our upstream value chain. These impacts are primarily direct impact drivers of biodiversity loss due to extraction of natural resources and mining activities. Furthermore, mining also has negative impacts on the extent and condition of ecosystems and thus impacts species diversity. As mentioned previously, we used the Global Biodiversity Score tool to obtain an overview of biodiversity- and ecosystems-related impacts in our upstream value chain, using global average data for our industry. We are dependent on mining of metals and minerals to expand the capacity of renewable energy assets, just as our peers in the industry. However, we acknowledge the trade-offs of mining in the value chain, which we actively work towards managing. As mentioned before, we are actively engaging with our tier 1 suppliers on their impacts on biodiversity, and we also continuously work towards gathering location-specific data on our upstream value chain.