Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth and is important in many levels:
- Economically: biodiversity is responsible for the production of food, medicines and various forms of raw materials
- Ecologically: biodiversity is sanitizing functions that maintain the quality of water, air and soils and the contains of diseases
- Environmentally: biodiversity helps mitigate the effects of droughts and flooding
Veolia develops innovative and sustainable solutions to balance our ecosystems and protect our valuable resources. By 2020, Veolia aims to carry out biodiversity diagnosis and deploy an action plan in 100% of its sites with significant biodiversity potential.
With the Group’s commitment to preserve and restore biodiversity, Veolia India has entered into a partnership with International Union for Conservation of Nature early this year. Through this partnership, Veolia India has joined the “Leaders for Nature” (LfN), India, a business biodiversity network which engages multinationals to work towards greening the economy and mobilize companies to incorporate biodiversity considerations into their operation.
With the support of the IUCN team, we hosted our first workshop for all the managers of Veolia India on May 27, 2016 to understand biodiversity and some local biodiversity issues, discuss few nature based solutions and how to reduce the ecological footprint of our company through our processes.
Biodiversity is build out of three intertwined system:
- Ecosystem diversity
- Species diversity
- Genetic diversity
These three intertwined system together form the complex tangled structure of biodiversity that is vital for the survival of organisms on earth. We humans are also woven into this structure and if a few strands are lost our own well-being will be threatened. Hence, protecting biodiversity will help us create earth’s own safety net which will in future safeguard our survival.
With rapid urbanization across the world, undermining biodiversity can be very risky for the future.
Businesses are dependent on biodiversity in diverse ways and hence can play an important role in conserving biodiversity and ecosystems.
Some of the initiatives which businesses can undertake are:
- Being informed of their impacts and dependencies
- Being responsible against their ecological footprint
- Defining policy and action on ground
- Being open to share their resources for conservation
On october 03, 2016, with the support of IUCN we organized a biodiversity exposure visit for all our employees at Lodhi Garden, Delhi. The main objective of the visit was to explore the local biodiversity and to understand more about the Nature and Ecology. Guided by Dr. Hishmi Hussain, IUCN Commission member the employees walked around the garden examining various forms of biodiversity present in the garden and also sharing their experiences and knowledge. The exercise was indeed very interesting and knowledgeable for all our employees and has helped them to understand the subject and its impacts on our daily life. Through these workshops we would like to encourage our employees to explore solutions which are eco-friendly and will help the company to have less impact on the environment.
Reducing our environmental footprint and that of our customers and creating favorable conditions for biodiversity is a part of Veolia’s ambition to resource the world.
