In the run up to the Greater Manchester Green Summit, we’re previewing what to expect on the day and hearing from our headline sponsors and official partners.
In this blog, headline sponsor Electricity North West shines a light on the key role that enhancing nature has to play in their environment ambitions.
Click here to find out more about Green Summit 2024.
A key part of our strategy for enhancing the environment is to target biodiversity improvements on our estate; this is so important for connecting with nature, helping our customers and communities to understand the benefit of the interventions we are making for the environment but also connecting pollination corridors across Greater Manchester to enhance biodiversity.
Identifying suitable land for biodiversity enhancements
We don’t have access to a huge amount of land, but we do have pockets of land across Greater Manchester, usually around our substations, which we are utilising for biodiversity enhancement. We have identified 41 substations in Greater Manchester that are becoming critical havens for biodiversity. By targeting substations in and around the city we can create biodiversity hotspots that are important for wildlife and our communities.
We reviewed all our substations and parcels of land and soon realised that we had a unique opportunity to do something different, many of the sites benefitted from not being intensively managed or having herbicide applications for decades. This means that we can replicate on a smaller scale, traditional hay meadow management methods of managing grassland to further drive down soil nutrients, to allow greater biodiversity by encouraging the growth of a wider range of less competitive native grass and wildflower species.
We are using data combined with traditional techniques for management of grassland to drive our biodiversity work and are already seeing some examples of rare and unusual species growing next to our critical infrastructure. Importantly, we can capture and log these improvements so we can further support even more work in this area.
Increasing wildflower diversity in Droylsden
A good example of this project is our biodiversity site in Droylsden where we have seen a recent dramatic increase in wildflower diversity, following just one grass cutting cycle. Droylsden is a particularly important site within Greater Manchester as it acts as biodiversity ‘stepping stone’ in an otherwise highly constrained urban environment with limited greenspace. This means that the site acts as an urban biodiversity oasis by enhancing valuable habitat there for pollinating insects and helps them to better traverse the often fragmented remaining green areas of the cityscape.
We are looking forward to sharing progress on our biodiversity goals at the Green Summit and are keen to learn from others and identify further opportunities for collaboration in this important area.
For more information about our diversity plans come along to our stand and have a chat with us.
