Biodiversity

Biodiversity is an essential part of safeguarding our water resources and helping reduce the impacts of our operations.

Pebbles

Our Biodiversity Strategy 

Biodiversity is fundamental to allowing Yorkshire Water to provide our core service of delivering a natural resource to our customers and protecting that resource from our impacts.

Biodiversity is the variety of life - plants, animals, fungi or micro-organisms, as well as the communities they form and the habitats where they live. It’s essential for people, providing vital services like clean water, carbon storage, underpinning our health and wellbeing, and for the intrinsic value of iconic species like salmon or kingfishers.

Ecosystems with high biodiversity can more efficiently recycle water, oxygen and carbon and contain a thriving community of species. Enhancing biodiversity, for example by creating farmland buffer strips along watercourses, can protect our raw water resources and boost resilience to flooding.

Due to the size and scale of our operations, our construction programme and our landholdings, we’re in a position to cause large positive or negative impacts on biodiversity. This is a responsibility we take seriously. We endeavour to help encourage wildlife and plants across the region to thrive. We also have a responsibility to protect and enhance biodiversity to safeguard the ecosystems on which current and future generations will rely.

The below points are an indication of how vast and varied the Yorkshire landscape is and indeed the scale of our responsibilities:

  • Over 11,000 hectares of our land are designated as sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) covering around 40% of our estate.
  • We abstract from and discharge into a number of special areas of conservation, including the internationally important Humber Estuary Ramsar site.
  • Our operations cover the most northerly chalk streams in England, a unique and irreplaceable habitat. 
  • Over 1,100 km of statutory rights of way pass over our land and we have a duty to help promote people’s engagement with and enjoyment of biodiversity.
  • 462 species of national or international conservation importance are found in Yorkshire, with around 50% of species and habitats of principal importance in England being found on our land.

What are our key principles?

We will...

  • Work to achieve a net gain to biodiversity through our operations.
  • Focus on improving the ecological resilience of our rivers and catchments.
  • Give a strong voice to nature in our decision making. 
  • Help customers engage with their rivers and surrounding natural ecosystems.
  • Deliver our activity through working in partnership, continuing to collaborate with our external Biodiversity Advisory Group to shape our programmes. 
  • Prioritise delivering our investment through integrated catchment management, a systems-based approach recognising that wider and more holistic outcomes can be delivered through working with others to manage multiple objectives within a geographic area.
  • Through our Nature First commitment, make nature based solutions our default delivery option.
  • Be transparent with our data, either through our own websites or through collaboration with our regional local environmental records centres. 
  • Fully comply with our obligations under wildlife law. 
  • Use data to shape our decisions, building the lawton principles into how we plan our work, and targeting action at key habitats like wetlands and limestone grassland, identified by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust as being of high nature value. 

What's our track record?

In 2020-25, we have...

  • Restored over 900 ha of priority habitats like reedbeds and blanket bog.
  • Conserved and re-naturalised over 180 km of river.
  • Surveyed over 20,000 ha of our land, with its biodiversity type and condition mapped and data accessible on our website.
  • Helped facilitate over 700 public events focused on connecting people with nature, and worked with over 200 stakeholder organisations to facilitate around 44,000 conservation volunteer hours. 
  • Set up our own wetland plant breeding nursery to help bring back locally scarce and endangered wetland plants.
  • Helped establish a native crayfish breeding hatchery and set up the Yorkshire crayfish forum, bringing together partners to help prevent regional extinction of the white-clawed crayfish.
  • Funded 10 staff roles with eNGO partners, helping drive forwards interventions around species conservation, wetland restoration, invasive species management and river restoration.
  • Supervised three PhD students, and in addition, published three peer reviewed papers helping us make sure our work is evidenced based and learning shared.
  • Unlocked over £7m in external environmental funding against our own investment.

Read more about the work we've done so far

The year ahead

In 2025, we will:

  • Publish a Yorkshire Water environment strategy, with biodiversity and nature an integral part of this.
  • Update this strategy to align with the environment strategy.
  • Review lessons arising from the independent evaluation of our 2020-2025 biodiversity programme and agree our 2025-2030 plan of action for biodiversity, and start delivery across the programme
  • Roll out our Nature First initiative to deliver nature based solutions across our capital programme.
  • Begin delivery and reporting under the new 2025-2030 Ofwat biodiversity performance commitment.
  • Continue to work with partners to tackle biodiversity loss and attempt to stop regional species extinctions.
  • Continue to work with our external Biodiversity Advisory Group and maintain a transparent approach to our programme and data via regular updates on our public website.
  • Make compliance with wildlife law and our strategic policies, an integral part how we work with our 2025-2030 construction partners and how we operate as a company.

Our approach

Our approach is focused on seven key areas:

  1. Building on our AMP7 programme, investing in priority habitat creation, restoration and conservation. We need biodiverse river catchments to help us deliver our operations.
  2. Investing in species conservation and re-establishment. We have a duty to ensure we mitigate our impacts on endangered species, and use our land and assets to help with their conservation.
  3. Investing in river restoration. With changing climates and growing populations, we need strong and healthy rivers to withstand low frequency, high magnitude events such as droughts.
  4. SSSI management. As owners of large areas of blanket bog, we have a duty to ensure we work with Natural England and other partners to rewet and restore this irreplaceable habitat. 
  5. Improving biosecurity and managing invasive non-native species, to prevent deterioration of rivers and landscapes across the county.
  6. Moving to a Nature First approach to promote nature based solutions over pouring concrete, when upgrading sites and assets 
  7. Through our integrated catchment management approach, embedding biodiversity in our approach when working alongside farmers to improve water quality on and off our land. 

£5 million

investment in habitat conservation

£2.2 million

investment in species conservation

£4.7 million

investment in river restoration

 

Beyond this, Yorkshire Water is committing to:

 

£7 million

investment through the Great Yorkshire Rivers Partnership, working with partners to remove barriers to fish passage across Yorkshire by 2042

200 biodiversity units

established above and beyond any required for their construction programme

£6.5 million

investment in moorland Site of Special Scientific Interest restoration

£5 million

invested in non-native species management and biosecurity improvements 

Nature First commitment

Considering nature-based solutions first when delivering Yorkshire Water's £2 billion investment programme 

Our decision making process hierarchy

  1. Using natural solutions to strengthen the resilience of Yorkshire’s rivers and catchments, and improving the baseline
  2. Designing out harm when developing a plan or a project
  3. Minimising any unavoidable impacts
  4. Mitigating against impacts and providing compensation where needed

 

How will we achieve this?

  • By ensuring biodiversity is part of everyday business decision- making and embedded within our strategic partnerships.
  • By continuing to play our part in forming strong regional partnerships to restore biodiversity across Yorkshire, and prioritise advice provided by our external Biodiversity Advisory Group.
  • By ensuring our decision-making is grounded in data and follows the science.
  • By being transparent in how and why we make our decisions, sharing monitoring data as widely as possible through our website and through local environmental record centres.

What will we achieve?

 

Wilder Rivers

Building on the work of the CaBA Chalk Stream Partnership, we will protect and restore over 15km of chalk streams across Yorkshire by 2030. 

By 2030, we will re-wiggle rivers and restore floodplain connectivity across over 100km of our catchments. 

Through the Great Yorkshire Rivers Partnership, we will open up 500km of Yorkshire’s rivers for migratory fish by 2042.

Working with the Yorkshire Invasive Species Forum and others, we will improve regional biosecurity and manage invasive species at a catchment scale.

 

Biodiverse Catchments

By 2030, we will create, restore and enhance wetland habitat across over 200 ha of our catchments. 

Working with Natural England and other partners, we will continue to re-wet and restore our upland SSSI sites with a target of moving at least 80% to favourable status. 

We will integrate biodiversity within our approach to land management, directly at our local wildlife sites, and indirectly through the farmers and landowner with whom we work, generating at least 200 Ofwat biodiversity units by 2030.

We will play our part in halting species extinction, in particular but not limited to, by 2030, working with Partners to deliver projects focused on white-clawed crayfish, tansy beetle, water vole, swifts and freshwater pearl mussel, as well as projects targeted at endangered wetland plants and a variety of bat species. 

Risk and opportunity

 

Key risk

Working with our regional Rivers and Wildlife Trusts, we have co-created a plan to play our part in restoring regional biodiversity. However, nature is complex and we will have to respond to increasing environmental pressures such as climate change, and one-off shocks such as wildfires or newly arrived invasive species. By working collaboratively with others we have mitigated this through welcoming input from external experts, but we will have to manage the programme in an adaptive way to make sure we can achieve positive outcomes for biodiversity.

Ofwat have introduced a common performance commitment on biodiversity, measuring habitat focused biodiversity outcomes. Through consultation with our regional Rivers and Wildlife Trusts, we are committed to maintaining our investment in outcomes such as species conservation or river restoration that may not appear to produce a benefit for biodiversity under the commitment. We are also committed to other investment such as our moorland SSSI programme, where recovery of degraded habitats may take many decades, and recognise this may not result in a benefit measurable within five years by the commitment. 

 

Key opportunity

We have significant direct biodiversity investment within our 2025-2030 plan (£34m) as well as our Nature First commitment.  Thanks to ongoing work from the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and others, we have the most data we have ever had on which to base our investment to maximise outcomes for nature. Aided by the establishment of the four regional local nature recovery strategies, this is a huge opportunity to work with partners to deliver positive action for biodiversity.

Working with others

Take a look at how we are working with partners to benefit biodiversity across Yorkshire.