For many years we’ve supported nature through our operations, our supply chain, and with our clients and people. The most recent addition has been our new edible garden on our Embankment Place roof terraces.
Setting the scene
The UK is in the bottom 10% of countries globally for protecting nature, with only half of its biodiversity intact. In fact, 40 million birds have disappeared from our skies since 1970 and a quarter of our remaining mammals are at risk of extinction.
Thriving natural ecosystems are not only crucial to reaching net zero but are also key to businesses, with over half the world's GDP highly or moderately dependent on nature. This is why we have included nature into our refreshed corporate sustainability strategy.
In addition to our work with our recently launched global Centre for Nature Positive Business, we’re working on other ways to play our part in solving the ecological crisis.
How we helped
In 2011 we created our first green roof space on our More London building, extending this to Embankment Place (EP) in London a few years later. Designed to support biodiversity in an urban environment, our sedum roof, habitat walls and planting areas have provided a sanctuary for a wide range of native invertebrates, solitary bees and birds.
In addition to our work to embed nature considerations into our supply chain, catering, and client work, we also wanted to help our people connect with nature.
Taking into account factors such as roof structure and wind exposure, we sought to create an edible garden where our people could learn about growing food in a way that is compatible with nature, while ensuring the habitats we’d already created weren’t disturbed or in competition. We planted an additional 55 varieties of plants to the roof space, specifically chosen to both support nature whilst providing produce for our chef team for event catering.
We opened the new edible garden space on the terraces of Embankment Place in May 2023, which is now open for all our people to use. Alongside this we’ve created a series of events as part of a new Nature Network programme, including tasting tours, bee safaris and gardening workshops.
“Rethinking how urban spaces are used is critical for supporting nature. We’re so pleased to be collaborating with PwC UK to help bring their roof space to life in a meaningful way for the chef team and their people.”
Jack Astbury
Director, Urban Organic
Making a difference
Our longstanding green roof programme has demonstrated the benefits of giving space to nature. Already, we have observed various bee species (e.g. hair footed flower bees and wool carder bees) as well as 13 bird species, including black redstarts, and over 50 different invertebrates.
So far, hundreds of our people have registered or taken part in our new Nature Network programme, which is supporting a series of hands-on workshops and virtual events with Urban Organic and Urban Bees, to upskill and inspire our people to continue enhancing biodiversity at home.
We’ll continue to embed support for nature across our UK operations and supply chain, while supporting clients to do the same.
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