The Natural Environment and Climate Change

Our natural environment underpins everything we do: the habitats within JHE and the species of flora and fauna that inhabit them, our freshwater courses and bodies, soils, geology and weather form the JHE core.

• JHE is a vast natural capital asset with immense downstream provision of public goods including carbon sequestration. From mountain top to river bed, our diversity of habitat and wildlife represents extraordinary opportunity and brings with it significant stewardship responsibilities.
• JHE works to balance the industrial focus of Alvance and SIMEC, mitigating the wider environmental impact and investing in competent natural resource management and usage (including renewables) to meet our sustainability objectives.
• Water is a basic human requirement and JHE acts as a collector, purifier and reservoir; our catchment impacts from the west coast to the east coast.
• JHE is primarily a fragile upland environment. We will restore upland habitats including deep peatland, a crucial carbon sink, and heather moorland, rarer than rainforest; we will maintain and manage low-input grazing land, also an important carbon store, and carry out riparian and hill improvements including native tree planting.
• We will manage sustainably our game, deer and fish populations as vital components of our natural capital stocks.