Five festive wishes from the Green Christmas Fairy

I wield a green magic wand. I leave enchanted landscapes in my wake. A few trees here, a few ponds there. With a mere snap of my fingers, ideas sprout to life: I am the Green Christmas Fairy, don’t you know?

When I engage in conversations with colleagues about biodiversity, I sense this unspoken expectation. People anticipate a talk on sowing seeds, bees and scented flowers. “Gaelle, give us a list of five simple tips”, I hear a lot.

It’s clear that my colleagues across BAM share a burning desire to do right by our planet. But if it were that simple, we wouldn’t be in the nature crisis we are currently in. Nature loss has reached catastrophic levels, with one in six species at risk of extinction in the UK , and 1 in 5 in Ireland. We know our activities in the construction industry significantly impact the natural world and the continued loss of biodiversity is a huge threat to our planet, society and the economy.

But let me confess: I haven’t got five simple tips, five quick fixes, or a “one-size-fits-all super simple approach”. I don’t have a green magic wand. Sustainability is a complex labyrinth of interconnected systems and no systemic problem can be that simple to solve. Making a positive impact on nature demands meticulous unravelling, careful evaluation of our impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities, planning, implementing, monitoring, adjusting, optimising, resourcing, communicating, innovating… It’s a marathon, not a sprint; it demands dedicated and arduous effort, and yes, sustainability is hard work.

So, keeping in mind this complexity, I have five wishes which aren’t just for Christmas..:

1. Think about biodiversity right at the start. If we are to have any chance of a positive impact on nature, we must integrate sustainability right from the outset of a project.
2. Take time to understand the risks and opportunities of each project. Planting trees or installing bee hives willy-nilly is not the solution! We must take time to identify activities that will have the most positive impact on an individual project, and then develop targeted strategies to address them.
3. Integrate biodiversity into a bigger framework. Combine it with considerations such as decarbonisation, climate adaptation, social value, wellbeing and community engagement. When we do this, we have the biggest impact.
4. Evaluate our impact on a global scale. Examine not only the direct impacts of our activities during the construction phase but also the “embodied nature impacts” of our entire value chain. This includes upstream impacts on biodiversity due to the materials we procure and downstream impacts such as the water use of assets during operational life.
5. And for my final wish… In an era where children often identify more with social media notifications than the melodies of birds, how can we make a more sustainable world truly desirable? Over 60,000 delegates attended COP29. We heard from state leaders, industry leaders, youth activists, climate scientists, representatives of indigenous communities, journalists… But, in my mind, not enough from philosophers and poets… Could it be that it’s them we need the most right now?

Definitely not Green Christmas Fairies.