Nature positive pathways
Laying the foundations for Yarra Valley Water’s Nature Positive Plan
How Yarra Valley Water’s TNFD-aligned approach is driving a nature-positive future for generations to come.
The Challenge
Yarra Valley Water’s purpose is “to support the health and wellbeing of our customers and create a brighter future for communities and the natural environment”, recognising that the health of people and nature are deeply connected.
This purpose, launched in 2020, was a revision of its historical responsibility to protect public and environmental health. The challenge in meeting its purpose requires Yarra Valley Water to work to both minimise negative environmental impacts, while also restoring nature.
The concept of nature positive, a science-based, measurable goal to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 on a 2020 baseline and achieve full recovery by 2050, provides a framework to advance its current 2030 Strategy’s pillar of “Leading for Our Environmental Future”.
This pillar, which currently focuses on the outcomes of “beyond zero carbon”, “towards circular”, and “healthy ecosystems”, has enabled Yarra Valley Water to build a foundation of knowledge and projects from which it can then look at its nature positive pathways.
Yarra Valley Water engaged Edge to articulate potential nature positive pathways and opportunities for the organisation, and to understand its readiness to develop its first Nature Positive Plan.
In addition, this work helped lay the foundations for Yarra Valley Water to potentially conduct credible, robust nature-related reporting in future, in line with the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) Recommendations.
Key Deliverables
Board strategy day
Discovery Report
Opportunities assessment
Board strategy day
Discovery Report
Opportunities assessment
The Approach
To identify potential nature positive pathways for Yarra Valley Water, Edge conducted a comprehensive review of its relevant research and data.
In line with global best practice, this review was aligned to the TNFD’s LEAP approach. Edge then benchmarked Yarra Valley Water’s strategies and practices against local peers and global leaders, identifying strengths and areas for development.
Through stakeholder interviews, Edge gathered insights into Yarra Valley Water’s aspirations, challenges, and existing progress towards nature positive outcomes.
This culminated in a Discovery Report, which provided a review of Yarra Valley Water’s current and potential relationship with nature, alongside opportunities to further assess its nature-related issues.
At the time, Yarra Valley Water was exploring what intergenerational equity could mean for the organisation and the water sector more broadly.
To explore this, Edge conducted an opportunity assessment on the types of nature positive and intergenerational outcomes that Yarra Valley Water can directly control and influence, balancing the short-term needs of today with the longer-term needs of the future.
To support these strategic discussions, Edge engaged with Yarra Valley Water’s senior leadership, attending a strategic planning session to understand the intersections of nature positive and intergenerational equity, alongside Yarra Valley’s Water’s role in protecting and restoring nature for current and future generations.
The Result
As a result of this work, Yarra Valley Water has made strides towards understanding what nature positive opportunities and pathways there are for the organisation, and opportunities to support intergenerational equity outcomes.
This work has laid the foundations for Yarra Valley Water to finalise its TNFD LEAP assessment in the future and develop a Nature Positive Strategy and Plan.
The next steps for Yarra Valley Water will be building its understanding of its material dependencies and impacts and its nature-related risks and opportunities, while ensuring it has robust evidence to inform the organisation’s Nature Positive Strategy and Plan.
The Edge team stretched our thinking around how to bring nature, climate and intergenerational outcomes together in a future strategy, and represented the ‘voice of nature’ compellingly to our leadership team.
Alice Greenhill, Strategy and Sustainability Manager, Yarra Valley Water
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