JSW STEEL: Measuring and reporting biodiversity impacts: a journey towards “No Net Loss”

Context

JSW Steel, the flagship business of the diversified US$ 24 billion JSW Group, is a leading steel manufacturing company in India. Over the last three decades, JSW Steel evolved from a single manufacturing unit to become India’s premier integrated steel plant with a capacity of 34.7 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) in India and the USA (including 5 MTPA under commissioning in India) The company's next growth phase aims to expand its total capacity to 50 MTPA by fiscal year 2030-31.   

Steel production is resource-intensive, often requiring large land areas, raw materials (e.g. iron ore, coal, and limestone) and water. The interaction with biodiversity arises at several points throughout the plant's lifecycle, from construction to decommissioning.  

Biodiversity reporting with GRI 304: Biodiversity 2024 has been very useful to JSW Steel. GRI 304: Biodiversity 2024 greatly improved its understanding on the proximity of their operations to high biodiversity areas, impact materiality assessment, and stakeholder engagement. It helped shape their strategy to address impacts, risks and opportunities related to biodiversity, with a focus on reducing the risk by mitigating its impacts on local ecosystems and species    

Assessing site-specific impacts 

JSW Group has committed to achieving No Net Loss by 2030, taking actions to understand and address how to measure progress towards this target in a scientific and verifiable way. For this reason, it conducted a site-specific assessment in their biggest steel plant at Vijayanagar, India, covering two local ecosystem types: tropical thorn forests and freshwater. 

The Vijayanagar complex is the home of steel, cement, energy and paints businesses. The biodiversity No Net Loss assessment at the Vijayanagar aimed to determine periodic gains and losses of biodiversity in order to evaluate progress towards No Net Loss targets by calculating the negative and the positive biodiversity footprints for each ecosystem. This assessment also intended to make recommendations to improve the positive biodiversity footprint to either achieve No Net Loss or convert those into Net Gains of biodiversity over the coming years. The Biological Diversity Protocol’s double-entry bookkeeping method was used to calculate this.  

For this evaluation, four points of reference to time were taken into account: 

• The reference state of the ecosystems as a hypothetical starting point when the ecosystem conditions could be considered pristine.
• The phase of industrialization.
• The phase of loss of ecosystem structure and function.
• The ending point after 10 years of implementing measures to improve the state of ecological features and species accounts.

JSW’s approach to achieving their target of No Net Loss of biodiversity by 2030 follows the mitigation hierarchy to avoid, minimize and compensate negative impacts and to achieve net gains of biodiversity.  

Lessons learned

• JSW found out that large-scale afforestation activities carried out along with the Karnataka Forest Department in an area of 6,300 hectares resulted in a positive biodiversity footprint of 3,837 hectares so far. Their aim is to increase this positive footprint to 5,116 hectares within the next five years. 

• There was significant improvement in the freshwater ecosystem with positive gains over a 100-hectare area. JSW is aiming to increase these gains to a surface area of 167 hectares in the next 10 years. 
  
  
• This pilot assessment helped JSW to prioritize 2-3 KPIs on how to measure No Net Loss, as is, for example, the presence or removal of invasive alien species.
  
  
• It also helps the company prepare to report under GRI 101: Biodiversity 2024 and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework. 
  
  
• All its biodiversity-related interventions related to biodiversity are now tied to new GRI 101 standard which helps us to ensure JSW's alignment with best practices and stakeholder expectations.
  
  
• The pilot has helped JSW to understand how effectively the company applied mitigation hierarchy by quantifying impacts of various initiatives taken over a period of time.