Our operations are widely dependent on biodiversity

At UPM, wood sourcing is the area of operations with the greatest impact on biodiversity, solely due to its wide geographical coverage. Biodiversity is critical for maintaining healthy forests and helping them adapt to climate change. Understanding our impact on biodiversity is also crucial to our energy business, especially regarding our hydropower plants. We cannot either ignore the impacts of our operations on the local environment at our mill sites. Understanding and mitigating these impacts, and most importantly of all, developing indicators to measure them, are driving our actions to enhance biodiversity.

We have set several targets and key performance indicators covering the areas of biodiversity impacts 
relevant to UPM: forestry; stream waters; emissions from production sites; and the supply chain. These targets support UPM's policy objective of mitigating the impact of UPM's operations on biodiversity and even of enhancing biodiversity.

For enhancing biodiversity we have set two key performance indicators that we report on annually:

• Net-positive impact on forest biodiversity and developing a monitoring system covering our own forests in Finland (since 2018) and own land in Uruguay (since 2022)
• Obstacle-free streams, with the target of releasing or restoring 500 km of stream waters by 2030.

Holistic focus on managing biodiversity

Biodiversity is one of our environmental focus areas, and it is widely linked also to our management activities. In 2020, we linked the margin of a EUR 750 million revolving credit facility to the biodiversity enhancement in our forests in Finland. In 2022, we further strengthened this link by including biodiversity as a measure in the management remuneration and set it also as a KPI that is followed by the UPM Board of Directors.

When it comes to protecting, preserving and managing biodiversity in a sustainable manner, we believe in the power of collaboration. That is why we work closely with NGOs, researchers and government institutions to develop metrics for monitoring biodiversity, to gain a deeper understanding of rare and endangered species, and to promote conservation and sustainable management practices around the world.

Close collaboration with the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) 

In 2023-2024 we participated in the SBTN’s Initial Target Validation Pilot to test methods for setting targets to enhance biodiversity. The SBTN methodology provided new insights into data availability and tools. 

Read more: UPM case as part of SBTN Pilot

In March 2024, we published our first nature-related disclosures according to Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) as part of the Report of Board of Directors. It means that we have assessed and reported our nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities according to the TNFD recommendations.