Biodiversity Challenge
BRL Ingénierie has been combating the erosion of biodiversity for many years. But is it possible to have a positive impact on biodiversity in all the projects carried out by this engineering firm? This is the question we wanted to answer by launching the Biodiversity Challenge within BRL Ingénierie.
What did it involve? We put out an internal call for applications to select the projects/contracts we were working on, to see what we could do to improve their impact on biodiversity. Of the nearly 450 annual projects under consideration, we selected 3 to be submitted to 7 experts with very different business skills, ranging from infrastructure to irrigation and regional development.
What was the outcome? The discussions led by this working group showed that a comprehensive biodiversity action could only be understood by taking into account a large number of factors, such as the client's mode of governance, financing constraints linked to the donor, knowledge of the ecosystem under study, etc...
What did we conclude? By taking into account all the components of each project, we realized that the modes of action could differ, but that there was always something to offer our customers! But above all, we became aware of the power and relevance of cross-functional work, and the richness of collective intelligence.
Has there been any follow-up?
- We created the Biodiversity Toolbox to provide BRL Ingénierie employees with the resources they need, whatever the characteristics of their project. This enables us to be a source of ideas for our customers and, little by little, to ensure that biodiversity is taken into account in all the projects in which we are involved...and beyond, we hope!
- We have also included questions on biodiversity protection in all our business start-up reviews.
- On a daily basis, we encourage our teams to cross-fertilize their expertise to achieve the systemic vision associated with a given problem.
Our challenge enabled us to launch a company-wide awareness campaign. The approach is now being pursued by involving our customers: whatever the type of project, we need to ask ourselves the question of biodiversity!
