Strong, balanced ecosystems are integral to long-term sustainability, and therefore to our business. We are committed to promote awareness, conservation and restoration of biodiversity in our area of operation.
To support the biodiversity in the area of our operation, we ensure that every new process is assessed for its likely environmental and biodiversity related impact. It is important that any change in production or other operations does not adversely impact air or water quality, or result in habitat loss. We have successfully planted more than 10,000 trees per year for last 3 consecutive years. We also have conducted a detailed biodiversity study to understand nature biodiversity aspects within the area of operation.
We are creating a biodiversity park in our premises and undertaking species identification studies as part of our restoration effort. With the objective to enhance carbon sequestration, we subscribe to the Mahindra Hariyali project - Mahindra group's national environmental goal of planting 1 million trees to increase forest cover. - and are keen to scale up the impact of tree plantation guided by the NAPCC guideline for Green India and BNHS. We did a successful project with US AID, IORA (under the US Government program of Forest Plus) wherein we completed growing 50,000 saplings in a controlled manner within our premises and handed over to Madhya Pradesh government after attaining 1.5 feet height for further plantation.
In an effort to extend the benefits of our Environmental Life Cycle Impact Assessment and have an integrated view of our sustainability, we engaged with Trucost for our Natural Capital Valuation in 2014 where we evaluated our products at the Khopoli site. Putting a monetary value to environmental impacts such as pollution, dependency on water use, natural resource consumption, and applying Natural Capital Valuation to our product Life Cycle Assessment data will help drive our sustainability product decision making in the longer run.
