‘Nobody understood what it meant for them’: Fortum’s revised approach to biodiversity

Tomas Qvickström tells REP the firm’s new plan allows different parts of the business to know what’s relevant to their work

Finnish energy producer Fortum has become one of the first companies in the world to publish a dedicated biodiversity transition plan.  

The document was published on Thursday, alongside revised biodiversity targets.  

Tomas Qvickström, Fortum’s vice president of corporate sustainability, says its first set of targets were “very overarching”. 

Set in 2023, they committed the company to ‘no net loss of biodiversity from its Scope 1 and 2 operations by 2030′. 

But, Qvickström admits, the concepts were too abstract to land properly with his colleagues elsewhere in the business. 

“When we previously talked about ‘no net loss’, nobody understood what it meant for them,” he tells Real Economy Progress. 

“You couldn’t relate to it.”  

With the new strategy, Fortum has “really broken it down, and each business can see which parts are relevant to them,” claims Qvickström, adding that the ambitions and scope remain the same, but it’s “more concrete and transparent on what it means in practice”. 

The update sees Fortum split its goal into three concrete targets.    

First, by 2030, it wants to have a net-positive impact on biodiversity from its own land use. 

Second, it wants to make sure the biomass it procures doesn’t contribute to any further negative impacts on biodiversity, compared to 2024.  

And third, by 2040, it wants to “increase the ecological value in river stretches where actions have the most ecological benefit”.  

Qvickström says the cost of mitigating Fortum’s different biodiversity impacts is one factor that influences how it will achieve its goals. 

Biodiversity + Climate 

The company also published the results of a biodiversity foot printing exercise, which found that more than 95% of its impact on species comes from its greenhouse gas emissions.  

Those impacts are already addressed by the company’s climate transition plan, but Qvickström says the two strategies must be considered alongside each other. 

“We want to exit coal, and of course, that has a positive impact on emissions and biodiversity,” he notes.  

“But when we then replace that coal with biomass and waste, it opens us up to new impacts on biodiversity, which we want to mitigate.” 

That’s not a hypothetical scenario for Fortum: last month, the firm decided to stop burning coal at a site in Poland, meaning its demand for biomass will increase.  

TNFD and SBTN 

The publication of Fortum’s biodiversity plan comes just a week after the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) published guidance on how to approach nature in corporate transition plans.  

But Qvickström says his firm didn’t think it was necessary to use external frameworks like those from TNFD or the Science Based Targets Network. 

“For me, the most important thing is that we know what we are doing,” he says. “And we have a concrete plan that we can show progress against.”

Fortum was named a winner in Real Economy Progress’s recent CSRD Awards 2025, in the biodiversity category.