UN Biodiversity Conference: COP 15

I have been fascinated and engrossed by nature from a very early age. My grandfather made me a member of the RSPB nearly 60 years ago, and only today I got a renewal from Butterfly Conservation, pointing out that I had been a member for 40 years when I thought I had only recently joined. The depressing thing is that I have seen in my lifetime at least one species of bird become globally extinct: the slender-billed curlew. It probably is extinct, although there may be relic populations breeding somewhere in its wintering grounds in Siberia. I was recently in Chile and saw a hummingbird there, a Chilean woodstar, which I think is down to its last couple of hundred individuals. It is all very gloomy and, looking through my old notebooks, it is not just internationally. Where I live in Middlesex, west London, 30 or 40 years ago I was seeing 20 or 30 turtle doves just by walking around the local gravel pits. They are now a complete rarity.

It is not only birds, of course. Throughout the world, every month, we are only just beginning to discover new species of, for example, insects. To be honest, some of them may become extinct just after they have been discovered. We know most of the reasons for this: climate change, habitat loss, human interference and indiscriminate use of pesticides.

I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will go into more detail on this but, at COP, some particular goals were raised, such as substantially increasing the area of natural ecosystems, ensuring that nature’s contribution to people is valued, maintained and enhanced, and sharing the monetary and non-monetary benefits of utilisation. I say this to all Members in the Room and further afield: we do not do enough publicity on the magnificent work of the Dasgupta review, which put out hard research into the economic benefits of biodiversity.

Another goal was to ensure that all parties, specifically developing countries, have adequate means to implement these aims. This includes financial resources, building capacity, technical and scientific co-operation, and access to technology. This is important because it is very easy to lecture countries, particularly developing ones, and say, “You must do more. You must protect this. You must protect that”—especially when we are not so good ourselves, which, to a large extent, we are not at the moment. However, we cannot expect them to be able to fund these things.

I want to put one idea forward. I am one of several vice-chairs of the all-party group for UK Aid Match, through which ODA money is matched by private money from institutions. It is already being done and could be increased to go towards biodiversity projects.

The other thing that should be mentioned is the requirement for transnational companies and financial institutions to monitor, assess and disclose the impact on biodiversity of their operations, supply chains and portfolios. I am still trying—I tried again in the financial services Bill—to get an amendment down about deforestation and making sure that UK money is not in some way aiding it.

The scale of the biodiversity crisis is huge. There is so much to do. However, I have to say that we are not exemplars in this country. I am delighted that I have 10 minutes to speak; I could probably go on for a lot longer but I am a stickler for these things. We talk about 30by30—it is a great idea—but are we doing enough? I see SSSIs being threatened. Are we doing enough to ensure that they are in a nature-ready state? Frankly, our national parks do not live up to the expectations of the ordinary member of the public. You think a national park is where you see herds of migrating wildebeest; in fact, our ones are pretty poor on biodiversity.

There are some good things. I am delighted about the measure on pesticides because insect loss is a huge problem. I am slightly surprised that the Government agreed to it because it is not necessarily what they want.

I have been extremely lucky in my life—from my grandfather making me an RSPB member all those years ago to my parents encouraging me. I have seen wildlife around the world and here in the UK. In those early days when I used to work on things that most Members in the Room at the moment are far too young to remember, such as Peter Scott’s “Look” programme—I remember David Attenborough from “Zoo Quest” rather than some of his later things; you can see how very far I go back on this subject—I could never have imagined, watching a black and white screen, that I was going to be lucky enough to visit some of those places and see some of those species, both here and abroad.

In the same way that I was lucky to see them, I have been extremely lucky to find myself in Parliament, first in the House of Commons and now here in your Lordships’ House. I made a vow to myself that the one thing I would concentrate on more than anything else, because wildlife, nature and conservation are my passions, was doing whatever I could to ensure that future generations can benefit from and enjoy the wonders of nature, just as I have.

Anyway, I welcome of course the Government’s signing of the global biodiversity framework at Montreal. I ask, however, what this may mean in practice. After all, by 2020 Governments across the world had failed to meet any of the targets they set themselves at Aichi in 2010, and Britain’s was among the Governments that did not do well. According to Wildlife and Countryside Link, only about 3.2% of land in Britain is well protected and managed in terms of biodiversity, and Natural England has found that half of Britain’s sites of special scientific interest are not in a good state. However, while in the latest Autumn Statement the Chancellor spoke about climate change, he said nothing about biodiversity.

There is too much wriggle room in the vague language of the GBF. For example, Target 7 on pollution commits signatories to

“reducing the overall risk … by at least half … and working towards eliminating plastics pollution.”

That does not put countries under any useful discipline. Will the 30by30 Kunming-Montreal commitment in Target 2 be the biodiversity counterpart of the 1.5 degrees Paris commitment? Fourteen of the 23 targets do not state a 2030 deadline. Moreover, the agreement at Montreal is not legally binding. Do the Government accept that honouring it is, however, morally binding and a prudential necessity?

At Montreal, the Government pledged “up to” £29 million in funding to support developing countries to deliver the 30by30 target on biodiversity, plus £5 million for British Overseas Territories, which are important in terms of biodiversity, plus a contribution to funding via the World Bank. They cannot be accused of extravagance. Will that £29 million go into the special trust fund? Will it be new money, or will it come out of the overseas aid budget or other existing budgets?

Target 4, on the need for “urgent management actions”, requires Governments to produce their national biodiversity action plans by 2024. What consultation will the Government undertake? There is complicated work to do. They will need to designate extensive new areas for protection and restoration, and these will have to be carefully delineated to include essential habitats. The Environment Act targets that Ms Coffey belatedly announced just in time for COP 15 included plans to protect only another 4% of habitats by 2042. This falls far short, in physical extension and timescale, of matching what is required.

Are the Government prepared to set aside their shibboleths? Instead of obsessing about abolishing EU law, will they focus on producing good new law? Target 15 is about regulation of businesses. Will the Government accept that biodiversity is an area where tough regulation of business is essential? Target 15 also concerns the provision by businesses of information to consumers, and Target 16 is about ensuring that people

“are encouraged and enabled to make sustainable … choices”.

Will the Government make sure that we are informed and, frankly, nanny all of us to do the right things?

Will the Government ensure that their own scientists are seriously committed to the GBF’s objectives? I ask this in view of intense concerns that Defra scientists have not properly examined the toxic effects on marine species, as well as on fishermen’s livelihoods, of dredging in the Tees. The biodiversity disaster that recently occurred in the North Sea off the coast of Teesside raises worries about the performance of the regulators, the Environment Agency and the Marine Management Organisation. Will the Government ensure that, in their haste to create freeports around the country—two more have just been announced—construction work does not have devastating effects on wildlife?

We will want to see that the Government are sturdy in resisting lobbying by vested interests, particularly the agricultural and food industries, against the necessary measures to preserve and restore biodiversity. Target 18 is to:

“Identify by 2025, and eliminate, phase out or reform incentives, including subsidies harmful for biodiversity”,

substantially reducing them by 2030. As things are, Governments across the world are providing $1.8 trillion—2% of global GDP—in subsidies that exacerbate biodiversity loss and climate change. Mr Gove expressed a clear willingness to tackle this problem; it is less clear that Ms Coffey is seriously committed to doing so. I hope that the Minister, whose personal commitment is not in doubt, can reassure us. Will our Government repurpose their agricultural support spending to prioritise the protection of biodiversity in the fight against climate change? The opportunity is there to create many new jobs in the protection and enhancement of nature, and in making a positive experience of nature more accessible to people whose well-being and health can benefit from it.

Do the Government accept that the GBF is an opportunity for businesses of many kinds to remodel themselves to stop damaging ecosystems? Will the Government support this process by redefining reporting requirements for businesses, regulating constructively and offering positive incentives? Will they encourage UK businesses to lead in this revolution?

Target 14 calls for the integration of biodiversity policies across all sectors. In their 2011 plan, the Government admitted that nature was “consistently undervalued in decision-making”. What procedures will the Government follow to ensure that the whole of Whitehall and its relevant agencies are involved in delivering GBF commitments? Will we see that reflected in impact assessments from all departments? How will the Government report to Parliament on their methodology and process?

We look to the Government for leadership on this massively important issue of biodiversity. I hope, in the wake of COP 15, that they will no longer be found wanting.

The crucial words here are “enable” and “managed”. That means action now and ongoing sustainable action into the future.

The implementation mechanism is a crucial part of the agreement. It is meant to underpin the framework with a clear agreed structure for how countries will make national plans and monitor, report and review their progress. We were therefore disappointed that the Government failed to produce new environmental targets on time last year. However, when they were published there were glaring omissions, including missing targets to protect and improve water quality and important natural sites.

Water companies in England have dumped sewage 772,000 times over the past two years, lasting for almost 6 million hours. Last summer, beaches across the south coast were closed because of sewage dumping, impacting both domestic holidaymakers and our international tourism business. National parks such as the Lake District have not been spared such spills. River pollution is now so bad that no river in England and Wales is free from pollution, but what have the Government done? They have pushed back targets to clean up the majority of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters by more than 30 years to 2063, yet the water companies continue to pay their managers massive bonuses for this failure. What is really needed is massive investment in infrastructure to separate rainwater from sewage water, and to improve treatment facilities and water use efficiency measures.

To achieve the clean water objective, we on these Benches would halt sewage discharges by mandating major sewage infrastructure upgrades as well as reducing other river pollution by reforming the planning system to ensure that decisions are compatible with nature recovery and climate change mitigation, while designating more areas for wildlife. Along with many others, we believe that tackling the nature crisis must go hand in hand with tackling the climate emergency, but, while we support investing in new technologies, we understand that a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem offers us the surest means of storing carbon and reducing emissions. That means that, as well as investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, there must be large-scale investment in restoration of peatlands, heathland, native woodlands, salt marshes, wetlands and coastal waters, helping to absorb carbon, protect against floods, improve water quality and protect habitats. Of course, it also means tree planting. The second report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, on nature-based solutions to net zero, published on 27 January 2022—an inquiry on which I had the honour to serve—made numerous recommendations about this.

Our farmers can be key allies in enhancing nature and tackling the climate emergency, and target 10 of the COP 15 agreement covered agro-ecological approaches. As the Select Committee emphasised in the report, a shift to sustainable agriculture will be key to addressing climate change, ensuring a healthy and secure food system and a restored natural environment, as well as bringing economic benefits.

It is vital that the new farm payment system gives farmers confidence to predict the future profitability of their businesses while ensuring they can continue producing good homegrown food for our tables. I hear that, under the new regime, the Government now plan changes to the ELMS farm payment system, which has already been announced and under which farmers have been planning their businesses for at least two years. Some of them are now withdrawing their co-operation with sustainable farming initiatives because of uncertainty. How does this help? Can the Minister say how the Government’s new environmental land management schemes will encourage farmers to co-operate on achieving their objectives under COP 15?

The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was game changing in the protection of our important habitats, protecting sites of special scientific interest, which became known as SSSIs. I well recall this important legislation and noted that one of the earliest sites to be designated was the sandhills where I played as a child on my summer holidays. While the network of SSSIs is crucial to the protection of biodiversity, it is only a representative sample of priority habitats, and many existing sites are not in a good state. Indeed, too many are regarded as being in a poor state and therefore not protecting biodiversity very well. It is therefore essential, if we are to achieve our 2030 target, that we both expand the area of priority habitats protected under the SSSI legislation and improve the management of existing sites. As with much other legislation, it is all very well creating a new law, but its success lies in both initial implementation and sustained monitoring and management to ensure that the original objective is achieved for posterity. It has been proposed recently that in order to achieve the COP 15 objective we need to create 100,000 hectares of new SSSIs by 2030. The Government have not accepted this target, which is a pity, because it would create green jobs as well as protecting nature and helping to mitigate climate change. However, only 3,000 hectares of new SSSIs are created every year. At this rate, we would not achieve the 100,000 hectares until 2056. Will the Minister say whether the Government plan to accept the proposed target and what measures will be put in place to achieve it?

I mentioned earlier that the word “managed” was crucial in the COP 15 agreement. What I had in mind was the state of management of many of our SSSIs. The Environment Act 2021 is an opportunity to set in legislation ambitious and indeed essential targets to bring the management of SSSIs up to scratch. Nature NGOs have proposed a target of 75% of sites being restored to a favourable condition by 2042, with five-yearly interim targets to track progress. If we create a lot of new SSSIs and then allow them to go to wrack and ruin, we are wasting both the time and the cost of their original creation. Will the Minister therefore accept this target for restoration and renewal of existing sites?

The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, currently going through Parliament, presents a major threat to other measures already in place to protect nature. I hope that the Minister can tell us that something will be done about that.

These were all dropped afterwards but it does show that there are serious tensions in a conference such as this. Carbon Brief also said that there were tensions between the developed and developing countries regarding developed countries wanting to increase ambitions while developing countries needed assurances about sufficient resources. The noble Lord, Lord Randall, talked about money and resources to deliver. The Minister has experience in this, so it would be very helpful to understand better those tensions and whether they are any kind of threat to delivering on decision-making as we go forward, and to understand how we manage those competing interests between developing and developed countries.

Secondly, concerns were raised about the impact of the GBF on indigenous people’s rights. Target 3, the 30 by 30 deal, states that 30% of terrestrial inland water, coastal and marine areas must be conserved and managed by 2030 through systems of protected areas and conservation measures that recognise indigenous and traditional territories where applicable. Some felt that this was simply not strong enough. Amnesty International, for example, said that it believed that this threatened the rights of indigenous peoples by failing properly to recognise their lands and territories as a separate category of conserved area. Amnesty International’s adviser on this said that it only partly acknowledged indigenous people’s outstanding contribution to conservation.

Certainly, when I was at COP 26, there was a very strong presence of indigenous peoples there. I was not at COP 15, but I would assume that the same was the case. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on this and on whether he believes that more needs to be done in this area. If so, how would we go about it? If not, how do we reassure indigenous peoples that we are taking their concerns seriously?

A final concern that I want to raise is that some people have talked about an apparent lack of accountability within the GBF. In particular, a senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers UK argued that the GBF lacked “quantifiable measures”. In other words, it is more difficult with the way that it is drafted at the moment to hold countries and Governments to account. Clearly, without that ability to hold countries to account, it is much more difficult to ensure that we deliver on these ambitions. Again, I would be interested to hear whether there is any further work to be done on how you hold countries to account and ensure that action is taken.

Despite having raised those concerns, I think it is very important to recognise the enormous amount of progress made at COP 15 and to praise the GBF for what it is attempting to do and what it wants to achieve. It is incredibly important that, despite the concerns that I have raised, we manage to reach that agreement.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development said that “significant efforts” were now required from all societies and Governments to achieve the framework’s goals and targets. That is true, but it is true only because there is such an ambition within it. It is really important to acknowledge that. I follow the Minister on Twitter and I am aware that he described the GBF as a “huge, historic moment”. He is absolutely right—it is just a matter of how we move forward with this.

The key question now from our perspective is: how do we ensure implementation? My noble friend mentioned what happened at Aichi. We need to ensure that we do not have another failed set of agreements. From a UK perspective, I know that, to try to do this, the Government have committed to publishing a plan setting out how they will implement the GBF. A Written Question was put down in the other place on biodiversity in December and, in response to that, the Minister for Natural Environment and Land Use, Trudy Harrison MP, said that the Government would publish the environmental improvement plan “in 2023”—this year. The Minister said that the plan would

“set out our ambitions and approach to nature recovery”

following COP 15.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made some really important points about the loss of biodiversity in the UK and talked about many of the challenges and concerns that have been raised over and over in your Lordships’ House and the other place. She made an important point about how we have failed to properly protect and manage our existing protected sites. That does not send out a very good message for how we are going to take this forward. She particularly talked about SSSIs, which have pretty much failed in recent years. How does our ambition to deliver on COP 15 sit with the missed support and targets that we have had in this country in recent years? She said, very importantly, that we need to lead more strongly in this area. We need to make more progress than we have recently. I know that the Minister is very committed to this, so I would be interested to hear what plans the Government have to genuinely turn this around? We have been disappointed by the Government’s lack of ambition, including in their own environmental targets, which we have only recently seen published.

I want to end by asking the Minister this: when will we see the environmental improvement plan? Will it be truly ambitious? There is cross-party support—the Government have our strong support to deliver on these ambitions. Please, give us something to support strongly.

I note that the Independent has a new editor. Notwithstanding his many qualities, he is a climate sceptic, which I find worrying. We seem to be seeing a disconnect between the media and what we know exists in people: desperate concern for the natural world and a yearning for more biodiversity and improved nature. It does not matter which constituency our colleagues in the other place represent—there is not a single constituency in this country where a majority do not want more nature. They want leadership from government.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked about the potential discrepancy we see between developed and developing countries; I will come on to that in a second. I have been there. I have engaged with countries—north, south, east, west, rich, poor, nature-rich, nature-depleted—for as long as I have been a Minister. This matter is somewhat overstated. The majority of the engagement I have had with countries has left me feeling more, not less, optimistic. Yes, one or two African countries were concerned about the manner in which the agreement was reached, but many more were wildly enthusiastic. That is not to say that they did not have concerns, but those concerns were addressed, which is why we ended up with this agreement.

Let me add this: shift your focus to the small island developing states in the Pacific or the Caribbean, for example. They, too, had concerns about finance and many of the issues that have been raised today, but there is no doubt that their voice was louder than anyone’s in calling for an ambitious agreement. They wanted ambition. These issues are existential for small island developing states. It is not really a north/south or developed/developing divide; there are divides but they are overplayed. Overwhelmingly, the world is moving rapidly into the right position on this issue.

In the early hours of 19 December, world leaders finally agreed an ambitious global framework for action to put nature on a road to recovery. It was that “Paris moment” for nature that we had been asking for. Of course, the job now is to honour it in full. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework gives us a clear mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by the end of this decade. It includes a highly ambitious package of 23 targets for 2030 and four goals for 2050. These include global commitments to end human-induced species extinctions and to protect 30% of our global land and 30% of our global ocean by 2030—by the way, if that is not a newspaper headline, what is? This is an extraordinary commitment; of course, we have to make it real, but it is huge. It will be delivered through a package of nature financing, including a new international fund and the expectation that $30 billion will flow into developing countries to protect biodiversity every year by 2030.

We also agreed to establish a new multilateral system to share the benefits from the use of stored genetic information from plants and animals. To ensure that countries deliver on their commitments, the international community, for the first time, agreed a package of scientific indicators to track and report progress.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, mentioned the critical issue of indigenous people in local communities, and she is absolutely right. This has been central to our approach in the UK. She knows from COP 26 that we created as many platforms as possible to amplify the voice of indigenous people. That was noted, recognised and appreciated by the groups representing indigenous people and by the people themselves. We have continued that work.

For example, the delivery and design of LEAF—the biggest public/private partnership to support forests around the world—writes indigenous people all the way through its text and criteria. That has been appreciated. We also help to co-ordinate the donor group to ensure that the money promised to indigenous groups is properly delivered. I talk very regularly to representatives of those organisations to ensure that they are happy with the direction of travel and that we are getting advice from people on the front line. Some 80% of the world’s forest biodiversity is in land controlled and lived in by indigenous people. That is not a coincidence; they are the most effective at protecting nature and they need to be supported. Even if it were not for the moral issues, and just for practical considerations, the cheapest way to save nature is to look after the people who are doing it.

I do not say this lightly or with hubris, but I place on the record my boundless thanks to our excellent negotiators, because COP 15 was a triumph for UK diplomacy and soft power as well, with outcomes at the upper end of what we expected. Our negotiators—I saw this myself—played a critical role in raising ambition and galvanising momentum. I do not believe that we would have secured anything like the ambition we did without their Herculean efforts.

Our team was central to securing consensus on the highly contentious issue of digital sequence information; our science leads developed the important framework of indicators for tracking progress; we led the High Ambition Coalition and the Global Ocean Alliance, which helped secure the 30by30 targets, with relentless engagement and campaigning across the board; we convened and I led the High Ambition ministerial group to try to improve cross-regional co-ordination and strengthen ambition; and we worked over many months, alongside Ecuador, Gabon and the Maldives, to develop the credible 10 Point Plan for Financing Biodiversity, which has now been endorsed by 40 countries from five continents and was an initiative that played a visible and measurable role in unblocking ambition in the run-up to the CBD.

I also announced the Joint Donor Statement on International Finance for Biodiversity and Nature, alongside my friend and colleague the European Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius and my French counterpart Minister Christophe Béchu. That included new commitments from donors for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of nature, and a significant increase in nature financing, which was crucial for securing a consensus on finance in the GBF.

The outcome of the CBD COP was the culmination of years of hard work. I believe we can be proud of the role played by the UK. In Glasgow, in 2021, we brought nature from the margins of global climate politics and put it at the heart of our response. We secured an unprecedented package of commitments on forests and land use. Forbes described it as

“a Paris moment for forests”.

WWF said:

“Nature truly arrived at COP26.”

The Tropical Forest Alliance wrote:

“we’ll look back and realise that this was the day when we finally turned the tide on deforestation”.

We took the momentum we created from COP 26, as well as the networks we needed to secure it, and used that to help drive ambition at COP 15. Our responsibility now is to turn those commitments into action.

That is why the UK has committed £3 billion of our international climate finance to climate solutions that protect, restore and help manage nature sustainably. I want to take up the point that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, made on extravagance. He cited a few examples of things we are spending money on in this regard, but implied that they were the totality of our commitment. They are not. The commitment is £3 billion, within which a lot of other new commitments are being made.

I would just say this. Who knows what will happen at the next general election, but part of this commitment will be delivered after the election. If we have a new Government then, it is absolutely crucial that this remains the cross-party issue that it very clearly is. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness opposite for the manner in which we always debate these issues. It is crucial that we keep that promise, because our commitments led other countries to make their commitments. If we break our pledge, they break theirs, and we will let a lot of poorer countries down all around the world.

At COP 15 we announced some specifics, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, mentioned: £29 million to support developing countries with their land protection commitments, helping to deliver 30by30; around £6 million for projects to study and restore nature across our overseas territories; £20 million in grants to protect healthy marine ecosystems and reduce overfishing; £17 million to the World Bank’s PROBLUE programme to support marine ecosystems; £7.2 million to a new nature positive economy programme, which will support Governments, central banks, businesses and financial institutions in developing countries to integrate the value of nature into their decision-making; and a nature facility to help integrate and safeguard nature in our own official development assistance with other countries. That is key because, as noble Lords will remember, we persuaded the G7 last year to make a commitment—which again was not reported but was huge, in my view—to ensure that all our ODA and our aid is aligned with nature and eventually nature positive. We will need these tools to deliver that promise as well.

Having worked so hard to secure these targets, and put finance in place to help achieve them, it is key that the UK also leads by example, a point made by all speakers. The Environment Act gives us all the tools we need to do so, including putting in place a new set of ambitious domestic targets on nature, air, water, waste, et cetera. Later this month, in our first statutory environmental improvement plan, Defra will set out the measures we will adopt to achieve them.

As has been said by I think all speakers, a key tool to deliver nature recovery is radical reform of farming subsidies in England. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made this point; I think my noble friend Lord Randall did as well. Over a seven-year transition period, we are phasing out area-based agricultural subsidies and shifting our support for farm subsidies to deliver environmental goals.

That matters hugely for us in the UK, but it has global implications too. We are told that the cost of turning the tide on nature destruction is around $500 billion a year. By coincidence, that is roughly what is spent by the top 50 food-producing countries on subsidising often highly destructive land use every year. If we can persuade them to shift their focus in the way we are here, a gigantic finance gap can be closed. That is yet another reason why this Government, and successive Governments, absolutely must not allow this programme of reform to be derailed. That is critical. No matter what pressure is felt from those entrenched vested interests, it must be resisted.

Finally, we know that the global challenge ahead is huge, and that no country will face it alone. That is why the UK is at the centre of efforts to bring coalitions together of donor countries, philanthropists, nature-rich countries and the private sector to try to help turn the tide for some of the world’s key natural systems on land and at sea. Over the course of this year I hope I will be able to talk more about some of those initiatives in the Congo basin, the Amazon rainforest, Indonesia, et cetera. This is an absolute priority for me and, I am thrilled to say, for the Foreign Office and Defra.

COP 15 has provided momentum and a framework within which nature can recover and thrive. The UK Government played a really important part in the international effort to build that framework. Now we are and will remain committed to playing our part in full in a decade of global action to secure the abundance, diversity and connectivity of life on earth, and, in doing so, building not only a better future but a viable, liveable future for generations to come.