Hello, everyone,
and welcome to the Oxford Martin School for this final of four conversations about the Dasgupta review on the economics of biodiversity.
I'm Cameron Hepburn, director of the Smith School and lead researcher on a few books about programmes.
And with me today, I'm really delighted to welcome Netflix, 70s professor of Biodiversity and co-founder of the Nature Based Solutions Initiative,
and to be a familiar face to many of you listening in and all of us who are involved in the Oxford Martin School.
Before we dive into discussion with Natalie, I just want to recap where we are in this series.
So the first one of the series was with Professor Sekoff the description of self.
It's pretty wide ranging, venturing into some fairly contested territory, including managing human population and the limits to growth.
And that was a hugely well attended event, triggering more questions than I've ever seen before, actually in one of these Oxford Martin School events.
And so we logged some of those questions. Feel free to ask them again today.
You never know. We might be able to get to them because we didn't answer all of them.
Then the second session was moving around a summary on the Secretary-General
of the UN and executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.
She was also an advisory board member of the Dasgupta Review, and we explored the post-2020 biodiversity framework.
Nature based solutions are going to come back to with with with vengeance,
or perhaps not anger with curiosity today and the intersection of the climate,
climate, biodiversity and the green recovery agenda, which will also touch on today.
And then the third conversation a couple of weeks ago with with was with Professor Sir Charles Godfrey,
who's the director of the Oxford Martin School and Professor Dame Henrietta Moore from UK social anthropologists.
Very interesting. It was a wide ranging conversation about indicators of prosperity, levelling up regional job creation, and frankly,
I was delighted to be listening for change rather rather than high school, though I love hosting too, and that brings me smoothly to Natalie.
And as all of us, and that's read The Dasgupta review, and I want to start with a kind of opener from someone who is deeply in the science here.
How? How good or how bad is the state of nature, do you think?
OK, thanks, Cameron. Thanks for the introduction. It's fantastic, it's an honour to be to be taking part in this series of conversations.
So the remarkable thing is is that we can now map humans influence on nature and the biodiversity it contains to an extraordinary degree of accuracy,
right to thanks to a growing network of Earth observation satellites, lidar our data, a new Bottom-Up sensors and crowdsourced data.
Very powerful computing, obviously, and increasingly efficient fast biodiversity sampling techniques such as DNA barcoding,
acoustic monitoring by monitoring and so forth.
You can go to amazing websites like Global Forest Watch and see what is happening to our forests almost in real time,
and data is pouring in on the state of the biosphere.
And on this basis,
what we are clearly observing is the erosion of the diversity of life from the level of the gene right up to the level of the ecosystem.
We're seeing steep declines right across the board in the abundance of plants
and animals and microbes across multiple chozick levels below the ground,
above the ground in our oceans and across all lands at the local level, regional level and global and global level.
So with that, erosion of the diversity of life isn't the same,
and there are lots of key headlines that have been that have emerged and that we've been seeing
as a result of the various sort of systematic reviews and mapping exercises and the reports,
the global synthesis reports using a number of them come out in the last few years that perhaps this
important one was the Inter Governmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Expense Report,
and some of these headlines are shocking. I think it's worth starting this conversation over with a bit of a recap of those.
Now, we know that humans have modified over 50 percent of land use colour and use around 40 percent of primary productivity.
Nurses don't just get to review highlighted this demand for primary productivity and far outstrip supply.
Natural ecosystems of decline by 47 percent over nine million hectares of tropical rainforest disappear every year,
23 percent loss of biotic integrity. 68 percent decline in the population sizes of all vertebrates between 1970 and 2016 and then want to see me.
One of the most chilling statistics is that we've lost over 80 percent of animal biomass in the past 100 years,
82 percent declines in our wild mammals on land and 80 percent decline in wild fish in the ocean.
So our ecosystems are basically empty.
And in fact, the fact that we're normalising that is is is a problem and something we might want to come back to in this conversation.
And then another the final sort of piece is if you think about vertebrates on
the on the planet and in 97 percent of vertebrates of people and livestock,
three percent of wild animals. So not surprisingly, we fail to meet any of the Aichi targets,
which were the 20 targets set by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010 or zero out of 20.
Yeah, yeah. We met regionally, but we haven't.
We haven't many of them.
And if you zoom in to the U.K. and we go through the statistics in the U.K., but it's assembling very, very bleak picture, everything in free fall,
pretty much everything the specialist, the important, the important species there in there in free fall,
despite all the increased investment in conservation over the last few decades.
So we can say with a high degree of certainty that the state of nature is in steep decline.
Yeah, great. I guess we'll put it this way.
It's wonderful that we have all of this great data and monitoring and tracking
so that we can say with confidence that we're absolutely destroying nature,
which is so good now. I mean, given that report card.
Is it fair to say that we're in a mass extinction event, I mean, the Dasgupta Review says we are in an extinction event.
Can you say bit more about that? How do you define these ideas? Yeah.
I mean, many believe that we're sort of between half a million and a million species at risk of extinction within a couple of coming decades.
We're in some sort of extinction event or even that we're seeing the beginning of a sixth mass extinction.
So to get technical briefly, you know,
to be formally defined as a mass extinction event you need to do is around 75 percent of existing species within a short geological time frame,
which is around two million year timeframe.
And so that would be comparable with what happened, say, 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs went extinct.
Now, so to put this in perspective, so far, we've lost about one percent of species since over the last few centuries,
and we're on course to lose around 25 percent of species within most groups of plants and animals that have been studied over the coming decades.
There were some way off of 75 percent market. Some some groups of organised organisms were well on our way since cycads as well,
and amphibians is another 41 percent of amphibian species are threatened with extinction.
But more and more, the more important thing isn't the absolute numbers of species that are going extinct, of course, as the.
And research shows that over the last few centuries,
that rate of extinction is much higher than what you'd expect from a natural and natural background rate.
Say something about, you know, somewhere between 100 and 1000 times faster than what you'd expect.
So we're losing things at a faster rate.
We're losing things tens to tens of thousands of times faster than the rare mass extinction events in Earth's history,
meaning we're not in a mass extinction event yet. But unless we change dramatically change, then we will be.
Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like if we've got another two million years to get there, we're well on our way in the course of a few years.
And I guess not surprising if we're we're wiping out forests that you said over nine million hectares.
My rough kind of schema is that Wales is about two million hectares.
So you're talking about a four and a half five whales worth of forests being wiped out every year.
I guess that's so surprising that the inhabitants those forests go to.
But let me let me just be a bit of a pain here from a bit of devil's advocate,
as I frequently read the comments on online newspapers about action on environmental issues and climate and biodiversity.
And I think this is actually important if you're interested in these issues as presumably those of you tuning in.
It's important to do this because there are a lot of people who will say, we can't afford this sort of stuff.
We can't afford to change our boilers on climate or we can't afford to eat differently to save some furry animal that I don't really know the name of.
And, you know, maybe a more sophisticated version of that argument is, well, does extinction really matter?
I mean, it's part of the process of evolution. We've had these other great extinctions.
We wipe out a few million species. A few more million species will come in a few more million years.
And maybe that's not so terrible. Yeah, no, it is a great question, and actually I am by training an evolutionary biologist,
so I'm sort of used to thinking in evolutionary time frames, and I recognise that extinction is a vital part of speciation and actually most species
are on the planet for between three and 11 million years and then they go extinct.
So an extinction is natural, not stop extinction. But there are two really important things to recognise about.
What's happening now is that the rates of extinction is too high for species loss to be matched by adaptation,
evolution, speciation and in fact, the rates of adaptation that you'd need.
It would need to be 10000 times higher to keep pace with the rate of environmental change.
And the second thing is that the types of species that are being lost are often those with big influences on the ecosystem,
health and functionality of the ecosystem. And to do this, I just want to just expand on those two points.
The first is that, you know, the rate of extinction rate reflects the rate of environmental changes very, very fast, as we know,
and some people say, well, why can't species just move and why can't they adapt and in fact to some species are moving on.
Some species are adapting. But many species can't move. They don't have anywhere to go.
They might not be able to move because they have no dispersal capacities or the other
species that they depend upon because we all interact with lots of species in a complex web.
Don't move as quickly, or at least not at the same rate.
And so, you know, you end up with a situation where you've got these mismatches and then you get extinction, you know?
And as I say, evolution isn't fast enough to keep up with the rate of change. And the and the second thing is, as I say, you know,
it's not the absolute number of species that we're losing is whether or not they've been lost locally.
So you can talk about global extinction.
And obviously, it's a tragedy that feels like a tragedy to lose the products a million years of evolution, but it's lost locally.
That's just significant. You know, you walk into a lot of forests in the tropics or a secondary forest and is lost 30 percent of its species.
It seems to be really, really healthy.
The problem is is that 30 percent is a species that it's lost contains a disproportionately high number of really useful species,
the big body, birds and mammals, for example, which do all the job of dispersing the seeds or pollinators go.
And so you have a functionally functioning undermined ecosystem, even that might look healthy.
And that and that's, you know, we're losing our ecosystem engineers. You lose the whales and you basically use, for example,
the primary mechanism for getting the nutrients up from the deep ocean in the Southern Ocean, and that affects the whole food chain.
Massive influence on that on the ecosystem, of course, all the economically important fisheries,
that depends upon it, you know, so whether or not we're in a sort of a mass extinction event is kind of irrelevant.
What's clear is that all our activities are eroding the diversity of life at a rate not previously witnessed on Earth,
and the loss of species is undermining ecosystem health with knock on effects for everyone.
Yeah. Okay. I've got a few. I've got a whole set of things I want to discuss with you.
But just having a look at the 13 questions already that have come in and we have several hundred people engaged.
I just want to pick up some of them straight away, actually.
So, so one from Rupert Knowles is, you know, is this really about biodiversity or is it about species loss?
Is it about nature, actually, so that the Dasgupta review is is titled The Economics of Biodiversity,
but actually, as I know, is the review developed? It was it became a review about the economics of nature more generally.
What do you think the term biodiversity is the right term? Is it helpful in the public discussion?
Is it is that what we actually care about or is it something else we care about?
So there is a lot of confusion about this, and I've written papers that are trying and rethinking things to try and to try and clarify this.
I mean, biodiversity is a property of nature and it is the variability of life is not wildlife, it's not a mahogany tree, it's not elephants.
It's not, you know, and yet yet it gets conflated with that, say, in the general public or even in the development community.
There is this idea that somehow biodiversity can sometimes be the enemy of the pool, or it could be.
So there's a lot of confusion about it. And but I think it's out there, and I think we have to really be clear and double down on the definition.
I mean, the clue is in the name, it's a contraction of biological diversity and what ecosystem science,
experimental and observational science over the last 30 to 40 years,
basically since the Rio conventions re-establishes really demonstrated that the functionality in
the health and vitality of an ecosystem and the flow of ecosystem functions and services is very,
very strongly dependent upon the variability and members of different species.
The amount of genetic diversity as well within that system is the more diverse that system is,
the more able it is to buffer against environmental perturbations enable more diversity,
the more likely it is that a subset of species in that community are able to deal with whatever conditions are around,
whether it's a pathogen, whether. It's the droughts or floods. So in a rapidly warming world, biodiversity is incredibly important,
it's a foundational property of a nature based solution or any sort of intervention in nature.
You need to make sure it's diverse. It's like having a diverse investment for funding.
And that was a reason people like to invest in lots of different things because you never really sure you know what's going to thrive and when.
And I think we know that a lot of change is coming, but we're not sure from any one place to the next what the impacts of that change will be.
So the more diverse your ecosystem, the more likely it is that it will be continue to be able to support you in all the multiple ways, you know.
So whatever your problem, whether you're worried about food or water or carbon or whatever it is, you know,
if your ecosystem is diverse or close to a natural state of diversity, then the more likely it is to be able to handle it.
So I think it's important that we keep biodiversity in there because it's such an important to the natural world and one that often gets overlooked.
And what can come back to that? Okay, that's great. That's really helpful.
I hope Rupert feels that and clarified a couple of other questions. I just want to pick up before we go on.
There's a huge number of questions about climate and biodiversity and the intersection which which I was going to ask you about anyway,
but before coming to them two other ones. So first,
there's an interesting one quite like to know the answer to from Sophie Gill about
the the but the huge amounts of biome loss of the biomass of living species.
I guess the 80 percent numbers due to losing a smaller number of very, very large species like whales and,
you know, land animals that are at the top elephants and so on the top of the tree?
Or is it losing very large numbers of very small and light species, I guess you could say.
And do we know what the breakdown is between the sorts of things we're losing and we're just losing things everywhere?
Well, there's different processes, results in different patterns of loss, don't they?
I mean, in terms of biodiversity loss, the second biggest driver of biodiversity loss on land and in the seas, overexploitation.
So on land, that's overhunting and undersea, that's overfishing.
And both overhunting and overfishing disproportionately remove big bodied things for reasons, right?
And so that's why the big things come out of the ecosystem through that.
However, things like climate change and pollution and climate change certainly is a threat multiplier.
And although it's it's not a major driver of extinction presently, it's certainly going to be.
Climate change affects everything. And so you get very small bodied organisms being affected as well as the large bodies.
So it's a little bit more indiscriminate. But that for sure, it is the big stuff that goes for us because that's the stuff that something and often
those big organisms as well are quite sensitive to to environmental perturbation.
Not always, but there is that as well. And do you know whether they're a bigger chunk of that 80 percent,
if you are to just kind of add up the biomass loss or you don't have that number to handle?
I don't have that number to have there. And then there's there's a kind of Sophie probably would put this question better than I've put it,
but she has a follow up around what are the implications for the carbon cycle on the carbon storage of the loss of these larger mammals,
for instance, whales? I'm not sure I have a clue as to the answer to that, Juno.
So there's a lot of work on this and definitely not an expert on the importance of
a large bodied organisms on land and in the sea on the terrestrial environments.
It's really important in bringing back megafauna, for example, into the northern hemisphere, extreme northern hemisphere,
and is a very important interaction between grazing and the end and the speed with which the permafrost melts.
And so this really important work was going on showing how grazes anything crisis,
as well as mammalian grazes can influence that dynamic dynamic in a very positive way.
In other words, can slow rates of permafrost melting because they are getting rid of certain types of vegetation,
which are through the albedo effect of increasing the surface temperature that can bring them back in.
You're not getting so many say shrubs and trees, which might absorb more of the sun's energy.
This is the north we're talking about, not in the tropics, different dynamics in different parts of the planet.
So some really important work.
She some colleagues in Oxford are working on that as well and the Environmental Change Institute looking at that really important interaction.
So yes, of course, is this hugely complex nonlinear system isn't in the ocean as well.
That whole role of nutrient cycling, of carbon cycling, of the big whales, for example,
that is influencing absorption and release of carbon dioxide from the surface of the
ocean and has an effect on the global carbon cycle and hence on warming and cooling.
But I'm just definitely not an area of the new rich country of research.
So if your interested. So if you're interested in that, do you think?
Google's children elsewhere, because some people that are really working hard on that super.
All right. Well, let's move now into this intersection between biodiversity and climate.
And as I say, there's an awful lot of questions on this topic went out twenty three in total and that so they're just keen case.
But let me start with a general one to think that tackling biodiversity issues,
biodiversity loss and tackling climate change are well aligned or can be well aligned.
Well, look, you know, back in 1992, when the you know, the U.N. Earth Summit, when these three Rio conventions were established,
you know, one on climate change, one of biodiversity, one of the certification was the same community.
And the idea of this was that these were deeply, deeply instilling processes.
They required their own their own conventions because they do recognise the importance of these things individually, but they were interlinked.
But the policy practise and research community since then largely worked in isolation from one another,
and one of the really important things is happening. And this happened over the last year or two and say, is that these are all coming together more?
And we're really hoping this year that was going to be more alignment between
the goals and the action plans of the of the CBD and the you see me my last.
We only last week it was last week. So the first sort of joint report of the IPCC and Ipsos in which they, these two communities were acknowledging,
you know, acknowledging the interdependency of tackling climate change, biodiversity loss.
And I've seen over the years as I mainly work in the, you know, I'm a biodiversity scientist,
may be working with you, and I see each of those crops sort of get greener and greener and greener.
You know, and it's like, there's a lot more and it's just and so it should be I mean,
it makes a lot of logical sense doesn't mean on lands, you know, land use change to agriculture and forestry and other factors.
This is the second biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but it's the biggest driver, currently the biggest driver of biodiversity declines.
And so theoretically, if you slow biodiversity declines by restoring the natural world,
then you're going to have some wins in terms of greenhouse gas emissions as well.
But that's I mean, that's a massive and very hot topic right now.
But the other thing, just if I may as well am and I don't want to.
I mean, my interest in nature based solutions in this area very much came through the lens of adaptation.
You know, I took a sabbatical with the International Institute for Environment and Development,
and I started working on an ecosystem based application. And now it's all around.
Not so much the role of nature mitigation, but the role of nature in reducing exposure if people,
communities and infrastructure to the impacts of climate change,
supporting them, reducing their sensitivity by providing nutritional and nutrition of financial security and building adaptive capacity.
Because as you into is, you intervene in nature and restore landscape, for example,
you don't just kill natural capital gains, social capital, and that's really important. So in theory, you know, there is all this.
There are these reasons why, you know, people, our policy, policymakers,
practitioners and the research community who is now this really is that you really need to be thinking of these integrated solutions,
which is what drew me into the world of nature based solutions.
And which is sort of why why I think this is such an important concept because it necessitates that
you bring together all of these communities and the development and economic community as well.
But we'll come to that. I think we will. And I mean, the first and immediate follow up to what you said,
which is is a question from a non layperson rapier humbert on the the relationship between the
IPCC scenarios and the dramatic assumptions about negative emissions from nature based solutions.
And his question is, well, you know, given the assumptions there in the scale of tens of gigatons actually five or 10 gigatons per annum,
that tends to be tons cumulatively, if not 100. Is this really plausible?
And especially is it plausible, given that currently we're going the other way?
I mean, we're defrosting, we're not reforesting,
and our land use changes are again denuding soils of carbon rather than putting carbon back into the soil.
So in principle, you've got all these wonderful nature based solutions, but at the moment it's, you know, kind of nature based destruction.
I don't know how realistic are these IPCC estimates, do you think?
Well, those IPCC scenarios assume, you know,
the scaling up of two specific I'm not going to call them nature based solutions because
I don't think the classify section one is backs of bioenergy capturing carbon storage,
and the other one is afforestation. And it's really and that is planting trees, usually non-native tree species.
You the naturally treeless ecosystems or in areas that contain old growth forests as afforestation is different from reforestation.
And it's important distinction because a lot of those models are assuming that we'll be able to cover much of the world's.
Commercial tree plantations in it that will help,
but that is that is a flawed that is problematic because both those processes of need a lot of land where we might protect biodiversity,
where we need to protect biodiversity because of the resilience biodiversity gives us and many other reasons and where we also need to grow crops.
So something like bats and afforestation isn't ready to and probably can never go to the scales used in some of those models,
which is really, really a really sobering fact.
But one thing that's been happening over the last year or so is that, you know,
these communities of researchers across the world that have been working on trying to work out what the mitigation,
the climate change mitigation, potential of protecting and restoring our ecosystems and sustainably managing a working workingman's.
What is that the maximum it could contribute? And it's really important to get this right in very,
very difficult thing to calculate a lot of caveats about the impacts of climate
change on the biosphere itself and come back to that where things can be grown.
You know, the albedo effect needs to be taken into account all sorts of land tenure and all sorts of issues that need
to be taken to account for this general agreement on land is we don't know about the ocean contribution.
That's a big evidence gap. We don't know land, at least if we were to scale up nature based solutions to the maximum extent possible,
we could remove and nassib around 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide,
11 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere every year for about 100 years.
And then we we've reached sort of saturation, both in terms of land available for these solutions and in terms of the,
you know, the fact that ecosystems by and large reach an equilibrium of balance between photosynthesis and respiration.
And but the thing about nature based solutions, we can we can we can scale them up now with various caveats.
And then they need to be people that in biodiversity based.
But they're ready to go now with some of the technology, which we definitely need to be in place and scalable by the end of the century.
They will be ready by the end of the century to then take the rest of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that we know needs to be removed.
Greg, is it time sensitivity on every sometimes get out of the agenda?
And I think there has been a lot of confusion and misinformation about nature's role
in climate because there's been this meme is Betances circulation for a while.
That's 30 percent of the climate solution, when in fact the reality is actually close is 27.
And anyway, you don't get that without the 70 percent that you get through decarbonisation because if you don't
decarbonise the warming water and the biosphere into a net sources of carbon dioxide over the next century.
And so we did some work recently reframing that potential,
and it's about 0.3 of a degree of peak warming if we peak at two degrees towards the end of the century.
Now when you think about the difference in impacts that we have between the two degree and a 1.5 degree warmer,
well, I mean, 4.2.3 of a degree is actually quite a lot. And the longer you wait, the bigger the potential.
But actually, it is still very small, isn't it, compared to to what we need to see decarbonisation?
Is this a really important nuances around around nature based solutions which can get missed most out of the of the broader narrative?
And this has had some problems. We could go into if people wanted us to talk about that.
Well, I feel like that's been incredibly rich answer, actually, and I think you've answered the next question by Ray, too.
So to try and sum it up, Becks and DAC director capture that.
We'll have a lot of them there, the things in the IPCC models, but they're not nature based solutions in Professor Settings world,
but in your world, you can get maybe round numbers 10 gigatons a year for decades, maybe 100 years of nature based solutions.
And you can get them quickly and you could get them fast enough that you could take point three degrees of warming,
which I think is a very, very big contribution.
But again, to be clear that we don't have luxuries the luxury of saying, well, this and there's been, you know,
I really like I rather than be just if there's any B and C in the in the armoury on this kind of these issues, you've got to do all of them.
And clearly, we're not we're not we're not running a horse race between solar panels and nature based solutions here.
Both horses need to be winning. So, Ray, I hope that helps you.
There is some published literature as well on these kind of scale estimates.
They do range quite a bit, but they're not. I mean, there's some some of the 20 gigatons per per annum, but they've got quite big arrivals.
But but 10 feels like it's probably, you know, you feel probably fairly safe saying 10, least in a technical sense.
And there's a whole lot of socio political, cultural, economic factors that need to align in order to get that kind of.
I mean, some of those bigger numbers, you know, have got a much higher price of carbon or they've got or they make some bubbles.
And I would argue, perhaps too, both assumptions about where we can. Do this, you know,
and that's a massive question about who's Lam this is and the rights and the knowledge of the local
people that live there and also makes some big assumptions about where is viable to do this,
given the impacts of warming on the biosphere into that whole elephant in the room, often when it comes to these things, is that the biosphere?
You know, the impacts of existing will be sucked into the system on the biosphere,
and the fact that many ecosystems are quite close to or some ecosystems are quite close to tipping points.
I'm switching from one stable state into another.
Now, a lovely question here from Leslie King, which is lovely, partly because it's exactly the next thing I was going to ask you about.
So they use it so so we might get a good alignment between biodiversity and climate change from nature based solutions.
But what about the human development angle? Can you say a bit more about how nature based solutions could be a win for biodiversity,
win for climate and a win for humans and the economy, but also broader human goals as well?
Yeah, this was this is a really important question.
This was actually my my entry point into this, as I've mentioned, looking at what are the longer term developments,
particularly in the world of adaptation development, benefits of working with rather than just being traditional against ecosystems.
But obviously,
this is a huge topic in the economics of nature isn't really the central goal as a description with you not going to try and summarise that here.
Obviously impossible to do so other than to say I wanted to sort of flag up.
I would say worth worth flagging up,
sort of for kind of billowing areas of evidence in awareness around the question that you asked around that alignment that has become,
you know, lots of reports, lots of lots of headlines in the last couple of years, last year in particular.
And now, first of all, is the fact that the high dependency of business and economy in general on the flow of ecosystem services to nature,
to people, the huge operational regulatory liability opportunity,
loss, risks of ignoring the value of those ecosystem services and the cost effectiveness of working,
especially perhaps in the global south, but also everywhere. Really, the cost effectiveness of working with nature, working,
bringing technology and nature together in the context of things like disaster risk reduction and issues around avoided loss and damage.
You know, there have been big headlines often involving billions,
not trillions of dollars and all of which are probably gross and underestimates of the value of these things.
But over the last few months, we've also seen a growing emphasis on from a fourth area around this,
and that is the shorter term economic recovery potential investments.
So I think most, most governments and businesses do realise that long term, you know, there are these benefits that working with nature can provide.
But what's what's become apparent is actually this huge job creation potential and not just short term jobs, either.
Sometimes people saying, you know, once the trees have been planted, that's it. Not at all.
Once that ecosystem is in the process of restoration of stewardship, the management that is long term,
this is these are jobs for people all over the world over the long term, not just quickly creating jobs in the short term.
So it is it is. It is important to remember that we call them short term benefits because they can be generated tomorrow,
but they are enduring jobs, so they are worthwhile jobs as well.
And there are several studies I could cite and recent work published in fact,
a couple of weeks ago show that will the European Union is only spending one percent of its recovery budget on nature.
The job creation potential of increasing that would be huge.
There was one one figure that is going around an investment of around 3.7 billion into nature.
Restoration across a small number of countries could create one hundred seventy two
thousand jobs and seven billion euros worth of economic activity over 15 years,
and another oft cited study as well. Many more of these views compared to the return in terms of jobs created.
Investment in different industries show that in the U.S., if you invest one million dollars into coastal habitat restoration,
that's good nature based solution ecosystem restoration you can create 40 new jobs, and that compares to five for oil and gas, for example.
And we need more work, more studies like this. But the problem with all these courses that you know, the devil's in the detail,
these impressive figures that we always say, What are you defining as an investment in nature here?
What do you mean? You know, which brings me to actually answering the question about alignment of economy, biodiversity and climate.
And there's a lot of hyperbole verbally about about this sort of stuff.
And you know, at the end of the day, whether or not there is alignment between those things depends on,
well, I guess three things the type of the incident mentioned, obviously,
where it takes place, in particular the state of the landscape prior to the intervention is this integrated
landscape where nothing else could possibly grow within a few thousand years? Or is it actually a healthy interacting ecosystem who lives there?
And the third thing is the time frame and the spacious catalogue, which you measure some of.
Climate, economic and biodiversity benefits, and the really interesting thing is is, you know,
nature can't deliver everything in the same place at the same time, but it can deliver many things over time across whole landscapes,
which is why that kind of landscape perspective I'm not just thinking about a single space or a single ecosystem,
but thinking about the interactions between rural and recognising that we're going to need all sorts of different solutions.
As you were saying, Cameron is not either. Or is it? We need all these different solutions working over different time frames and spatial scales.
Another very rich answer. Thank you. If I move us on to just thinking about the mechanisms by which we might kind
of capture this triple win as it were a biodiversity climate and the economy,
as you say, there's some very big numbers bandied around on the economics and finance.
There's a question here from Steve Smith at the Smith School about financing nature.
He's pointed out that a lot of the interest at the moment is through carbon offsets.
And what's your view as to whether that's the best channel? They're better ones.
Should we make use of it? Should we be careful?
And, you know, if there are better channels, what are they? Thanks to you, that's a great question and a very typical one at the moment.
I mean, the problem is with offsetting is that it's often being used instead of drastic decarbonisation.
So there's a big, big, big problem around this potential of something like nature based solutions to distract or equally worse,
delay that ambition, ambitious action to decarbonise.
And so to get around that, to deal with that problem, we need to ensure that finance that comes through industries that you know it's
only for nature based solutions is only coming from those industries that are, you know, with ambitious and verifiable decarbonisation plans,
you know, they're doing given the size of the particular company, whatever it is or country involved,
given the levels of impacts on the environment is that organisation is an entity
doing everything it possibly can as quickly as it possibly can to decarbonise.
If it is, then during that transition towards zero net zero,
then using some of that finance to invest in ecosystem active activities in the ecosystem is a good thing,
but we have to make sure it's good finance from good entities and it's not being used in greenwashing.
A huge, huge issue currently. Big, big concerns.
A big pushback from the environmental movement against some of this because they think that some of the big polluters are using this in greenwashing.
But the other piece is a look at the investment,
and the other piece is just to make sure we create these boundary organisation and provide the technology information
so that that that funding can go to the good projects and the biodiversity based and led by local communities.
These police based projects that if even if they're not currently good for biodiversity, good for carbon, good for people,
good for jobs, they are being implemented in a way which makes it very likely that they will deliver those returns over time.
So this is why this is these boundary organisations that do that in both of the projects that the investors are really,
really important and in the short term is in a massive amount of funding available.
And that will help as we need to raise 500 billion US dollars a year to restore the natural world.
And a lot of that has is not going to come or it's not going to come from public finance.
A lot could biggest proportion is going to come from the private sector through and through this mechanism.
What we want to see, however, is not offsetting so much is in setting.
So we want to see companies companies investing to improve their supply chain so that then links to cleaning up supply chains.
If you can invest in good projects within your supply chains and actually address the impacts that you're having within your supply chain,
then that's also much, much more robust approach. You mentioned greenwashing, and it's the next question.
Actually, the top question from Ruti on is there.
Is there a risk? How do we protect against the concept of nature based solutions effectively being corrupted given all the nuances?
And I think just to observe that group of us at Oxford have put forward a set of principles on net
zero aligned offsetting and not I wonder if you might share your thoughts on how we how we just make
sure we don't have basically what happened just a bit over a decade ago with a whole voluntary
carbon market kind of crashed and burned because it didn't have the integrity and my personal sense,
you know, you can try and scale this, this sort of activity.
But if you scale it up too quickly before people really trust it, then at some point, you know, just kind of collapses.
Because why would companies voluntarily pay for stuff that people think, Oh, you're just greenwashing?
So how do you manage the greenwashing concerns with the citizens integrity integrity question?
Is it the integrity of the investors and the integrity of the projects and just making sure and there's a lot of work going on.
It's different now. It's different to what it was 10 years ago.
We've got, like, you know, pipelines of bankable projects, good projects already going, already demonstrating the benefits for carbon four.
But for adaptation, for biodiversity, we've got much better science in place, much better methods for monitoring and evaluating.
Even at quite a granular level, those carbon and biodiversity and adaptation benefits much better than we had then.
So we have those systems in place.
We have those frameworks in place, lots of work to be done, some really important fundamental science to be done there as well.
But there are a lot more tools and we have a lot of learning from what happened before, right?
So there's a massive amount. So I think really, I mean, a lot of us are working in this on this this year to really double down on the definition.
Well, on the one hand, as you know, on the net zero definition,
but also on the level of nature based solutions and ensuring that, you know, some broad guidelines around what good, successful,
sustainable, nature based solutions look like are adopted by businesses,
by governments and trying to get that adopted this year in a more formal way, as it is and is a major focus for us.
All guidelines, it's put very simply people who pose a lot of nuance about it,
but I really think it can be boiled down to four key guidelines for key policy guardrails.
One is that it's not an alternative to keeping fossil fuels in the ground,
so that speaks to the need to that to invest in that investors and make sure they've got these ambitious, verifiable decarbonisation plans.
And then the other three are making sure that we've got protection, restoration,
conservation of a diversity of ecosystems across landscapes, including our working lands.
The third one is that these projects must be led by, or at least in partnership with,
local communities and indigenous peoples in a way that respects their rights and their knowledge.
Otherwise, it's unethical and also not sustainable.
And then the fourth piece is to come back to biodiversity always, as this foundational property of good,
nature based solutions and projects need to be designed to deliver benefits for biodiversity and the way
otherwise nature won't be able to support us at all because it won't be resilient in a rapidly changing world.
So there are these four guidelines, each of them very much bolstered by robust evidence from both science and practise,
and increasingly so and really sort of trying to get that message across to say it's not a bad idea
that needs to meet these guidelines in order to count and to create these boundary organisations,
of which there are many now bubbling up all over the place.
And to make sure the science community engages with these boundary organisations to make sure they're doing that vetting piece in a most robust way.
I'd like to thank you. I think those four points are a useful.
I'd like to go back to Steve Smith's question and kind of blended with one from Jack Edmonson about
how we how we go about incentivising businesses to specifically invest in and improve biodiversity,
not through a carbon offset sort of wrangle.
So this is your, I think you said in setting, maybe if if it's the opposite of offsetting should be called on setting or something,
but anyway, for investing in biodiversity, for biodiversity sake.
You know, there's huge interest in ESG, but at the moment, I guess this is no kind of absolutely compelling way.
A firm large or small can say to its stakeholders, its investors and staff, look at the great thing we're doing for biodiversity.
I mean, some of them, many firms are doing this sort of thing, but it's it seems a bit ad hoc.
Do you have any thoughts about how we incentivise the scale up of businesses protecting biodiversity for biodiversity sake?
For biodiversity, sake, is obviously speaks more to social corporate responsibility and reputational,
you know, young people or people now increasingly aware,
especially over the last year,
about interdependency of human health and the natural world and the relationship between the health of nature and biodiversity.
These are sort of becoming when you switch on the radio in the morning, people talk about this never happens.
You know, it is a pity I was. So you think I'm exaggerating saying this is sort of almost mainstream these ideas.
And so, you know, speaking to that biodiversity for biodiversity sake is part of that.
Speaking to this recognition that we are part of nature,
that our health depends on the health of ecosystems, we can't continue with business as usual.
There will be more pandemics if we do not overreach to say that, I don't think.
And so that is very much in there. I think, you know, in terms of, I mean, international performance,
Standard six is a regulation around needing to report on biodiversity methods around that are improving.
It's not being done in a brilliant way across the board to date,
but there is obviously improved data to enable companies to do that in a much better way and the responsibility of them to do that.
I think in terms of like mobilising more investment, I mean,
there's obviously the ESG piece and there's a real push towards cleaning up supply chains because of
the risks to those supply chains and the risks to the assets within the supply chains of not doing so.
So climate change, combined with biodiversity is actually putting a lot of commodities, particularly obviously commodity supply chains at risk.
So this is an area the insurance industry is interested in, but just commodity companies in general are very,
very aware of the impacts of their activities on society and on biodiversity,
and on the relationship between two enormous supply chains and want to be able
to estimate those and to be able to invest in projects that help mitigate them.
So interesting. I think there's a connexion. I'm just going to dive deeper into the list of questions, which is now over 30,
because there's a connexion between the demand for this sort of activity from firms.
And, as you say, the fact that it's going mainstream.
And I think education has been a big part of that and perhaps needs to be an even bigger part of that in the future.
Val asks, Is it possible to make education about wildlife and biodiversity more prominent for kids at school in the UK, but actually globally?
I guess the specific question Val asks is that there's not a lot of wild, truly wild places in a country like the UK.
What do we do about it? I know for my three the worst punishment three kids.
The worst punishment we can impose upon them is removing some of their Attenborough
watching time on a show on a Saturday afternoon if they're really bad,
badly behaved. But but even better than that is actually to get them into nature.
How do we do? How do we do education better in this domain?
I mean, this is like it's impossible to exaggerate how important this is.
And you know, the getting recognising that we are part of nature and gang overcoming that dualism that goes back 5000 years,
at least as overcoming that, recognising that we're part of it is incredibly important and starts at the youngest age.
I would say to children of my own and many friends with children and would say that,
you know, kids spend a lot of time with children in the tropics as well all over the world,
and I can see that there is there is a love of nature that's quite innate recognition, that it's fun and playful.
And then and then over time, that gets eroded by conventional schooling, doesn't it?
And so there is a move in this country, in other countries to try and reverse that a bit to try and keep alive that love of nature.
And as we see our cities become green, I mean this in a brilliant, brilliant things happening in this year.
I'm producing some films on nature based solutions and action in the UK,
and one of the films is looking at what's going on in cities and we've been in touch with people from various cities.
Newcastle's one of them Manchester, Glasgow or others,
and there's just incredible things going on involving children in tree planting or other ecosystem restoration
programmes about greening or rewilding parts of the playground where possible of sort of accident.
And that sort of speaks that whole social capital thing. And if you involve people in nature, they get you closer to nature.
Then that enables some of the more really fundamental transformative shifts that
we need around patterns of consumption and diet and all these other things.
So I think that I mean, it's very, very important we do it by I would love to see the GCSE and natural history in the UK.
I would I would feel quite passionately about that getting kids out of classrooms and into nature,
even if it's just, you know, little allotments or whatever it is at school.
And lots of schools are doing this right and lots of cities are you've got city farms,
you've got so many amazing things that we have gardens across London involve children at weekends.
I mean, there's lots of brilliant people doing these things and transforming,
and I think I feel very optimistic about the future of landscapes, future British landscape in particular.
I think we're on a cusp of some. Quite just. Change very importantly, what goes on,
a certain 80 percent of those population are going to be cities by the end of the century, a figure like that, right?
A lot of us how beautiful, how healthy those environments are.
We have a fundamental role to play in whether we can enable all the systemic change that we need.
And I talk to town planners quite a bit and their vision of the future.
We need to sort of transport properly now. But once you sort of the down bespoke problem, we get rid of a lot of concrete.
We free up space for people and nature and that will bring mental. We know that brings mental health benefits as well as physical benefits.
We know we have to. There's lots that's all very well evidence now. It's a no brainer to do that.
And when you talk to young people, I mean, we started this conversation, didn't we, with lots of bleak statistics.
But actually, I hope we're able to end it in a more positive space in that actually,
there's so much going on that we can engage with as individuals that will reconnect ourselves with nature and will
make us feel a lot happier and less overwhelmed by some of these patterns on the state of nature that we hear about.
That really is a wonderful answer. I don't know if you're happy or not,
but basically you don't have to get on a plane to Madagascar to have a look at the
person's commute and just go into Newcastle and you can be inspired by nature and cities.
And the key point is, of course, because we do all live in cities, we've got to make it work for people and cities.
I think it's a super answer. You're quite rightly you're wanting to direct us positively and we will end positively.
But this is a very interesting question which you just kind of threw away in passing.
And Louisa has picked up on this connexion between biodiversity loss and pandemics and zoonotic diseases.
Her question is why is it that we haven't seen a big global pandemic originating from the Amazon yet,
given the vast kind of human interactions that are a bit messy going on there?
Do you have any thoughts on that? I absolutely remain completely unqualified to answer that question.
I don't know. Now I see Scott Brown's population densities of humans, population densities of domesticated animals and contact between the two.
But I think that is absolutely coming up. It's not with any authority. Sorry, you're unqualified to talk about negative things.
We're only talking about positive things the last minute. That was a very common cause.
So, so let's move on to cop.
So those listening in may or may not know that Professor Sutton has the title of Friend of the Cop, which is a significant role.
And it's just kind of helping the cop try to think through the role of nature based solutions on the climate side.
So what do you think? I mean, obviously there's the CBD, the Convention on Biological Diversity Cop in Kunming, in China as well this year.
Probably, we think, maybe possibly in October before the Glasgow cop in November.
What do we need to get from the Glasgow cop? Because that's the one you're advising on.
What do you think we'll still get? It's a really good question. You know, at the broadest level, the cops,
both cops an opportunity at the beginning of this critical decade for the world's nations to come together and sort this out,
make operationalise able, you know, commitments target not just targets,
but actual action plans for delivery and to make sure that those are aligned between the CBD and even this is really important.
And there are signs that that is happening, you know, and if we don't, you know, we don't have those actionable targets.
If this doesn't emerge, you don't get the level of cooperation we see then after when we all emerge from this pandemic really locked into,
you know, climate and ecological and poverty emergency, you know, and if it's not going to happen this year, know really big year, not me.
I'm saying that because the UK's hosting the cop, but because of the pandemic, you know, people are wanting answers.
People recognise that we really need to fundamentally change how we do things. If it doesn't happen now, that once again happen.
So there's a lot of pressure on it. But more specifically, obviously, COP26 is a critical time.
I mean, ultimate, it is a critical test. Paris agreement, isn't it? Well, pass TS live up to that commitments on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.
Will they enable communities to advance? Will they deal with loss and damage and all these things?
So, you know, we need, you know, I guess there's a certain things that I think we need and they're very broad things as well.
So forgive me,
I don't know whether any you remember whatever know we are running out of time what we obviously we need to close the gap to 1.5 degrees,
the gap between the existing pledges and what it's actually going to take to keep us at 1.5 degrees a huge gap.
The UK must, you know, lead high level international discussions,
especially to ensure that all the new economic recovery packages are consistent with that, that UK we need to get on track to net zero.
Big topic, we need to. And of course, I would say this.
I think it's very important for this particular increase ambition for nature based solutions to
enhance NDCs with robust targets and actions around nature based solutions properly defined.
Adopting, you know, specific guidelines and guardrails.
Can't ignore loss and damage needs to be isn't yet it needs to be on a par with mitigation and adaptation,
obviously massively important adaptation finance needs massively scaling up, obviously.
There's all the stuff around the just energy transition. And then the last thing and very,
very important thing is a Paris compliant finance sector that doesn't lock in
investments that are going to continue to damage the biosphere and climate.
And that's what is the Paris compliant finance sector look like.
Well, no new direct government support for international fossil fuel projects and doing perverse fossil fuel and agricultural subsidies,
of course, and cleaning global supply chains breaking the link.
The key thing is the deforestation link between agricultural commodities,
and you can have a system loss and damage that's important and then hold due diligence.
Piece is very, very important as well, making sure that finance is sustainable to deliver an actual positive economy.
So those are sort of four things that's what we need. What we're going to get, what we get, what are we going to get?
Well, there's a good chance this will be a successful cop, I think from a nature perspective.
And if it was your well, you would say that, wouldn't you?
But and certainly that might just reflect because that's the space that I'm working most closely.
But I am seeing very positive things going on, and so I remain optimistic that we will see some good things in the nature space that might
make up for some blacks in other aspects of what needs to be negotiated at the end of the year.
I think COP26 decision tax may well include the role of biodiversity, ecosystems and not just forests as it currently is,
but diverse ecosystems in general for mitigation and adaptation and with joint programmes between the CBD.
And even after obviously hopeful about that enhanced and NDCs with more robust nature based solutions that are currently at the moment,
it's an emphasis on forestry. I'm hopeful that other things will be in that peatland more prominent, for example, mangroves and wetlands as well.
I'm hopeful that there will be some adoption of some safeguards,
standards and safeguards for nature based solutions project that speaks to the integrity
question we just talked about and pledges for increased finance with various sorts.
And then in particularly important, I think, can actually good chance of success around sort of strengthen diplomacy around deforestation,
free supply chains, something that the UK is leading them? Well, we can do it across the remote at some of that,
and I'm sure some people listening in will be thinking that's all well and good, but we just actually need to stop killing species.
And I wonder if we can take it from the very high level of the international negotiations down to end at the very personal level.
If you're listening in and you hadn't realised just how bad this crisis was, I suspect many of you did know because that's why you tuned in.
But what? What can you what can an average individual do?
What are the biggest lever items we can more changes we can make to protect biodiversity?
And you know, what sort of things do you do to make a difference?
I think that shift is a big one for those of us that have the choice to have a different diet and for work,
shift to a plant based diet is incredibly important. That's the shift that I've made personally,
and I encourage those around me to do the same in this culture where it's possible in other parts of the world.
It's harder, but not impossible. We have to we have to do that.
I think what did you find? Sorry to interrupt.
What did you find easy or hard or kind of exciting about shifting from eating meat to to being vegan or vegetarian?
You know, so many vegan, I felt much healthier personally, I don't have it, so it's like bats and things like that.
I felt good to be consistent.
I have a diet that was consistent with my understanding of what was happening to Biosphere
and the massive role that particularly the meat industry has on biodiversity loss,
pollution and also climate change.
And so, you know, it was actually a difficult questions for my my children secretary push me from vegetarianism to veganism.
It's like, Well, if you say this. And what about this? What about that?
And I was like, OK, this isn't working even within, you know, around the family table.
So need to make that happen. And I think and I think that's a bit of cognitive dissonance about that.
When you do go to climate change meetings and is often beef on the menu every day, be for cultural reasons.
But really, we need to get on top of this issue. So that's the thing.
And so a dietary shift is one we're just all of all the stuff around consumption.
You know, I will find it hard to fly without an extraordinarily good reason.
I did a lot of globetrotting 20 odd years ago when I was working in tropical
rainforests and probably got a big carbon footprint that I need to do something about.
So flying less and I think one of the positive things of the pandemic is that we've all realised we can do many of us and many of us can't.
Many people have lost jobs and suffered, perhaps those of us working in research and the climate change negotiation community and so on.
We can do a lot of our job very effectively with very lower, much lower carbon footprint, and that's a really good thing.
So flying is another and then spreading the love about nature is important.
You know, whether that's with your children or with your family not mowing you lawns, smashing the meadows grow.
You know, there's little things we can do as well to create this sort of, you know, to to to grow the love for nature.
And I think it's very natural for most of us as well to get into that space.
And we've all benefited. Obviously, in the last 12 months, many more people of working in their gardens or allotments,
those of us who are lucky to have access to that sort of space.
You said really enjoyed it when told we were limited in how much time we can have in nature.
We've added even more opportunities now to to keep that going.
Even once you know all the previous freedoms are back.
There you go. That's great advice to leave everybody with your loans.
One job you thought you might have to do that you no longer have to do it.
It's not fun, especially if you get.
The advisory suggests that I feel compelled to say that the Oxford Martin School now does not offer meat in its events.
It's just vegetarian or vegan, too only.
And that's the other key piece of advice, which I admit I haven't yet followed, but we haven't eaten any meat today.
Yeah, well, take your time. There you go. All right.
Thank you, everybody for tuning in. I have to apologise again.
I kind to have this ludicrous optimism bias that maybe as each of these series of progress will pick up,
pick up of the questions that haven't been asked in previous sessions. But this has just left many more questions still unanswered.
Thirty six at latest count, so I genuinely apologise to those of you who wanted to get a bit more of that time and brainpower.
You're not alone. There are many people who want her time and brainpower, but thank you for spending an hour with us today.
Good luck in everything you're doing and good luck with the cup. Thank you very much.
It's been a pleasure.