 I will first start by giving a brief introduction and then I will pass over to hear some interventions from the panellists before we enter into a Q&A. So as most tuning into this event will know, we are in a key year for taking action on both the climate and nature crises. In November, countries will convene in Glasgow for COP26, a major event that is seen as maybe a last chance for getting the world on track to limiting global warming to 7.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. And shortly before that in October, ministers will meet in Kunming, China for COP15, where we can expect major news targets on stemming biodiversity loss, including possibly international agreements to protect 30% of the world's land and oceans by 2030. And though the climate and nature crises are being discussed at two separate summits this year, there is a growing awareness that the two crises are inextricably linked. Earlier this month, a joint report from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and ITBES, the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services issued a joint call for the climate and nature crises to be tackled together. They said that the event crises to be tackled effectively, they must be tackled as one. There are many ways that we can tackle both the climate and nature crisis together, a major one being stopping deforestation, especially in the world's tropical regions and rewilding lost habitats across the world. Though the potential of natural climate solutions is large, scientists have also warned that they must be carefully implemented to ensure they don't come with negative side effects for both people and wildlife. For example, planting and monoculture plantations with just one species of plant can be both detrimental to biodiversity and food production. With some scientists describing these monoculture plantations as green deserts. Today's panel will discuss ways that we can tackle both the climate and nature crises in a way that has co-benefits for people and for tackling poverty as well. We have four panelists with us today and I'd like to start by introducing our first panelist who is Professor Sir Bob Watson. Professor Sir Bob Watson is the chair of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. He is also one of the most influential environmental scientists worldwide contributing to multiple assessments of sciences to inform international and national policies and actions. Among positions held, Watson was former chief scientist at the UK Department of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs, former chief scientist and director for Environmental and Social Sustainable Development at the World Bank and associate director for environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Executive Office of the President in the White House. Bob, you're going to be talking to us about the science behind some of these natural climate solutions and the co-benefits they could offer. So I'd like to ask you just to take it away when you're ready. Thank you. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to participate today. I'm no longer the chair of it, but as I stepped down from that in May of two thousand and nineteen, well, I still interact with the secretariat and many of the sciences. Let me place the context first. Biodiversity continues to decline at an alarming rate. One million of the world's estimated eight million plants and animals are threatened with extinction. Population sizes and abundances are dropping. Ecosystems and their services are being degraded, especially the regulating services. And these are now threatening human well-being. But we can avoid this catastrophic loss of species and the degradation of ecosystems if we act now. The major drivers of biodiversity loss are land and sea use change, exploitation, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species in that order for terrestrial and freshwater systems. It's mainly been land use change for marine systems. It's been predominantly exploitation over fishing. There's no question that while climate change has not been the dominant driver of that loss of biodiversity to date. If we do not limit human-induced climate change to two degrees Celsius and preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Paris target, climate change may well become, most likely to become, the major driver of biodiversity loss in the coming decades. Even a 1.5 degree Celsius change in temperature causes a significant loss in biodiversity. And for every additional half a degree Celsius makes a real significant adverse difference. Destruction of nature, especially deforestation, loss of wetlands and unsustainable agriculture and forestry practices are significant contributors to the emissions of greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, but also methane, nitrous oxide, all of these leading to human-induced climate change. And therefore, as you've already heard from Daisy, it's clear that the issues of climate change and loss of nature are interconnected and must be addressed together. Continued changes in climate and loss of biodiversity undermine achieving any of the UN sustainable development goals. Therefore, we need goals, targets and even more important actions agree that COP 15 for biodiversity and COP 26 for climate change that are harmonized. Nature-based solutions, as again you've already heard from Daisy, can be beneficial for both adapting to and mitigating climate change, clearly beneficial for conservation and restoration of biodiversity and contribute to addressing land degradation. In addition, well-designed, they also contribute to the UN sustainable development goals. However, nature-based solutions have to be well-designed to ensure there are no unintended adverse consequences where the intervention is positive for one issue, but negative for another issue. For example, it could be beneficial for addressing climate change, but negative for biodiversity or some of the SDGs, such as food, water security. Conserving carbon-rich and species-rich ecosystem is highly beneficial, obviously, for both climate change and biodiversity. Particularly effective would be multifunctional land, freshwater and marine skates that integrate functionally intact biodiversity with the benefits of ecosystem services at a range of spatial scales. Restoring degraded terrestrial freshwater and marine systems with native vegetation is, in most cases, beneficial for mitigating climate change by increasing storage of carbon, beneficial for biodiversity by increasing species-rich nets and can contribute to several of the SDGs, including job creation and improved livelihoods. Consent, for example, conservation and restoration of mangrove systems can contribute to adapting to climate change by minimizing the impacts of sea level rise and storm surges. However, large-scale afforestation, planting of trees and ecosystems that have not historically had trees, reforestation of degraded lands with exhausting monocultures and large-scale monoculture bioenergy plantations where native vegetation has been removed or where arable land is used is most likely to adversely affect biodiversity as well as adversely affect food and water security. Now, to maximize the potential of nature-based solutions, we need to transform our economic, financial and productive systems. We need to invest in nature and in a low-carbon economy. We need to value nature by using measures of natural capital in decision-making. We need to measure inclusive wealth, the sum of built, human and natural capital, and use this in decision-making to complement GDP, which of course does measure economic growth but not sustainable economic growth. We need to eliminate adverse fossil fuel, mining, fisheries, agricultural subsidies that lead to both climate change and the destruction of nature. We need to internalize externalities into the price of goods and services and therefore, again, work against unsustainable practices. We need to embrace the circular economy. All of these measures will assist in the conservation of biodiversity and start to address climate change. Protected areas, for example, can contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as biodiversity, but they must be well-managed and designed to be climate resilient. Most protected areas systems are neither well-managed nor resilient to climate change. If they are well-designed, they also have social benefits. We clearly need to transform our agricultural and forestry practices using agroecological practices, hence reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases and becoming more resilient to climate change by breeding crops that are more temperature, drought, and salientary tolerant. Treating climate biodiversity and human society as coupled systems is key to successful outcomes for polity interventions. The interventions among these issues must be explicitly considered in order to maximize co-benefits and minimize unintended trade-offs. When developing policies to address these interacting issues, it's important to understand both their temporal and their spatial implications. And we also need to recognize differences in social ecological context, where motivations, interests, preferences, and values differ across societies and cultures. My last point is the need for transformative change in governance systems. We need polycentric governance structures where all voices are heard, but the power of vested interest minimize those that want to maintain the status quo of today. All stakeholders have an important role to play in addressing these issues. Governments need to lead and provide the policy framework to incentivize other stakeholders, especially the private sector and financial institutions, to play their individual and collective roles. In conclusion, nature-based solutions have an important role to play, but they must be well-designed and must not be used an excuse to delay the transition to a low-carbon economy by transitioning away from fossil fuels and improving induced energy efficiency. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very interesting. And I just like to apologize for mispronouncing your title there. So I would just like to add, as well, to everyone listening. If you have any questions on what Bob has just said, then please put them in the Q&A box, and we're going to be answering all questions after all the speakers have spoken. We're moving on now to our second speaker, who is Professor Natalie Seddon. Natalie is Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford and Founding Director of the Nature-Based Solutions Initiative, an interdisciplinary program of research, policy advice, and education that enhances understanding of the potential for nature-based solutions to address global challenges. Natalie trained as an ecologist at Cambridge University and has over 20 years experience in a range of ecosystems across the globe. So, Natalie, you're going to be speaking to us a bit about how we can implement some of these solutions that we've just been hearing about from Bob. So take it away. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to take part in this important event today. It's great to be here. And it's always a tall order to follow Bob. As he's explained very well, and as was highlighted in the joint report, the first joint report, in fact, the IPCC and ITBES, the evidence from both science and practice is really very clear now. As said, biodiversity loss, climate change, and poverty share many of the same ultimate drivers. And so, in theory, should share some of the same solutions. And it's quite clear now, and many are saying it, that we will continue to see very little progress on addressing these goals unless we tackle them together. So this is the core idea behind the concept of a nature-based solution which Bob has mentioned. This is a term that has gained a lot of traction recently in business and government discourse, but that does remain a lot of confusion about what counts, about how to implement about what good looks like. So, in practice, we know that nature-based solutions involve the restoration, connection, and protection of natural and semi-natural habitats, both on land and in the sea. It also critically involves, and sometimes this is overlooked, the sustainable management of our working lands, so our sea scapes too, so our croplands and our timberlands and our aquatic systems. And nature-based solutions also critically involves bringing nature, creating new ecosystems by bringing, for example, nature into our cities through green infrastructure. So as said, well-designed, these types of actions can indeed contribute to tackling climate change and biodiversity loss. And support economic recovery with lots of evidence that has been published over the last 12 months, the critical role of nature-based solutions in supporting economic recovery, and other sustainable development goals. But poorly designed schemes can have adverse effects as highlighted by Bob on biodiversity, people, and climate. And in particular, at the moment this is a very live topic, there are serious concerns that so-called nature-based solutions are actually distracting from the need for systemic change, in particular the rapid phase out of the use of fuels and are in some areas being used in greenwashing. Furthermore, as also mentioned, there is indeed an overemphasis at the moment in policy on planting trees rather than investing in the protection, restoration, and connection of a diverse range of habitats across the globe on land and in the sea. So to address these, oh, sorry, I realise now I should have switched my slide. So to address these, consortium of research, organisations in development and conservation, NGOs, have developed, based on the latest science and knowledge from practice too, they've developed a set of four evidence-based guiding principles around the implementation of nature-based solutions that should, if adhered to, ensure that they deliver long-term benefits for the climate, nature, and people. These are the high-level policy guardrails which complement the IUCN's global standard for nature-based solutions. So I want to talk through and then over the next few minutes, each of these four. So guideline one, so we know that nature-based solutions have been widely promoted as being a key climate change mitigation solution. And we see that the voluntary carbon markets are growing rapidly and carbon offsets have doubled from 2017 to 2020. And this has been driven by quite optimistic and in some cases actually erroneous estimates about the global mitigation potential of nature. In fact, there's a lot of confusion and indeed misinformation about this. And this is perhaps unsurprising as calculations are very challenging to do and they must take into account a very wide range of different socioeconomic, biophysical and ecological factors. Nonetheless, there is a growing consensus among multiple different research groups that are looking at this that the total mitigation potential of nature-based solutions on land is around 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year or 11 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent with 40% approximately of this coming from protecting our intact lands, 40% from improving our working lands and seas and 20% from restoring the native ecosystem. We recently calculated that this amounts to basically reducing global warming by around 0.3 degrees of warming peaks towards the end of the century at two degrees. Now, viewed through one lens, this might seem like quite a small contribution to global cooling, but it becomes hugely significant when it viewed within the context of a severe socioeconomic, ecological, cultural disturbances or impacts of being in a two degree warmer world compared to a 1.5 degree warmer world. So that was some analysis that the IPCC did a couple of years ago shows a big difference between the two. So in that context, not point through the degrees a lot. Nonetheless, we have to be very honest about this, very real about this. The total potential of nature-based solutions is much, much more than what must be achieved through decarbonization of the global economy. Furthermore, and this is often the elephant in the room when it comes to nature-based solutions, unless we rapidly fail out fossil fuel use, the mitigation potential of nature won't be realized at all because climate warming will undermine the biosphere and its capacity to draw down, store carbon or indeed provide any of the other multiple benefits to society. In other words, it will turn the biosphere into a net source of greenhouse gases rather than the net sink. So that's guideline one, the justification for it. Moving on to guideline two, all ecosystems, not just forests, but our kelp forests, our seagrass meadows, our savannas, our peatlands, our wetlands, all these different ecosystems, they all hold multiple opportunities for nature-based solutions. And in particular, I think it's important to highlight because this often gets overlooked that the remaining intact ecosystems on Earth are hotspots for biodiversity and carbon, and they are also really very resilient and able to support human adaptation to climate change and local communities and a source of rich livelihoods as well. Yet we know that many of these intact ecosystems basically lack effective protection and are poorly managed. And the point to be clear about is intactness is an important property of an ecosystem because as they are degraded, this significantly reduces their capacity to store carbon, increases their vulnerability to climate-related hazards such as fires. As Bob also mentioned, it's really, really important, and this is sort of part of the second guideline, to avoid inappropriate tree planting on naturally open ecosystems, such as peatlands and savannas, or to replace native forests. Plantations are important because they provide much-needed wood products and local jobs. They rarely represent a stable, long-term, permanent climate mitigation solution. Commercial plantations tend to be involved few species so they're not very resilient to pests and pathogens and climate extremes. And much of the harvest wood, not always, but much of the harvested wood is for short-lived products. So even if rates of carbon sequestration and storage in those plantations are high in the short-term, over the long-term there are significant risks that that carbon just gets released back into the atmosphere again. So in a nutshell, around the second guideline, nature-based solutions has to be valued in terms of the multiple benefits they bring to people in biodiversity rather than overly simple metrics which focus on carbon and the numbers of trees planted. And management at landscape scale is very important to secure those long-term benefits. So moving on to the third guideline, the third of the four guidelines. In areas of the world, in many areas of the world, regulatory frameworks are very weak and land and resources are often very easily appropriated, protected areas, plantations and other sorts of nature-based interventions are often or can often be established without taking livelihoods, rights or knowledge of local people into account. Local people might be used for labor, but then they have restricted access to what will once come on poor resources. And yet local communities and indigenous peoples have incredible rich knowledge about how best to work with nature locally and are in many parts of the world. For example, in Amazonia, you're actually demonstrably having a really important role in protecting biodiversity and addressing climate change. So they must be making the land use decisions and their cultural rights and so on and their rights to the lateral world must be fully respected. If we ignore them, then not only are these interventions in nature unethical, but they're also not sustainable over the long term. So this is a really, really a critical guideline. Successful, sustainable nature-based solutions have to be explicitly designed and managed adaptively through just institutions to provide a wide range of benefits to local people. And they need to be designed to take the needs, values and knowledge of different sectors into accounts, including marginalized groups such as women. And these nature-based solutions are produced or co-produced in partnership. And that's really, really important not to overlook and often is. So the fourth one is a really fundamental one, I think. For nature-based solutions to deliver sustained benefits to people, the ecosystems involved must themselves be healthy, they must be resilient. Their ecological functions and their services that provide to people must be able to be, resist or recover very quickly from climate change or other sources of environmental perturbation. So, and there's now good empirical evidence that that resilience, that functional resilience relates to the genetic, functional and species diversity of the ecosystems and the extent to which they're connected to other ecosystems. So you need to design nature-based solutions so that they explicitly provide or support biodiversity in this way. So in this way, you know, biodiversity is a foundational property of nature-based solutions, as well as being a benefit of implementing them properly. But as Bob alluded to, the extent to which interventions in nature support biodiversity varies across the different types of intervention. Clearly, if you protect an impact ecosystem or you restore a landscape to its natural state, that's going to deliver significant benefits to biodiversity. But the outcomes to biodiversity as they're creating a new ecosystem will depend on the species used, the state of the landscape prior to the intervention and the scale at which biodiversity benefits are measured. So it might be a good idea to establish a plantation on a very, very degraded landscape if this helps native vegetation to regenerate or if it takes pressure off natural biodiversity forest elsewhere. But if you put a non-native tree plantation on a naturally biodiversity forest or in a peatland or so forth, the outcomes for biodiversity are going to be very poor and there is evidence all over the world that this is happening. So to be very clear, nature-based solutions are these very place-based partnerships between people in nature. And there simply isn't, as Bob said, one intervention that can somehow work for everyone in every place. But there are these four broad principles that can guide investment, that can guide broadly speaking policy and practice. There is deepening consensus about the critical importance of protecting, restoring, connecting a very diversity of ecosystems across landscapes and to adaptively manage them and to have them led by local communities. And it's also for the broad range of benefits they bring beyond carbon. And there's also very strong agreement that nature-based solutions are not an alternative to keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Now as public policy and as the public and policy interest in nature-based solution is growing rapidly, we are promoting these guidelines. To encourage their broad adoption by businesses and governments. And the goal really is to ensure that all this potential investment climate finance in nature-based solutions is channeled to the best biodiversity-based people that are community-led nature-based solutions. And it does so in such a way as not to distract from the urgent need to decarbonise the economy. And so to build this momentum around this and to run up to the COP26 event in November, we're now inviting additional signatories from research conservation development organisations across the globe. So if you are one of those and concur with with what I've presented today, then please do get in touch. Okay, thank you. Thanks very much. That was really interesting. And I particularly enjoyed your point about the need to include disadvantaged groups. And I probably should say we were due to have the fifth speaker today who represent the indigenous viewpoint from the people's, sorry, from the Forest People's Programme. But unfortunately, we couldn't be with us due to other commitments. But we're going to move on to our third speaker now. So our third speaker that we have with us today is Camila Zepeda, who is Director-General for Global Affairs in the Mexican Ministry of External Relations. She's in charge of promoting, guiding and coordinating Mexico's position in multilateral forums on transversal issues such as environment and natural resources, climate change, 2030 agenda for sustainable development, financing for development and food security. She is Mexico's Chief Negotiator for Climate Change and Biodiversity and the country's focal points, the UNFCCC and CBD, as well as the National Focal Points of the United Nations Convention to combat desertification. So please, we're looking forward to hearing what you have to say on this issue. So thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation and very happy to share some of what we've had doing in Mexico because as you mentioned, I'm focal point for the three conventions and in that sense, we have promoted at all international forums the need to create synergies between those three real conventions and we believe that a way that we can tangible achieve this is through the implementation of nature-based solutions as one of the most cost effective and has the most multiple co-benefits to tackle not only climate change but also to avoid loss of our biodiversity. And so nature-based solutions with an ecosystem-based approach are in fact at the core of our international climate actions and moreover of our domestic policies. For instance, at the international level, the past year we co-led with Canada the action track of nature-based solutions of the Global Commission on Adaptation which was a one-year period effort that ended at the January Adaptation Summit. And within this framework, Mexico organized the dialogue of indigenous peoples on climate change, biodiversity and desertification with a specific focus on nature-based solutions. And it was a very enriching process that gave us an insight on how different communities and particularly indigenous peoples have always built their societies in harmony with nature. And we heard from them that all solutions are nature-based. And so we have taken these messages to the secretariat of the three real conventions for their timely follow-up as mentioned by Natalie because nature-based solutions must be designed, implemented and managed in partnership with indigenous peoples and local communities. And so we have been very vocal on each of these fronts that we need their voices, we need their representations. We have seen that, for example, in UNFCCC, there's already a platform but there's still much more work to do in biodiversity and particularly on the certification front. And so we are keen on working with them and making sure that this is essential for nature-based solutions implementation. And also following our international commitments and our engagement, we are seeking that this vision is aligned with our public policies, our legal frameworks and with all restoration, conservation and climate actions. To begin with, nature-based solutions are included in our updated national determined contribution which we submitted in December 2020 to the UNFCCC. And it outlines our commitment of nature-based solutions in order to meet our adaptation and mitigation goals. And we have also incorporated nature-based solutions in our national adaptation policy and more importantly, it is outlined in our general law of climate change with the aim to prevail over time and overcome administration changes. So as you see, it is our core legislation to include nature-based solutions. And in order to make it consistent, we have worked throughout all of our federal environmental institutions and working with other ministries that are not in the environmental sector such as agriculture, forestry, drylands to make sure that we are tackling and making the most of these measures as we believe that nature-based solutions can help face all of the environmental economic and also social challenges that we face. And for example, through the implementation of the sustainable agro-silver pastoral systems, we can avoid land degradation while also promoting conservation and restoration of soils and ecosystems, also reducing drought of water sources and favor mitigation through carbon capture and storage. So this is an example of how nature-based solutions can have multiple co-benefits and can also add up to mitigation actions and not a greenwashing concern as we have heard. There's quite a few countries that are pushing back on nature-based solutions. We still believe that there are definitely not necessarily an additional option that would undermine the efforts on mitigation, but that they can add up to what countries are already using to avoid green gas house emissions. And we have seen that in regions like Latin America and Europe, this land restoration is also an excellent tool for a sustainable economic recovery from COVID-19 and particularly through the enhancement of food security. And I wanted to share another successful project on nature-based solutions, which is the protection and restoration of mangroves. So these types of ecosystems are natural solutions to climate change, and they also generate a wide range of environmental services, such as erosion control and water purification. And a few years ago, we were able to restore 16 hectares in the state of Campeche. And after conducting a diagnosis in 2020 in the same region, we're hoping to increase this number to 40 hectares. And this has been a very successful project that has a participatory process with local communities, making sure that both men and women are deeply involved in this forest, in these efforts. And what we have seen is that by restoring mangroves, we are protecting our communities. We are protecting the habitat of many species and well, simultaneously contributing to carbon capture and storage and risk reduction. So there's a few examples of how nature-based solutions can help in our fight against climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation. And so we see that this potential should be leveraged, and we should aim at bringing to a much larger scale, because there are many benefits that we can take. And we do see that this broad picture on common points on restoring ecosystems and habitats, lands or soil recovery, carbon capture, also contribute to poverty reduction. So we are convinced that nature-based solutions are essential and that we need to create synergies between sectors, between actors and between the three real conventions to enhance the benefits for people. But what we are always saying is that in all of these ideas and designs, we must ensure that we have a gender perspective that our environmental policies have safeguards for human rights, because we do believe, as mentioned, that we need to bring on board those most vulnerable and particularly Indigenous peoples and local communities. Thank you very much for letting us share Mexico's experience with nature-based solutions. Thank you very much. That was a really interesting perspective. Good to hear on what Mexico is doing on this front. So our final speaker today is Simon Sharp, who is the Deputy Director for Policy Campaigns in the COP26 unit of the UK Government Cabinet Office. Before this, he was head of International Climate Change Strategy at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. He has previously served in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with postings in China and India and led on Climate Change Strategy, the run-up to the Paris Agreement. So Simon, please with you fill us in on what COP26 is planning on this front. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. Really, really great listening to the other panelists and always hearing Bob is just a reminder of the seriousness of the challenges that we're facing. Bob said every half a degree matters. And it's worth remembering that whatever global emissions pathway we end up going down, we can't be sure exactly how the climate system is going to respond. There's always a range of uncertainty. And so to meet the goals that the international community has agreed, limiting climate change to below two or if we possibly can below one and a half degrees, we not only need to move incredibly fast and act strongly, we also need to, to some extent, be lucky. So it's quite a sobering challenge. And to give another number that puts it in perspective, if we're going to be on a pathway with a good chance of limiting warming below one and a half degrees, then over the next decade, we need to decarbonize the global economy five times faster than we managed over the last two decades. So we need an acceleration times five. So as I think Bob was saying, we need strong targets. We also need strong action. And I would add to that that we need strongly effective international collaboration focused on really addressing the systemic challenges of a shift to a zero emission resilient world. And I think people, Natalie mentioned, if we're talking about nature-based solutions, then we have to make sure it's not a distraction from other things that need to happen. And it's not greenwashing. And I think that's absolutely right. So in a way, I'll say something that responds to both of those. First, absolutely right. Let's make sure it's not a distraction. Land use accounts for about a quarter of global emissions. That's no reason not to address the other three quarters. And so for COP26, as well as pushing countries on their economy-wide targets on emissions reduction, aiming for net zero, and similarly strong action on adaptation and resilience and on finance, we're also pushing on three of the largest emitting sectors of the global economy, the power sector, the road transport, and land use. And so just to address the point about fossil fuels, in the power sector, there's a huge opportunity to get out of coal, really kicking coal out of the global power sector and shifting to renewables. And in road transport, there's a really great opportunity to get oil out of the global economy by shrinking its biggest market very quickly, which is transport, moving to zero emission vehicles. So those are two things where we are trying to convene and catalyze stronger action and stronger international collaboration. But to move on to nature or land use, I want to talk just briefly about forests and agriculture, the two main sources of emissions of land use emissions. They're about half of the meat. So deforestation still being driven overwhelmingly by land use change and agriculture being the main reason for that. And this really is an international problem. A huge proportion of the tropical deforestation is being driven by internationally traded commodities and production of those commodities, things like soy, beef, palm oil, cocoa, and some others. It's a relatively small number of commodities. And what makes it so difficult to prevent that deforestation is that the value of those traded commodities is the value of that trade is about 100 times the finance that goes into protecting those forests. So in many ways, there are huge rewards for destructive activity. And we don't really have a chance of stopping deforestation, which is happening at the rate of a football pitch every second or two, unless we can align those trade flows with incentives to protect forests, not chop them down. So it's possible to see a way through this, but it's not something any country can do on its own. In the countries that are major consumers of these commodities, you need some sort of import standards that ensure what you're importing is sustainable to the maximum extent, produced sustainably. You really need those to be aligned with the laws and policies in the producer countries as well. And for that alignment to happen, for that to be possible to implement, you need traceability and transparency along that whole supply chain. And crucially, as Natalie was saying, the solutions have to benefit local people and local communities. Otherwise, they have absolutely no chance of sticking. And so you have to support the millions of farmers, producers of these commodities, helping them produce sustainably, move up the value chain and make a good return from trade. So those are pieces that we think it is possible to bring together. There is precedent for this in the way the world has gradually got to grips with the timber trade. There's a system that the EU has been at the heart of, but to some extent has been emulated by China and the US that does play standards on imports, does do that in partnership with producer countries and has begun to shift global markets towards sustainable timber. So that is the kind of approach that we think we need to replicate for the other major deforestation causing commodities. And to do that, we've created something we've called the forest agriculture and commodity trade dialogue. And we've brought together in that the largest producer and consumer countries of each of the key commodities. So that includes Brazil, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, European Union, US. It's quite a collection of countries that are influential in this part of the economy. And have a great deal of common will, I would say to address the problem. We know it's a long game, but we hope to make some real steps forward by COP26. If people want to see more information on that, you can look on the website of the Tropical Forest Alliance, which gives more information and also says how you can help. Second thing, agriculture. Camilla was talking about how sustainable agriculture can avoid land degradation and also reverse it. But at the moment, we're really spending a lot of money in the wrong way. The top 50 agricultural producing countries in the world spend something like $700 billion every year on agricultural subsidies. And in many ways, those subsidies are incentivizing destructive practices. Only about 5% of all that money incentivizes protection or regeneration of ecosystems. So we think there's a huge shift that needs to take place in those incentives and those public policies. The UK, as it happens, is going through that process domestically, having left the EU's common agricultural policy. We're now redesigning our own approach to supporting farming in the UK. And that gives us a chance to look at how do incentives and subsidies contribute to regeneration instead of destruction of ecosystems. So for COP26, we've pulled together a group of countries working with the Food and Agricultural Organization, the World Bank, the UN Food Systems Summit to try and intensify and accelerate the exchange of best practice globally and accelerate that shift towards sustainable agriculture. So those are two critical parts to the problem. I'd just say a word as well about finance because Bob was talking about the importance of valuing nature and we very much agree. And we think there's a great deal of logic in making sure that all significant financial decisions take into account the effects that they could have on relevant natural systems. In other words, we don't wanna be making investments that destroy natural capital. Camilo said, all solutions are nature-based solutions. In a way, that's true of our economies in general. All economic activity is based on the natural systems that support it. So if we're making investments that destroy those natural systems, we are undermining our long-term economic potential. That was one of the important conclusions of the Dasgupta review of the Economics of Biodiversity, which the Prime Minister commissioned. And so that understanding and the implications of that for how we make financial decisions is something important that we are trying to share internationally. So in summary, we've got an absolute mountain to climb but there are hopeful precedents for the kind of actions countries can take individually and the ways they can work together internationally to accelerate change. So for the next sort of five-year period, what we hope COP26 will set up is a period where we have clear goals. We have really strong consensus on what we're trying to achieve both on biodiversity and on climate change. We have strong action from countries and from all the other non-state actors as well. And we have really strong and effective international collaboration to accelerate progress. Thank you. Thank you, Simon. And thanks very much to all our speakers. I was sensing a few common themes there in terms of ensuring that nature-based solutions are a supplement rather than a substitute to fossil fuel cuts and ensuring that stakeholders across the board, especially those who are disadvantaged are included in discussions. So I think those are two really important points. We're gonna move on now to the Q&A segment of this session. So I would like to invite anyone that has any questions at all, please just post them in the Q&A box and we will try to get to them. We've got quite a lot of time for questions now. So we should have no problem answering any queries or questions that you have. So I'll start with a question in the Q&A box from Ebony Holland. She says, thanks to all presenters. A question on how to leverage the big meetings this year to progress nature-based solution efforts. What will COP 15 and COP 26 need to land in order to enable strong action for high-quality nature-based solutions that deliver for climate, nature and people? I'm sure everyone has something they would like to answer to this question. So I'll start with Bob and go through all the speakers if that works. Thank you very much. Yes, clearly what I would like to see is that governments around the world will address the issues of climate change and biodiversity together. So when they send a negotiating team to COP 15 and they send a negotiating team to COP 26, those negotiating teams have actually worked together to make sure that the goals they have for biodiversity and for climate change, they're consistent. And it was more important than the goals and the targets they're going to talk about at COP 15 and COP 26 is what actions are governments willing to do. I mean, let's be quite honest. We missed the 2010 biodiversity target of Holt and Restored Biodiversity. We missed all of the all-overmade progress. We missed all of the ITC targets in 2020. And people are talking about more ambitious targets without saying and analyzing why they failed on the original targets. At the moment, the current pledges, not the ones that have come out in the last few months stimulated by the EU, the UK and Biden, but the original Paris pledges put us on a pathway to three to four degrees Celsius, not one and a half to two degrees Celsius. So we've got to actually have what actions will be taken in both. Now, I was very pleased by the G7 Communique. There's a lot of things missing in the G7 Communique and it's only a subset of countries, of course, but they did recognize the need to work on these two issues together. That's a major step in the right way. I've also seen in the public, in the private sector, the World Economic Forum, the World Business Council on Sustainable Earth, the big leading companies are also talking about both climate change and nature. So there's a good recognition now of working together, but boy, we do have to turn the rhetoric into actions, monitorable actions. Thank you. And Natalie, do you have anything to add to that? Well, not much. I don't think absolutely the focus needs to be on action and I would highlight an additional thing is to say that we need a parents-compliant finance sector. We need to not lock ourselves into investments, which are going to continue to erode the biosphere and the climate system, ending perverse subsidies being a big one, but there are many other aspects of that. And that seems to be like a really fundamental one, breaking the link between agriculture commodities, cleaning up to global supply chains, and of course, the whole piece around mandatory due diligence, you know. So to identify, assess and mitigate climate-related risks. So I mean, there's lots to talk about, but I think that's like a massive piece that needs to be addressed. Thanks. Mila, if you've got anything to add from your perspective in Mexico. Thank you. Just mentioned that with all this information that we have on A2B Solutions, I think we need to show the co-benefits to the private sector because we need more resources going to these very cost-effective projects and particularly resources going to local communities because as federal governments, it is easier for us to access to the multilateral institutions, to the regional banks, but then for actually the states, the local municipalities that are in charge of implementing most of this are having a hard time to getting this project on the ground. So it is important to also encompass the efforts with a private sector. Finally, Simon, do you have anything to add to what the husband said? Sure. I mean, most of what I said was about how do we use COP26, which is one of these big events to make progress, but just to try and be a bit more specific in one or two places, I agree with Bob completely. We've got a lot of targets in the right place already, in fact. We now have something like 70% of the global economy covered by net zero emissions targets, which are mostly around about the year 2050 plus or minus. And as Bob said, we've had some pretty tough targets on biodiversity before but failed to meet them. So actions are overwhelmingly important. And I was talking about FOIS, I think some of the critical actions to take there to do with import standards in commodity consuming countries, laws and regulations in commodity producer countries, information sharing to support transparency and traceability between the two, and finance and investment to support smallholder farmers in moving up the value chain. In those other sectors, I was talking about which we've prioritized as COP26 presidency. In the power sector, there's an overwhelming need to cancel plans for new coal plants. Coal is becoming really uneconomic as well as dirty, bad for air, bad for health, really a bad bet. And over the last five years, countries canceled plans to build about 900 gigawatts of coal plants, which is equivalent to 10 times the UK's power capacity. There's still about 500 gigawatts planned and that's really 500 gigawatts of bad investment so that needs to be canceled as soon as possible. And at the same time, you need a lot of regulatory changes in power systems around the world. If you make the right changes, you get the private investment, you get renewables deploying very, very quickly and becoming very, very cheap. So that's the kind of action we need there. And in transport, there's a rapidly accelerating shift going on from petrol and diesel cars towards electric and to a lesser extent hydrogen vehicles. And really regulations and incentives can be enormously effective in accelerating that. When we're encouraging countries to commit to 100% of new car sales being zero emission by 2035. And of course, anyone that does that needs to move quickly on to thinking about trucks as well. So plenty of other actions we could talk about, but those are some of the important ones that we need to get. OK, thank you. And we're going to move on now to a question from Sam Zadel for Natalie. He or she says, how does Natalie feel about nature-based solution accreditation? Can we rely on organizations like Gold Standard to ensure nature-based solution projects we invest in meet the four principle guidelines that you've outlined? So this is an important, very important integrity question. And there are two components of integrity around nature-based solutions. This is the integrity of the investor and the organization that's channeling funding towards projects and the integrity of the projects themselves. So the focus of this discussion has been around what integrity of the projects look like. So biodiversity-based people led, local communities engaged, all of those things that are encapsulated by those four guidelines. But of course, we also need to vet the investors. We need investment coming from those with ambitious, verifiable carbon decarbonization plans. Otherwise, it's greenwashing. So I think there's a really important role for robust science-oriented or evidence-oriented boundary organizations that can do that two-way process. And it's not, when it comes to the integrity question, yes, the IUCN Global Standard is a very, very useful starting point. That was the product of a two-year rigorous consultation process. And I think they're very, very good. The idea is to improve them through testing in the field across the world. So that's a dynamic process. We should all be engaged. So that will go some other way. And then, but obviously, there's also a need for bringing together the latest science on how we map and monitor biodiversity and how it's responding to climate change. And that needs to feed into it as well. So it really is going to take up a massive collaborative effort between the research and practice communities to get this right. And it's no one organization that should be responsible for this, although there are discussions around that at the moment. So yeah, that's how I would answer that question. But probably my colleagues have other things to add to that, too. Does anyone like to add to what Nancy was talking about just then? No, I think what Natalie said makes eminent sense. We need to be able to certify good practice, basically. And that's also what was mentioned by Simon in how do we get sustainable standards that import an export? I think it's extreme. I would like to make one comment. And that is one thing that makes me a tad nervous is for many governments and many in the private sector, they keep focusing on net zero. Now, there's no question in my mind, net zero is needed by the middle of the century. But what it's done, it's taken the eye off what we need to do now. The real issue is how to reduce emissions between now and 2030, not how do we just get to net zero by 2050? Because if we don't act now and to actually get on a 1.5 pathway, which I think is impossible, I'll be quite honest with you, you need to reduce current emissions by about 50% by 2030. Even a two degree pathway needs a 25% here. But the current pledge is not some of the new ones from the EU and the US, which may or may not ever come to pass. They put us on a pathway, as I said earlier, three to four degrees Celsius. So what the focus must be on what can we do between now and 2030, not rely on these negative emission technologies in the middle of the century, many of which are untrue and economically, socially, and environmentally. So I really would hope that our COP 15, one will really focus on anti-cop26, obviously. What can we do now? What actions can we do that are monitorable and verifiable, basically, in that transition to a low carbon economy and to conserve and restore biodiversity? And obviously implicit in what I said, I think that, to me, one of the most important things is reducing these perverse subsidies around the world, see if we can get agreement on that, and start to agree that we'll use natural capital in decision making. Those could really make a big difference. They're not technologies. They're policies that can stimulate technologies and behavior change. OK, great. Natalie has to shoot off in a minute. So there's one more question for her that I would like to direct to her if I can. It's related. So it's from Kim Bauer Richards. How can we secure, I think, I mean, how can we ensure that nature-based solutions do not turn into greenwash, especially at the local level by business and culprits of high greenhouse gas emissions? Are you planning some form of local level guidelines in addition to the four principles that you outlined? So you can answer that. And then I know you have a question. I think I kind of answered that in my last intervention. I mean, I think we need these really robust boundary organizations that do that adjudication, that do the due diligence on the investors, as well as ensure that those projects in which the investments are being made have at least high potential to deliver for local people for biodiversity and for climate over the long term. Non-trivial tasks to do that, but there are some broad lines in the sand which I've identified. And I think in terms of the, as I say, so again, before the IUCN Global Standard is a fantastic starting point. And we need to sort of, yeah, enable local businesses to be able to sort of trial those. And lots of tools are being developed to enable local organizations to try and monitor and evaluate the outcomes of their interventions. But obviously in a rapidly warming world, what good looks like is changing. And so that whole mapping and monitoring over time is a really important one. And we have to know and acknowledge that learning by doing is a thing, an important thing. And one thing to add, I think, that hasn't come up or has come up, but I just wanted to say something about it as well is that there are so many communities out there, particularly in the global south, we're just getting on and working with nature and they're building their own resilience by working with the natural world. And it's important to learn from them. We in the global north have a lot to learn from those communities. And I think really engaging with them and helping to share their understanding about how best to work with their ecosystems in this climate, especially those communities in parts of the world that are used to variability and like ours perhaps. So I think an important role and something that I think is good to happen this year while the world is looking at us is to really spot by some of those examples of good practice. So sharing those examples is really, really important. I'm very sorry, I have to leave. I know there's lots of other really good questions coming in, but if people do wanna reach out to me in the Nature-Based Solutions Initiative, I'll try and respond to their questions. Thanks very much for the opportunity to speak to them. Good luck with the rest of the session. Thank you very much for your time. Bye-bye. So we'll move on now to a question from Clement Messivier. And I think this is probably a question for Simon. How can governments like the UK better integrate nature and nature-based solutions in the formal UNF triple C process? And at COP26, how to better integrate nature in the text and decision-making coming out of the process is in addition. So if you wanna have a go at answering that one, if you can. Thanks. Well, that's a tricky one. I think it's helpful just to think about, well, what does the formal negotiating process do? And what does it not do? And needs to be done alongside that in different ways. What it has done in recent years, ever since we went about the Paris Agreement, it took a different tack. It's done a good job of building international consensus around goals, around what are we trying to achieve? By letting go of the earlier attempts to sort of negotiate to carve up of the global carbon budget, it allowed countries to decide for themselves what they were gonna do and share that with each other. And to some extent put pressure on each other to do more. And in some ways, we've seen that be surprisingly effective. That most people probably wouldn't have guessed five years ago, that at this point, we now have, as I said, 70% of the global economy covered by net zero targets. And the G7 countries, which make up about 50% of the global economy, all have 20, 30 emissions reduction targets that are pretty much in line with 2050 net zero as Bob said, it's incredibly hard. It amounts to halving emissions within the next decade. But the G7 countries are actually in that zone. So in some ways, that pretty light-touch norm-setting process has had some significant effects. But what it doesn't do through the formal negotiations is agree a lot of the practicalities of how countries will actually meet those goals. As we've been saying, targets are only met through action and that process of agreeing text, it doesn't actually specify what particular actions countries need to take. So that, and for good reason, because if you really want deep agreement, then you can't always achieve that between 196 countries with a wide range of differing interests. And in fact, you don't need to either. I've been talking about road transport. There are only three rule-setters that cover half the global car market. That's China, the EU and the US. In fact, they cover about 60% of it between them. So if they all agree what to do and take actions aligned with each other, they can shift investment throughout that global industry extremely quickly. And they can and should also support other countries in making that transition. So you don't need 196 countries to agree everything. I think this has been a long way of answering your question, but you don't necessarily need negotiated text that says everything you'd like to hear about nature. What you really need is the right countries collaborating in the right kind of way. Bob, did you have something you wanted to add to that? No, I would agree with Simon. I mean, I originally, a long while ago, liked the sort of prescription of the Kyoto Protocol, but it would be impossible to negotiate now. There's no way the US could ever sign up to something like that. And no one probably China, Brazil or a bunch of. And so I think the approach in Paris was an innovative and a good step in the right direction. And as Simon said, if you get the right ensemble of countries who are powerful in certain sectors to move ahead, I mean, I think language could encourage certain things and say eliminating subsidies should be considered, not prescriptive, incorporating natural capital, a useful thing to do, et cetera. So one could sort of point out the types of actions possibly, but don't try and make them prescriptive. They would, you know, to be honest, it won't work. So one is relying on the goodwill of countries. In fact, when you look at all the conventions, there are no strong compliance mechanisms. How do you actually force a country to do something? It may say we will achieve something, but you can't force it, do you have a trade war? Certainly not going to go to war. And so this is the point. All of these big conventions where the stratospheric ozone, the Montreal Protocol, which has been very successful, they're all based on the good faith of countries working together. So I think basically what Simon said is actually the best way forward, basically. Subgroups of countries. Now you've got to make sure that it doesn't work to the disadvantage that are not those that are not part of the club. Some of the small island states, some of the poor countries in Africa and other parts of the world. So you could get, you know, half a dozen big powerful countries to decide something, but hopefully they would take into account other sensitivities of poor countries. Thank you. I just wanted to add as well that Camilla also had to leave due to commitments that she had, but we're still taking questions for Simon and Bob for the next 15 minutes or so. So moving on now to a question from Catherine Odell from Christian Aid. She asks, what is the most useful thing that ordinary people, quotation marks, can do to press for the best outcomes in terms of nature-based solutions? So either of you can kick off with that one if you feel comfortable. All right, very straightforward. Vote for politicians actually care about these issues. Rarely are environmental issues the key issue in a national election or even local election. And so when you, when you vote, whether it's for a local council or if you're in the US for a mayor or a state government or the national government, vote for people that care. The point to make here is issues like climate change and biodiversity loss are not simply environmental issues. They are economic issues. They're development issues, security, social, moral and ethical issues. So when people start to realize these issues are not simply caring about hugging trees, et cetera, they actually affect their lives and it will affect their children's lives. The first thing to do is use your vote sensibly. Second one is let the private sector know that you care that goods and products, goods and services are sustainable. And then at the more limited level, make sure we don't waste our food, our energy, our water. Think what is a good healthy diet for you but also, which is not saying you need to go vegetarian or vegan but a more balanced diet with vegetables and fruits. It will also be good for your diet, also good for the environment. So it really ranges from use your vote, use that your power as a consumer and then the individual things you can do to sort of conserve and not waste these vital commodities. I don't have anything to add to that. That was a great answer. So not much to add, but a little. Bob already mentioned sort of use your power as a citizen and your voting power, which is part of that, and use your power as a consumer, including your buying power and also your ability not to waste stuff. By buying power, I mean, for example, you can choose a electricity supplier that only produces from zero emission power generation. I do that, you could buy an electric vehicle, I don't do that because I can't afford one yet but you can afford one, you can do that. The one thing I'd add is also use your power as a professional person. Whatever you do, think about where is your point of leverage, your unique point of leverage in the systems that need changing, whether you're a teacher or a journalist or an architect or a vehicle mechanic, whatever you do, there will be some way that you can help accelerate these transitions that other people can't do. And that's a really important thing to think about. Great, thank you, that's really interesting. And we've got another interesting question here from Catherine Brown. She says, do you have any views on how we can better get the message across on the need to support nature resilience to minimize a ticking time bomb with emission releases from degraded peat or the effects of wildfire? There is a big debate going on about sequestration and offsetting the instance in the climate community but not on ensuring we protect the stock of carbon stores that are already there through adaptation, which is equally needed. So, Bob, do you have a response to that question on the ticking time bomb and emissions releases? Not a very good one. I mean, I think on emission releases, one of the ones that we get most worried about from a climate change perspective is actually the melting of permafrost leading to large methane emissions, basically. And methane is a very strong greenhouse gas per molecule. And this is one issue of the melting of permafrost, the release of methane that could lead, I wouldn't call it a runaway climate effect, but it could certainly amplify the climate effect. But also we do need to manage our forest systems, our grasslands, our peatlands, so that they become sinks for carbon, rather than net sources. So we do need to manage these really carefully. The issue of wildfire, of which I'm definitely not an expert, definitely not, is a tricky one. Most natural systems have wildfires. They actually help to regenerate biodiversity. And I know in sort of big national parks in America, there's this interesting tension of to what degree do you control wildfires, to what degree do you manage them, to what degree do you let them go? I'm not an expert on it, but a lot of thinking is being given to these sorts of issues, both by the scientific community, but of course by the land managers. And this is where the science community working with land managers, and of course with governments to get the right policies in place. It needs everyone to be part of that solution. Simon, do you have anything to add on peatlands? In particular, I know it's a big focus point for the UK. I'm glad you asked that question to Bob. But can I actually jump in with a question for Bob? Yeah, sure, go for it. Thanks, Bob, you were just mentioning some of the feedbacks in the climate system, like permafrost storing. And generally, in the climate system, as it is at the moment, there are more reinforcing feedbacks than balancing feedbacks, and that's bad news. It seems to me that the same is true in the economy in terms of low carbon transitions, but the other way around, that once you get a transition on the way, there are feedbacks that accelerate it, and those are mostly helpful. So you have this feedback between policy, finance, and technology, where you see it, for example, in the UK on offshore wind, where you put the right policies in place, you mobilize the finance, the finance flows into the new technology, the new technology improves, it comes down in cost, it increases its social acceptability, and it becomes easier to have more policies that help deploy it further. And you see this all around the world, and this is why the global deployment of solar power in 2020 was 10 times as much as we thought it was gonna be in 2020, about 15 years earlier. So this is why, as you were saying, actions are so important, because if you take the right actions, you actually quickly find that you can make progress much faster than you thought you could. So I can see that that is true in at least two of the sectors I'm working with, the power sector and road transport. What I find less obvious, and I'd like to ask you about, is in the land use sector, is it possible to generate those same kind of reinforcing feedbacks that accelerate progress towards sustainable agriculture? I think the reason it's not obvious is that you are trying to conserve something, whereas in these other sectors, we're not trying to conserve the fossil economy, we're trying to overthrow it. But when you're trying to conserve natural systems, are you still able to benefit from those kind of feedbacks? A very interesting question, so I mean, I think what you, I mean, without answering a question to start with, I think what you've said is by investing in solar, investing in wind, investing in storage, investing in batteries, once you make those breakthroughs and you can go to scale, the costs come down tremendously. Even 10 years ago, one looked at renewable energy, solar and wind and say, is it ever gonna be practical? It's intermittent, but boy, with storage capability now, batteries that can make electric cars do 300 miles and you can actually charge them in only a half an hour to a couple of hours. It's revolutionized the way we think about renewable energy, the way we think about cars. And I mean, McDonald's proved with hamburgers, if you go to scale, the cost just comes down with scale. Your comment about land juice however, which is your question, I honestly don't know a good answer to it. I'm actually very optimistic that we can produce the food we need in a way that is sustainable. But it's very multifaceted. It'll be very place-based basically. Each location, the ecological context, the social context, the economic will vary from place to place. Now, the first place to make land juice sustainable is we need to stop wasting food. In other words, we waste 30 to 40% of all food produced. So if we can reduce that down to five or 10%, makes a big difference to the amount of food we need to produce in the coming years. The big issue in most small countries in say, Africa, you have small-scale farmers on one to two hectares of land and their problem is rural development. They don't have access to financing for the best agrochemicals appropriate aggregate. They often don't have the appropriate knowledge for agroecological practices. They don't have infrastructure to get the food to market. They've got bad roads. And so when they get a good crop, it wastes in the field. They don't have storage and transport. So the challenges around agriculture to make it more sustainable, a very place-based. And it's obvious, for example, we need better storage for this. It's not a technological challenge. It's just that the money hasn't been put in those sort of things. And the same with financing. Farmers need microfinancing. They have showed the sharp loan sharks in many. So I don't know to be honest with you, I can't answer your question about can you scale things in the same way? I think it needs a lot of governments around the world to really work hand in glove with their farmers, with their foresters. And as you said earlier, now that you've left the European Union, of which, of course, I've got my own views on, you're trying to really look at all your environmental policies and all your agricultural policies. How do you make the British farmer both sustainable but also viable financially? So I think every country is going to deal with these issues separately. So not an answer I know. I just don't know what the right answer is. Thanks, Bob. Thanks. So we've got a comment here from Steve Brown, directed at Simon. I think if we reframe it as a question, it's around the idea of can zero emission vehicles truly be zero emissions if we take a kind of cradle term in the end of that approach. But you know what I mean, so yeah. Cradle to scrapyard. Cradle to scrapyard, yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. I think so. But maybe we don't entirely know. I mean, what do we know? We know that there can be zero emission at the tailpipe, which is the first thing that we need to achieve. We've done that already. Tesla's selling them. They're all over the place. And they're improving in performance really rapidly and coming down in cost. Once we've, well, sorry, it's not sequential. We can work on these different bits at the same time. But that's the part of zero emissions that we can achieve most quickly. The next part is looking at the main materials that go into the car's construction, things like steel and plastics. And decarbonizing the production of those materials is much more difficult. But we do know that in principle, you can achieve that. It's just that's making that happen. The political economy of making that happen is incredibly difficult. It's going to take money. It's going to take policy. It's probably going to take international coordination. But in principle, we can do zero emissions, steel and plastic. Whether if you look at every single material that's in a car and have we figured out now how to produce all of those materials, zero emission, I don't know. I really don't know. There are some things that we'll only figure out as we go along. But it's useful to look at global emissions as a pie chart or a Sankey diagram and get a sense of the relative importance of different sources. And transport is something like 12% to 15% of global GHG emissions by the moment. Large part of that is oil. And so you can make a massive dent in that by shifting to battery powered vehicles. And then industry from lots of different sources is also something like 20% of global emissions. And I think steel and is fine and steel is probably the biggest subsector within that. So we know where the big chunks are. We chase after the big chunks first and once we've made good progress on those, there'll be more resources and more attention that you can focus on the smaller things that are left over. OK, great. So we've got another question here from Richard Newbank. I think we've spoken a lot about this already. But in case anything else that you wanted to add to this topic, he's saying the presentations have given large implications for the role of corporate interests involved in food systems, especially agrochemicals, food training, and retailing. What is the top of your priority list in terms of reform for large transnational monopolies? And so if there's anything that you really wanted to add on this topic, please feel free to jump in. My comment would be that I think that many in the private sector, especially the large multinationals, now recognize that they need to be sustainable, environmentally and socially sustainable, in order to be economically viable. So for example, every year there's the World Economic Forum, which brings together leaders of both business and government in Davos, Switzerland in late January. The year about 18 months ago, when they looked at their risk register, all five issues were environmental. This year, four environmental, which includes nature and climate change, and one was pandemics, because of the COVID-19, the recognition of the impact of a future pandemic. So the fact that the World Economic Forum, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, have now started to recognize they need to be sustainable to be economically viable. So to be honest, I think what we need is government working closely with the private sector to design the policies that will allow the private sector to be innovative. Now there's a lot of people in the world that don't trust the private sector. I believe we have to work with them. They're not all trustworthy, but not all governments are trustworthy either, or not all NGOs. So I think what we need is some trust, where government works hand in glove to design the policies to allow the private sector to be innovative, transition to low carbon, to be sustainable with respect to natural resources. So I think it's a partnership we want, basically, nationally, locally, and internationally. Simon, is there anything you want to add? Sorry, go on. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think if you look at any country that's making good progress on decarbonizing itself domestically, then one of the things they've done is in each sector, the government's gone and spoken to the industry, the people are in that sector, and said, how does it work? What do you think needs to happen to change this? And it doesn't mean that government then does anything the industry tells it to. Of course, there are incumbent vested interests, and some of them resist change. But there are also many industry leaders as well, and constructive voices. And that is where the knowledge is. And you see that happening domestically. If we want to change stuff quickly, globally, then you need to have that same conversation on a global scale. And we've been talking about deforestation quite a lot, and it's a good example of this, that back in 2014, there was something called the New York Declaration on Forests. And lots of the companies involved in the international commodity trade, food trade, they all made commitments to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains and get that done by 2020. Many of them have done really good things and made progress, but it hasn't happened collectively. Well, individually, they found it was impossible to do. And what they have now been saying to governments is, well, look, we can't do this on our own. It's not that simple. You can't look at the problem in such a reductionist way. We'll only be able to eliminate deforestation from our supply chains if you create a level playing field for producing global markets. So that is the job for governments. They have to get together and do that. OK, and we're coming to the end of our session now, but I think I would just ask both Bob and Simon, if you have a kind of last remark you'd like to make on the topic of nature-based solutions, particularly in regards to nature, climate and people that interlink, then please go ahead and make a short statement. Thanks. My first thing would be for both conventions, do not take your eye of moving to a low carbon economy. That's the number one priority, both for climate change and because of climate change's effects on biodiversity, that's the number one effect, in my opinion, or one of them for biodiversity. And then look at the full range of nature-based solutions. See how you can design a project that is good for climate biodiversity and many of the elements of the sustainable development goals, food security, livelihoods, water security, good health for all. But be very careful that you don't get unintended consequences where you try a short-term project that in the short term is good for one of the issues and bad for the other. So it needs very careful design. But to me, the most important is don't take your eye off the near-term reductions in carbon that we need by 2030. Start to conserve and restore as much as possible. Simon? Yeah, I suppose we've both and the other panellists who were here earlier, we've all sort of recognized the severity and the difficulty of the challenge. But maybe it's good to end on a note of optimism if we can. And I would say that many in the climate change community and especially the economists sort of mischaracterized the problem of getting to a zero emission Brazilian economy. For decades, they looked at it as a challenge of burden sharing and assumed it was all about a cost. And how do you share out that cost? And I would say that is not true. The progress that we've seen in in the sectors that we have begun to decarbonize is that actually you quickly get to a point where you can see that the new system will be better than the old. It will be cheaper, it will be better performing, it will be cleaner, it will be lower cost. There'll be different ways in which it is better. And humanity has never moved from one system to another that was worse deliberately. And it's highly unlikely that we're going to now. But what we can do is figure out a better system in each of these sectors and in the economy as a whole and move towards that quickly. And that is a positive sum game. So that is actually something that countries can be very willing to work together on once they've got a clear sight of where they're going. So I think that's what we're trying to do. And that's one thing that gives me some optimism. Brilliant, thank you. So thank you very much to both of you and thanks to everyone for joining us and staying with us until the end of the session. And apologies for the thoughts and questions that we didn't quite get to this time. But hopefully we can carry on these conversations in the months leading up to COP26. So thanks very much. And yeah, good to meet with you today.