Press Conference: Parliamentary Report Launch: Delivering 30X30: Strengthening Biodiversity Conservation in the UK Overseas Territories, UN Convention on Biodiversity - COP 17

Though she be but little, yet she is fierce. I sometimes wonder if there's anything left worth saying that Shakespeare has not already said. And we have a wonderful example of this in the Overseas Territories. Though they be but little, they contain 94% of all the endemic biodiversity for which the UK is responsible. And that's why in the report that we're launching today, this inquiry into delivering 30 by 30 and strengthening biodiversity conservation in the overseas territories. we have tried to focus not only on the great work that is already being done there, but in the ways in which that can be turbocharged and improved. The OTs are home to some of the world's most unique and globally significant biodiversity. Geographically, they're dispersed, and actually, they're home to relatively small populations. The territories contain nearly all of the known biodiversity for which the UK is internationally responsible. So their terrestrial and marine environments support thousands of endemic species, globally important habitats, and some, of course, of the world's largest marine protected areas. which is enabling the UK to meet its 30 by 30 commitments in the marine environment. So critically, the success of the GBF and the UK's enabling of all the 23 targets cannot be delivered unless it is done through the overseas territories and with the overseas charities. You will see from the recommendations in this report how, yes, of course, we have focused on finance, we have focused on the successes, but we have also focused on ways in which skills and capacity building are really important, because the successes have not been by the UK doing things, by the UK telling the OTs what to do, and that was a really important feature of our inquiry. We had in front of us witnesses from the OTs themselves telling us what they found important, and one of the key things that they said to us is, look, unless we have sustained certain long-term funding, What actually happens is the groups that we get together, the skills that we put together in order to conduct this work, if they don't know that they've got a job at the end of the month, or if there's a gap in the funding for up to a year, what are they supposed to do? Inevitably, they have to find work elsewhere, and that expertise is broken up and lost. And that's why one of the key calls that we've made in this report is for that sustained funding, that long-term commitment, because unless that's there, then the certainty that those small teams of people need cannot be sustained, and that undermines the work. So we were also very keen, and one of my regrets is that on this panel today, We do not have a representative from the OTs. And that, of course, is also one of the recommendations that we've met, that representatives from the overseas territories should be included much more in the UK's international negotiations. They should be brought into those negotiations to facilitate what's going on, because they are such an integral part of achieving our success. The final thing that I would point to in terms of governance is the way in which repeatedly all of those, the scientific bodies, the NGOs, the OTs themselves said, look, we have really good commitment from the government. We've got really good commitment from ministers. In fact, one of those ministers is now no longer a minister, but she was there at the time. And there's no doubt of the will and the support. But what they said is, look, government is fragmented in this. And the responsibility lies in the FCDO, the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office. But actually, much of the biodiversity side, the technical side, lies with Defra. And they said, you know, there was a time when there was a minister that straddled both those departments. And many of you here, I know, will remember Zac Goldsmith and the way in which he was able to coordinate between the two departments. And that's why one of the key recommendations, again, that we've made about governance in this report is that actually we should look to have a straddling minister. a minister that has a foot in both camps, that can make sure that government is joined up in its approach and that when people are talking to one minister, they don't feel that another one is being left blindsided. So I hope many of you will have the report, you'll have read it online. There are very few copies that we've printed because we've tried to be as ecological as possible in doing that. But the other thing I would say is that although the title of the report focuses on delivering 30x30, let's never forget that 30x30 target 3 is simply a fence. It puts a protective line around that which in many instances is already degraded ecosystems. Target two, on the contrary, is not a fence. It is a harvest. It's about the restoration of 30% of the degraded ecosystems. So we look at the work that's going on in places like Gough Island to try and restore that degraded ecosystem. So vital, so important, yet so difficult. And that's why sustained funding, that constant clarity about achieving the objective is so important. All of the targets in the global biodiversity framework are essential to achieving this. It doesn't matter whether you're looking at perverse subsidies at target 18. It doesn't matter whether you're looking at extinction of species in target four. We have to understand that this all goes together. And that, again, is one of the features of the report. I've spoken for long enough, so I'd like to open it out to questions, either to me or to Kerry, who was also on the panel, or to Mary from her expertise as the former minister in the department. So there's a roving mic that Steve has. Please just raise your hands. And if you could, when you either ask a question or make a statement, just say briefly who you are and what organization you represent. That would be really helpful. Thank you very much.

Hi, Kate Gillum from AFP. Can you hear me better? Sorry. Hi. In your report, you talk about funding. Obviously, funds are very tight, budgets are tight in the UK, but also in lots of countries that are here today. How are you justifying getting more funding for this when people struggle at the end of the month? If I may, a second question. This is going to be the first sort of big diplomatic environmental event that the Burnham government will be coming to. And I was wondering what your reading of their appetite for environment and climate policies were based on your conversations with them. Thanks very much.

Thank you. I'll take that one. I'll take the first part of your question, maybe throw the second part to my colleagues. You talk about the economic challenges that people are facing. And I think one of the things that this conference is really good at focusing on is that we do not have any economy without the environment. Everything in our economy, the economy is a subset of the natural environment. It doesn't matter whether you're looking at the extraction of minerals or whether you're looking at our food sources, everything depends on the natural environment. And that's why if we want to grow our economy, and I would say let's do that in a way that grows our wealth rather than necessarily GDP, which is simply a measure of economic activity rather than actually wealth, then we need to focus on the fundamentals. And that's what the GBF is trying to get the world to do. So if we are genuinely going to increase the wealth that people have, increase their well-being, then we cannot do that without focusing on biodiversity. And we can't do that in the UK and meet our global commitments, our international obligations, unless we look to doing that also in the overseas territories. But, Kerry, maybe turn to you for the second part of that question.

Yeah, so thanks for the question. You have here a former climate minister and a former nature minister that have sort of been very involved in these discussions. What I would say is, I think, you know, Andy Burnham is relatively new to the international climate diplomacy world. He did a lot of good things as mayor of Manchester in terms of decarbonisation of the city and working with other mayors, but this will be new. I think it was really good that he announced very early on in his premiership that he is going to COP31. I think what's also really good is we will have Miattha Fumbula going as Desne's secretary and leading on the negotiations, but having Ed Miliband in as foreign secretary with, you know, it's obviously very dear to his heart, but he has very much put climate policy as the heart of his foreign policy agenda. So we will see a really big push. And I found that when I was climate minister, having that buy-in from David Lammy, particularly on things like deforestation, but also oceans, was just really, really important to be able to operate on both those fronts. And obviously, Ed is so well connected within that world as well. So I'm hoping that there'll be a really big push when we get to the climate COP. We are going be asking as a group of MPs that are sort of thinking well it's about time that we had a word with the Prime Minister to ask what his objectives would be because he hasn't made clear what he wants to go to achieve but I think tying in with what Barry says the fact that this isn't Just, the environmental imperatives are really, really important, keeping to 1.5 and 30 by 30, but actually tying it in with economic growth, and I saw as climate minister, we are... revered around the world for our expertise in offshore wind, but also a lot of the other technology and innovation. We also ought to be playing far more of a leading role on the financial side, so the voluntary carbon and nature markets, where have we got to in terms of the high integrity principles that we launched at COP a couple of years ago. So those are the sort of things I personally would want to see us leading on, which aren't us making some great sacrifices to the UK for the better good. It's part and part. It is for the better good, but it is also very much in the UK's interest to be leading on this. And I really hope, you know, when Keir Starmer took over in 2024, the fact he went to COP and announced the really ambitious NDC to show that the UK was back on the stage, and you know that the climate consensus has broke down, it was really important that we did that. And just tying it back into what we're saying about the report. I think that the UK has a role to play, probably, you know, more than other countries because we've got the Commonwealth connections, which brings in a lot of the climate vulnerable countries, small island states, but then the overseas territories, meaning we're responsible for so much of the world's territorial waters. You know, it's those things that mean the UK presence at these summits, the Oceans Summit in New York in January as well is really, really significant.

I didn't catch where you were from. A. Agence France-Presse. Okay, super. So the first thing I would say is that we have less money to spend on the environment. We have reduced our aid budget from 0.7% to 0.3%. And I sometimes feel that that has been forgotten and there's a kind of... We need to look at the big strategic picture. It is a 0.3% world, and as a result, Defra's funding for international nature over the next three years is 115 million pounds a year, and that is a roughly a 40% reduction. So that's the context. The second piece is the fragmentation. So you have FCDO leading on some things, you have DESNZ leading on others, and you have Defra where all the scientific expertise resides. And we have colleagues here from Chester Zoo, we have colleagues here from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. All of our world leading science comes through Defra and with this kind of we, I'm sort of still thinking Defra, are seen as this sort of slightly Cinderella department. So I think that's the second thing. However, over the last two years, we have, as a department, produced an overseas territories biodiversity action plan. That is the first time that has ever happened. It is incredibly difficult to negotiate with dozens of small states, especially with the constant churn of elections. So actually, it took ages. I kept saying, why isn't it ready? And they kept saying, there's an election in X island in the Caribbean. And so just the logistics of bringing the overseas territories together is actually very challenging. But now, when the FCDO hosts those overseas territories, nature is now on the agenda in a way that it wasn't two or three years ago. So I think that's a really positive trend, if I can call it that. I would also say, you asked about the Burnham government, we have announced our funding pledge to the Tropical Forests Forever facility, and I think that is deeply significant. I think there was nervousness under the Starmer government about what the optics of that would look like at home, domestically, and the fact that it's a loan facility, you know, all these things are hard to explain to a domestic audience. So I think it's really positive that the UK has stepped up. And Keir Starmer was very clear, he wasn't saying never, he was saying not now. Well, now we're at the point where we're able and we're confident to make that facility available. And I think that's really positive. But I think just to echo what Barry said about the food security, et cetera, I think there's a growing realisation that there is no national security without nature security, and the nature security assessment, which was published in January this year, makes that very clear. And the government the UK government is going to be talking a lot more this autumn about domestic resilience and how to store food and water in the event of some sort of, you know, the power going down or flooding or the sort of heat waves that we've had this summer. Lots of our country is still in drought at a time when we would expect the reservoirs to be filling up. Most the majority, quite a lot of them are still below 50% full and that's deeply worrying. So, we are looking I think there is an understanding and Andy gets that from his time as mayor of Manchester there's no good building tower blocks in the city if the water is running off the moors coming down and flooding them as has happened in Manchester so he's definitely aware of the the need to protect nature.

Next question okay I've got lady there and lady here.

Thank you for this panel. My name is Anna Scott. I'm a reporter at Carbon Pulse. I have a couple of questions for the panel. As it's given the budget cuts, what role do you see for private finance for nature in the overseas territories? And then maybe more specifically, Kerry, you mentioned voluntary nature markets. What role, if any, do you see for biodiversity credit financing nature in the overseas territories? Thank you.

Thanks very much, Luke. Again, I'll take the first part of that and then you specifically mentioned Carrie, so I'll pass over to her for the second. One of the very specific recommendations that we've made in the report is that we need to increase the ability of VOTs to access private finance. And that's not just philanthropic finance, it's blended finance and other ways of making sure that we can turbocharge the resources available to them. So that's very much part of the report and the recommendation that we've made to government on that to work with the OTs in doing that. Absolutely critical because nothing gets done if the funding is not there. You need the skills, you need the resources. in terms of human resources, you need the sound science because everything has to be built on that sound data. But actually, it's getting that funding in. And as Mary and Kerry have already outlined, funding is tight in the department, and that's why this This recommendation that we've made here, I think possibly has even more significance now than it did when we made it just a couple of months ago when we were actually conducting the inquiry. It really is important that we help them access that finance. So thanks for that question. Kerry, pass to you.

Yeah, thank you for the question. It was something of a passion of mine of trying to get the voluntary carbon and nature markets over the line when I was in the department because we're not going to be able to do this just on the basis of public money or philanthropic donations. We do need to have the blended finance. And what I saw was a real appetite, and that's in the UK as well as internationally, for people wanting to invest in this, but they need to make sure that it's a credible investment. And that is partly about getting the taxonomy right. So I think particularly when it comes to the ocean side of things, There's so much focus on like tree planting and I think people know where they are with trees, although there's still that qualitative analysis to be done. I was in Trinidad as Minister where they were using lasers to sort of bounce off the trees to measure the width of the the trunks and the density of the forest that they were seeking to create. So it's not just like 20,000 trees. I don't know if you remember, it was the 2019 general election where every party seemed be in a race if like one party said they were going to plant X million trees, the next party was saying, well, we're going to do another million more. It's not just about the numbers. It's really looking down into the quality of the peatlands in the forest areas, the biodiversity there, everything. So how can you make sure that you measure that? And that's where the scientists and the research that's being done is really important. But then how do you stack up what you're doing? So like, say, around around island states. It's it's partly about biodiversity. It's also about the sequestration. It's about climate adaptation, the resilience, you know, the role that they're playing in preventing flooding. And again, in the UK, if we're doing this, you're saving insurance companies potentially a huge amount of money. And that's why they want to invest in these things. So I think And going back to, you know, on the innovation side, we've seen things like the debt for nature swap in Belize, we've seen blue bonds around some of the places like Seychelles. We ought to be looking at how the overseas territories can also benefit from that. I think one of the problems is, you know, they are very small, inevitably, and one of the recommendations we've made is whether we can work better across overseas territories, perhaps, so that they can join together on initiatives. But I would say, you My view is that we need to show leadership across the piece and then we need to look at how the overseas territories can take advantage of that. Geographically, one of the things that we discuss in the report is the fact that the overseas territories do not fall quite into the category of sovereign states when it comes to applying for finance, but they do not benefit from the climate finance and being able to apply for, say, for ODA or anything like that. to me, say, looking across areas like the Caribbean, it didn't quite make sense that you had some islands that were in one camp and others that weren't. And how do you deal with things on a geographical basis where basically, you know, they're all experiencing similar things?

I think just to add to what Carrie is saying there, if you look at what the report investigated in there around the Sargasso Sea and Bermuda, what you see there is that, yes, there is scope for doing carbon credits, but you do that and yes, people can come in and the finance can flow into the carbon credits related to seagrass and the Sargasso. But What those sargassum mats do is they provide an extraordinary habitat for so many other species. You're talking about frogfish, the nursery grounds for them, dolphin fish, marlin, vital habitats for sea turtles. We've separated out in the COPs you know, the UNFCCC and the UN CBD. But actually, what is increasingly understood is that these have to come together, because it is an ecosystem. And carbon is the fundamental driver of that ecosystem. But it's not everything. And that's why in the carbon markets, you can be doing the finance around the carbon, but creating these huge ecosystem benefits and biodiversity benefits in the process.

And I was saying that is, you want to get as much value into your investment as possible, and that is how do you start, you know, the starting point, I guess, is, you know, biodiversity credits and it's the carbon side. But if you can actually stack up those things, then you get, It's more valuable for the investors, but it also means it's more likely to be protected. I would just sort of say the minister was in Bermuda on the Sargasso Sea and signed the Hamilton II declaration yesterday. So that's, that was obviously a really good step forward.

Yeah. Next question.

Thank you. Hi, I'm Abby from the UK chapter of the Global Youth Biodiversity Network. Our recent report that reviewed the inclusion of youth in our NBSAPs, including our devolved nations and the overseas territories strategy, demonstrated that the overseas territories NBSAP serves and includes young people far better than any other UK NBSAP. While the report highlights that the overseas territories note the importance of items relevant to young people, such as capacity building, are not explicitly mentioned or included in the report, despite their making up a huge population in our overseas territories, having compounded barriers to accessing long-term and sustainable finance and playing a hugely valuable role in delivering the 30 by 30 and other targets. You reference that there are no overseas territories representation on the panel today, but I was wondering what we can learn from the overseas territories and how they have included young people as contributors and leaders in their NBSAPs, not just beneficiaries, for our own implementation of biodiversity targets on the national and international level.

Certainly, what was clear from the evidence that the overseas territories gave us was two things. One, just how important young people are in doing the work here, and that is getting out there, not just as paid people, but also as volunteers in many instances, and the way in which they are driving this. But that led us absolutely fundamentally to the conclusion that skills and capacity building is absolutely vital to the work. But I take your rap on the knuckles that we could have explicitly mentioned young people in the report, and we will bear that in mind for the future. Thank you very much. Next question.

Hi, thank you. My name is Miranda. I'm from a youth land trust called Reserva. My question is, we've just seen that the Burnham government has approved the Jackdaw oil field, and I was wondering how we're going to reconcile this move with your mission to achieve the 30 by 30 target, given how closely connected biodiversity, health and climate change are. Thank you.

Okay, so Jack, do is the guess. field and much smaller than Rosebank, which will be a separate decision, which I think is the big one. I think it's important to say that the decisions, we still have the commitment to no new oil and gas licenses. These licenses were already approved and they had to go back to the drawing board in terms of permits because of the Finch judgment on scope three emissions. I The Minister has decided today that Jackdaw is compatible, that they've managed to make the case, and she has to apply, it's a quasi-judicial process, she had to apply those rules because otherwise we would have been back in court being challenged for it. So I think it's important to say that it's not really a political decision and it doesn't signal where we are, but the commitment is still there, no new oil and gas licences, and I very much hope we stick to that. I also think there's an issue about marine protection in the areas we're exploring in the North Sea, and that's something we have very much bear in mind and indeed around the overseas territories with some exploration around Falklands we need to make sure the marine environment is protected.

Yeah the UK is world leading in having said that it is not going to have any more exploration licenses and I think we need to be mindful of that. Yeah move on to the well final two questions if we can be quick because I know we're running up against time.

Thank you from the Royal Entomological Society, Barry obviously we run the APPG with you for the bees, pollinators and invertebrates. Our own report, which we are launching tomorrow here, shows that species living on islands are particularly susceptible to invasive species. What is the interplay between overseas territory policy and invasive species policy, if you see one?

Can we take the other question as well? I will come back to that in a second.

Thank you so much. from Blue Marine Foundation. The Blue Belt program is probably one of the most successful marine protection programs globally and there are so many learning...

We say precisely that in the report.

Good. And there are so many learnings from the enforcement and the effectiveness of these marine protected areas but we are lagging domestically. Why has it been so difficult and why is it still proving so difficult to get there domestically, especially when It's inexplicably linked to the synergies that you were just talking about with nature and climate targets and across different government departments within UK government.

Okay. First of all, if I can respond to the question on the nature of non-natives in the overseas territories, obviously it is absolutely more critical, if anything, in the overseas territories. You will know that in the report that we are launching tomorrow on non-native invasives and their impact on pollinators in the UK, we specifically make the point that the UK is more vulnerable because it is an island. When you reduce the size of that island to the extent of the overseas territories, that increases the vulnerability. And we've seen this, the instance with Gough Island and the attempt to eradicate mice on Gough Island, which has been so difficult. You talk about specifically the non-natives impact on insect life, and that's entirely the same as within the UK. They can have a devastating effect on pollinators. either by out-competing the existing pollinators or simply by predating on existing pollinators. That is why biosecurity is so important and why the monitoring, identification, data and sound science to see what the dangers are coming in, to be alert to them and then to take early action in remediation is so important. I'm going to pass over, I think, to Mary for the question on the domestic, even though Mary, she didn't do marine in the department, but I'll ask her to give her take on the discrepancy, as you outline it, between the success of our MPA program in the OTs and the less successful implementation of MPAs around the UK coastline.

So I just want to say a couple of things to wrap up on all of this. First of all, on the Asian Hornet, the other thing that's really important is for people to keep their eyes and ears open and tell us when they spot it, because we didn't do that with the oak processionary moth and it is now endemic across Greater London, whereas with the Asian Hornet, we have an army of beekeepers who tell us where they've spotted it and DEFRA will go out and zap it and we've done that with the very successful, finally, the eradication of the Colorado potato beetle so don't think that a few insects coming in and taking over and out competing is a good thing. If our potato crop fails, we've already forgotten the lessons of history if we look back to the Irish potato famine. I just want to say a quick thing on youth which is that the overseas territories have got a GCSE in marine conservation and that was one of the reasons why I pushed so hard for the domestic implementation of our GCSE on natural history, because I felt like there was a sort of disjoint between what young people in the overseas territories were learning about their natural world and the fact that, you know, here everyone's learning about AI and disinformation and, you know, hours on Instagram and actually not understanding what was around them and the living world that was around them, which I'm very excited about that natural history GCSE. On our MPAs, we did, Kerry and I, when we were both on the Environmental Audit Committee, did a report into marine protected areas and we called them paper parks at that point. At that point, a lot of the research was in flight to see what was there. There's a kind of sea blindness around the United Kingdom and in the same way as we're an island with a lot of things happening on it, so the planning space is very contested. you have a similar outcome whenever you try and do a marine protected area. So anecdotally, people would say one scallop fisher objected to this MPA and Defra didn't implement it. So it's sort of disproportionate voice to certain communities. I think that is changing. I think that is changing as the fishers see the mackerel fleet, the mackerel going up out of our waters, up into the Arctic, and people really are beginning to I think fishers have always understood what's happening with the fish, but they're seeing the loss of livelihoods and certain shops pulling out of certain fishing stocks. So I think there is an appetite, but as I say, it wasn't my area, but I think we are looking, as we have said, at the ban on, we're looking at the bottom trawling issue, and I know that's something that my colleague, Emma Hardy, who was in charge, and Stephen, who is now the Marine Minister, is very keen to act on.

Look, we have to wrap up now because I think the press room is going to be taken for another event. I just want to say finally that I'd like to thank the governments of Gibraltar, St. Helena, St. Helena National Trust, the National Oceanography Centre, the RSPB, the Great Blue Ocean Coalition, all the territory governments for the evidence and the oral evidence and written submissions that they made to us. This report could not have been done except in collaboration and if there's one thing that I hope people will take away from the report it is that there needs to be better collaboration because it's that collaboration that has enabled the success to date and that will continue to turbocharge it to meet our commitments in the future. Thank you very much.