Professor Yvonne Buckley:

I believe it is the latter. Again, there is the question of scale. There are some things we can only do at national or international level. Some of that research has to be done. We must be able to put forward the most efficient and least-cost, best solutions we can, and I mean not just economic cost but also social and environmental cost. Research is necessary to inform that, as well as the appropriate mapping and data. On the implementation side, we need to know the best methods for doing that and how to get the most bang for our buck at the implementation stage, such as what species, where, how much of it and at what quality it will do the best job for us. Some of that information will come from research, some will come from implementation and some will come from the interplay between research and implementation. We learn as we go along here.

I would love to see the connection between implementation and research hardwired in somewhere. We have to do action research, which is research that is not divorced from implementation but which is knitted in with implementation, so we can learn as we go along with these nature-based solutions. In addition, we can change course if necessary. If we find better solutions, we can adjust and move with those. It takes a long time to improve the quality of functioning ecosystems and to restore ecosystems. Decisions we make now will potentially be with us for hundreds of years. I believe it is a jigsaw or a web of solutions from the local scale all the way up to the national and international scales. I would like to see an ecosystem of research, implementation and multidisciplinarity, to be honest. The Deputy is correct that climate and biodiversity must be addressed together in terms of both the research and the implementation phases. I am using the word "ecosystem" here in two ways: one, in a biodiversity sense and, two, in a healthy ecosystem of researchers and practitioners working together to get the solutions we need.