Dr. Deirdre Lynn:

I will do my best. I am not familiar with many of the building regulations. We are building up capacity within the local authorities with regard to biodiversity officers. We hope to roll out biodiversity officers across all local authorities in the coming years. I think there are only five biodiversity officers at the moment. Hans Visser is the biodiversity officer in Fingal County Council, which recently published a biodiversity plan. Mr. Visser noted that the council only has funding for a portion of the actions it needs to take so we need to look at our resourcing to make sure biodiversity action is undertaken at the local level. We provide some funding to biodiversity and heritage officers but we need to look to all areas to pull in that funding to make sure we take on board local action.

The Deputy mentioned green spaces. Many local authorities are embracing the all-island pollinator plan. My preference would be to appreciate that we have amenity spaces. Obviously, we have spaces where the youth are playing football or Gaelic games but there should also be areas where there is space for nature. They do not need to have massive seed mixes from God knows where. They can just be left. We do not need to have everything so neat and tidy. That is what I would really like to see. I would like to see our communities functioning for different purposes. It is not that I want everything necessarily to be complete wilderness but there should be those little corners and spaces within our urban environments where nature is allowed to thrive.

Local authorities have built up resources relating to climate action. There are climate action regional offices. It would be great to see more of a focus on biodiversity even within the climate agenda. All local authority staff have had mandatory training relating to climate change. I think they all had about an hour and half of such training. I believe there may be moves to try to develop a similar programme for biodiversity and water. Making sure staff in local authorities really understand the issues and solutions they produce for biodiversity at local level would be really excellent. I look forward to seeing this rolled out in the coming years.

I recently purchased a home with a BER of A3, which involves air to heat. We are now seeing financial institutions and companies starting to green their portfolios. I managed to get a really good interest rate based on my BER. It is encouraging that financial institutions are also trying to green their portfolios. There is an EU taxonomy regulation and there will be a dedicated act for biodiversity that should be signed off within the coming year. A lot of these financial institutions would have to make disclosures relating to directions for biodiversity so that is very encouraging. A lot is happening at EU level.