Dr. Emer N? Dh?ill:

To answer the Senator's business question, on foot of the last national biodiversity action plan, one of the actions there was for a business and biodiversity platform to be delivered in Ireland. That has started. One of Natural Capital Ireland, NCI's, projects is a business and biodiversity platform and the aim of it is to work with businesses to learn from them but also to guide them in relation to the corporate sustainability reporting directive, CSRD, and the impacts that will have, especially on small businesses. The big businesses have the financial and people resources but it is a very big ask for the smaller businesses. How do we get this information? How are we able to resource it? What we are trying to do with the platform is that we have already developed a community of practice to learn about the challenges different businesses have from semi-States to private businesses. Everyone is feeling very challenged around CSRD but we know in particular that it is the SMEs and even the micro-businesses that do not have to report under but are still part of the value chain so there will be an expectation from other businesses just to get some kind of information on impacts and dependencies and again this is something the Government really needs to help with as well, especially for small businesses. Again, the larger businesses should also be investing in this to help the smaller ones.