Ms Marie Donnelly:

This week we had a dedicated meeting on biodiversity. We plan to come out with a specific chapter of our recommendations review on biodiversity, probably in October. I confess that one of the messages I was getting from that, which I thought was a good expression, was that biodiversity is an all-of-government and all-of-society challenge. It is hugely important in the area of emissions and what we do to capture emissions acting as a sink. However, biodiversity is of course wider than that. It is about species, animals and plants. It is about invasive diseases and invasive insects coming into the country. It is about our capacity to grow food going forward to adapt to the climate changes coming down the track. The Senator is right on biodiversity. The plan for the nature restoration law is being developed. I think the last time I saw a list of 190 actions in it. One of things we perhaps need to do is prioritise and regroup some of the actions, so we get greater clarity as to what we need to do now and how we are going to it. If it is too long a list, it will disappear into the woodwork. Biodiversity is a key part of what we are looking at and we will come out with a chapter on that in a couple of months.

On the overshoot, the legislation is clear that an overshoot is subtracted from the next carbon budget. On current reckoning, we will overshoot carbon budget 1 to some extent. Carbon budget 1 was a fairly low level. We knew it would take time. We knew it would take time to make the investments and changes in the policies. It was an easier carbon budget than carbon budget 2, but the overshoot for carbon budget 1 goes into carbon budget 2 and, worse still, the overshoot from carbon budget 2 goes into carbon budget 3 and so on. It is important to remember that the carbon budget numbers we recommend are the ceilings. They are the maximum emissions possible. From that maximum will be deducted the overshoot, which then becomes the maximum we can emit. The numbers we have recommended are challenging. They become even more challenging when the overshoot is taken into account.