Ms Sarah Clancy:

A small whole-of-government action that could be taken is the Government could adopt a working definition of what "biodiversity" is.

We have been in meetings where people have said "biodiversity is very important for the tourists" and our guys are going "for all human life on Earth, actually". If simple things can be done, such as where we are using one definition of this and this is what we mean by biodiversity.

Two other things might be worth mentioning. Ireland has signed up to one aspect of the 30x30 campaign, which is that we will protect 30% of our marine areas by 2030, but the aspect to which we have not fully signed up is that we will protect 30% of our land area by 2030. It is very useful in terms of a framework. Coillte, for example, has control or oversight of 7% of that 30% we want to protect, so we already know 7% is in the hands of a semi-State agency. It would be worthwhile pursuing this ambition and then define what we mean by protecting 30% of that land because an audit of what land is owned by the State, what land is vacant and what land is being used should be possible. Again, it is a positive action that links our water quality and land use, which is an emotive use in Ireland, to our climate goals target for 2030.

Declan Owens, a trade union legal activist from the North, has done a significant amount of work with community groups around taking a rights of nature approach to climate action. He has influenced our PPN to the extent that it passed a motion at the plenary that it would like us to do all our environment action from a rights of nature perspective. I will not go into the whole lot; I think everybody present probably knows it, but it would mean accepting that nature is not just something we can extract from to the nth degree but has a right to exist on its own and we are dependent on it. That lens might be useful because it seems to us to be one that people can grasp, possibly more so than referring to a particular subsection of sustainable development goal 11. The rights of nature seems to be more immediately graspable concept for people. Those are a couple of things that have come out our way that might be positive lenses to use.