Dr. Deirdre Lynn:

The third national biodiversity action plan covered the period 2017 to 2021. What is very interesting is that something happened in 2019 on the back of the global assessment that was produced by the intergovernmental panel for biodiversity and ecosystem services. Nationally, we also produced our assessment reports from which Mr. Bleadsdale showed some of the results. A lot of it started to seep into the consciousness of people. Nature started to be talked about more and we started to get more concerned about.

On the governance of the third plan, we had a biodiversity working group, which was an interdepartmental working group made up of officials across various Departments. The reporting structure was such that they were reporting progress updates to the NPWS and we were not really going any higher than that to report back on progress. We are strengthening the governance in the next plan. There will be a new and expanded biodiversity working group that is going to include more members, for example, from the Department of Finance, which has committed to looking at fiscal policymaking in respect of the new biodiversity action plan. The plan will be on a statutory footing, so there will also be a requirement for public bodies to report on their progress on the plan. As Mr. Bleadsdale said, we will report the-----