Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his presentation. Our committee is now being asked to examine the report of the Citizens' Assembly on Biodiversity Loss. It makes compelling reading. There is no doubt the intensification of production in agriculture and other industries has had a huge impact on nature. There is a figure thrown around which I have often used. It is that our production and consumption activities are extracting from nature three times what it can restore in a year. That is the direction we are heading and clearly there are consequences from that for all of us and even for the sustainability of many of the businesses doing so. It does not take Einstein to recognise that.

The Minister needs to be commended on the progress being made. As he said, 95% of Natura regions are now subject to regulation. There is a significant shift in the State attitude, with Bord na Móna's title going from brown to green and Coillte's target of 50% of its forestry being managed for diversity, building from the present 20%. There are grounds for optimism that we can make the shift, huge as the scale of the challenge is.

It is crucial people do not feel overwhelmed by the statistics thrown around about the scale of deterioration. They are in this report and we have heard some of them in this debate. That is not to understate the truth of them. We had 500 pristine rivers and are now down to 32, I think. Many habitats are not improving. There is a scale of challenge but if people feel overwhelmed by the scale and do not get an understanding that we can have early wins and make significant changes through the mechanisms the Minister of State is developing, we will set the progress back.

One of the things that worries me most about the debate on the nature restoration law is it has been conducted, to a large degree, with finger-pointing, blame and targeting sectors as the villains of the piece. It struck me when the citizens' assembly report was being presented to Members in the audiovisual room that the emphasis in its work was on listening to those whose behaviour has to be changed in a respectful way and trying to build collaborative mechanisms where people can understand what needs to change, not to divide communities but to unite them in taking on this challenge. It was a strong message to come from those who had attended the citizens' assembly and sat through all its deliberations.

We need to go much further in getting a framework where there is recognition and reward for those we hope and expect to make changes. We have been far too slow to articulate a carbon-farming context where people can see there is a viable living in the traditional way of life, with money coming not only from production of high quality food but also from the way in which they manage the resource at their disposal, most notably land. That is the gap and it is emphasised time and again in this House that our approach to the key sectors is far too diverse. I believe seven Departments and 23 public bodies each has part of the brief for addressing biodiversity loss.

It is difficult to see that as a basis for greater coherence. We must move towards budgetary systems that tell people this is a way in which you can see a viable living for yourself on the land. We must also develop a way to integrate this work. I give a very strong plug for embracing the circular economy as an approach that ought to be at the core of this. The Dutch, who I think are further down the line in many of these areas, have adopted that. The beauty of the circular economy approach is that it looks at the whole supply chain of different sectors from the materials they extract and use, right down to the waste and disposal of products at the end of their life. One can develop, as the Dutch have, a compact for food and other sectors in which you do not point the finger at farmers being accountable for 40% of our carbon budget, as we tend to. You start to look at the food waste we all engage in. It generates probably 5 million tonnes of carbon per year; it is a significant element of the emissions we create. It also looks at our consumption decisions. If we, as a community, were to examine our consumption, our emissions are 75% higher than if we look at our production. There is a narrow focus sometimes in the climate debate, whereas the circular economy debate recognises that our choices as consumers, as well as producers, impact the overall.

The circular economy also has the merit of integrating all of the adverse impacts on the environment, not just carbon emissions. That is where the Minister of State's role in working to restore biodiversity becomes a key pillar of a circular economy approach. The other merit is that it is a problem-solving framework, as opposed to what I think has gained currency, which is setting laws with targets we do not know how we will achieve and then people are berated for failing to reach them. It is a bad context in which to try to bring people with you. The circular economy takes the reverse role. It recognises that everything we do along those supply chains has real impacts, for example, how quickly we discard things, what we do with the materials we discard and how much we recover to reuse in the supply chain instead of putting pressure on these ecosystems which are under such stress. It creates a framework within which all players in a sector can sit down together and address it.

When the Government creates a framework for forestry or whatever, we should not regard significant private investors wanting to be part of that as some way hostile to our objectives. If we do not change the framework in which major companies make investments and we see it being channelled into frameworks we have established, we will be only working at the fringes of the challenge. There is an appetite among industry to make changes to recognise that biodiversity must be restored and that we are not treating nature correctly. Sometimes, listening to the debate in this House, it is said that big business should not be involved in any of these schemes. If big business is not involved in the schemes we are bound to fail to achieve our ambitions.

I look forward to the debate in the committee. It will be quite difficult to tease through the proposals on this matter and find landing zones with feasible policies to bring people with us. That is what we must try to do as an Oireachtas. I commend the Minister of State for the work he is taking on in this area. He has brought greater shape to our thinking about it. I hope that the recognition of the biodiversity crisis will see budgetary frameworks changing to help him to achieve some of the things which are now so important.

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