First of all, thanks, Chair, for agreeing to the slightly later start time. We have been having a bit of a pre-EAC workout in Committee Room 10 next door, which I can tell you is considerably hotter than this Committee Room. I am grateful to the Committee for the slightly later start. This document is a cross-Government strategic assessment developed by analysts and subject matter experts across Government. It was published in January of this year and basically brings together the scientific evidence, the policy analysis and national security expertise to inform our long-term resilience and security planning.

It was a cross-Government document developed by analysts from across the Government. You can see from its title who might have been involved, but it is not produced by a single Department. It was about bringing together that scientific evidence, policy analysis and national security expertise to look at resilience and planning.

It is a convention that we don’t comment on internal machinery of national security assessments or the specific methodologies to formulate them. It is a cross-Government document.

I see it as a cross-Government assessment. It is a cross-Government publication. Obviously, it has some heavy scientific analysis in it, but the power of it is that it does not belong to a single Department.

It was not commissioned by me, so it—

I don’t know. It predates me. It is not something that I commissioned. It is something that I became aware of.

I believe so.

Andrea, do you want to come in on that?

It is part of routine cross-Government resilience planning, but I think it stands as a groundbreaking piece of work, because what it does for the first time is bring biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, pollution and national security together into a single cross-Government assessment and looks at that at a global scale. I do not think that that endeavour has been undertaken before. I am really pleased that it has gathered such significant levels of interest from your Committee, and both here in the UK and internationally, which demonstrates our impact and leadership in this interesting nexus around biodiversity loss. It often tends to be treated as something that happens “over there”—as something that happens to nature, as something outside—but this document looks at the human impacts as well. I feel like that blending of the human, the natural and then the systems approach is quite unique.

In a way, one of the consequences of this report is us looking at strengthening cross-Government co-ordination on climate and nature risks. You are right to say that we launched that taskforce during London Climate Action Week. This is short term, so it is a tangible but time-limited mechanism, bringing together security, military and academic experts to turn evidence into action. It will help close the gap between our ambition and our delivery, provide us with independent challenge. It will look at the key gaps and the most significant climate and nature-related risks to our security and resilience, and identify opportunities and areas of strategic focus for the Government, including where we can shape resilience outcomes internationally. Nature and food representation is essential, and of course water. We have experts on the taskforce—Nathalie Pettorelli and Tim Benton—but my understanding is that other experts will be added to it, and I am continuing to press for strong nature representation on it so that that nature focus is not lost.

At the moment in DEFRA we are looking at land use, food security and climate adaptation and working on the full waste spectrum. I am happy and content that colleagues are chairing the taskforce, but I will expect regular updates, impacts and feedback on it. I think it is about us being in the heart of this, and I am confident that the academic experts that are there will do a great job. What we do know is that the value of pollinators to the UK economy is around £1 billion a year. We have Bees’ Needs, the event in RHS Wisley next week, celebrating pollinators and all the brilliant work happening across the country to try to protect and preserve not just bees but other pollinators; there are dozens of them that get a less good press than bees, so we have to look after the small things that don’t have such good PR. We have also announced today our species recovery fund, which is £60 million—the largest budget allocated by any Government—to protect and avoid the extinction of some of our most fragile populations. That goes from birds like the red-billed chough down, to the glutinous snail, which is extinct in England, to all sorts of exciting northern dune sand beetles. We are really focusing, through our environmental improvement plan, on the actions we are taking to tackle that biodiversity loss and make sure that when we turn up to the climate and nature conferences at the UN this autumn, we are shown to be, and are, playing our part in this global effort.

I was a bit confused about this, so I have gone back to basics on it. I think you asked me this question in DEFRA orals a couple of weeks back and there was this kind of, “Which document is which?” There is a thing called the futures report, and that is a completely separate document. Let’s just go back to what is in the record. The Times reported that the NSA was the conclusion of a 2024 report. I have seen the internal futures document—and my friend, the previous Farming Minister, Angela Eagle, also read it—but only as a result of you asking that question. It was not something I knew about prior to your question.

Let’s just go back to the futures report, because that was a very early piece of work, and it dated from 2022. When I read it, I was a bit like, “Mm”—I was not impressed, frankly. As a non-scientist, I did not think it stood up. It was an internal horizon-scanning document; it was not formal, it was not adopted as Government analysis or policy and it is not part of our assessment. So that is that bit put to bed. This is the trouble when we have documents coming out: we are not quite clear which documents we are talking about. The futures document was not completed or quality-assured; it was internal analytical material. However, documents go through many versions, and we get to version 32 in the end, which is the thing that we put out. We have the thing that we put out, and it talks about the risks from wide-scale ecosystem collapse, from pollution, from boreal forest collapse and from mangrove collapse. All these risks are there for everybody to see. That is bad enough. We have enough to be going on with in the published document.

No. We published our environmental improvement plan in December. We published a land use framework plan in March. As I say, today we are announcing our largest ever three-year species recovery fund. I would strongly counter the idea that we have been sitting waiting for this document to come out before we started shifting ourselves into taking action on this. We passed legislation to clear up our rivers, lakes and seas. We have effectively banned neonicotinoid pesticides. We have taken very strong action across every element of this, whether that is pollution, the entire waste system or food waste collections, which are all about reducing the methane from our food waste bins, which is the global warming gas we can do the most about in the shortest period of time. We have not been sitting around waiting for some scientists to check each other’s homework and then come to us and say, “Oh, Minister, things are really bad.” We know things are really bad. I spent three years as Chair of this Committee and three years as shadow Secretary of State. I have spent the last 15 years of my life, including the five years where I had my mini-sabbatical, talking and working with civil servants at Cranfield University, saying, “Things are very bad. Here is what Government need to do on a policy level.” With this document, it is not suddenly like we have all woken up when it is published and are like, “Oh crap, we had better crack on with things now.” We have been cracking on from day one.

Thank you.

If we look at the actual report, on coral reef collapse it says there is a “realistic possibility” of collapse starting from 2030. We have done a lot of work and overseas programming with our overseas territories on—I can’t remember exactly what it is called, but it is something like spiny coral reef disease. We have been looking at what the resilient corals are that we can take out, put into nurseries and grow as replacement corals as the ocean warms. You heard on the news this morning about the massive marine heatwave that is taking place around the UK and about the octopus coming into Brixham and eating the crabs—all the stuff we like to eat. We are looking at these things through our overseas territories programming, through our global ocean resilience programme and through the various overseas marine funding, which I will ask Ms Ledward to come in and talk about more fluently than me.

I have set up a little taskforce—my own taskforce—that is mainly DEFRA. It is a group of all the civil servants working on this issue across Government and looks at environmental resilience and efficiency in Government. That is very important as well, because we need to look at our own environmental resilience and efficiency taskforce and at what we can do, as Government, as well. So there is a little bit of that going on. I accept that that is going on at a very official level, and that these are very simple projects. There is the circular economy. There are pilot projects in prisons, such as looking at water leaks in prisons, and the MOJ saved £4 million in one year just by finding and fixing leaks. These are really simple things, and they do not sound like a lot, but £4 million off your water bill is a good deal for the taxpayer and a good deal for the environment. In a heatwave, when we are all showering more and getting the paddling pools out, it is really important that Government step up and play their part. In terms of what we are doing across Government, we had the discussion about the climate security taskforce. I would say that this is now talked about in different Government Departments in a way that it was not when I was here in 2019—it was not an item for discussion in the Department for Education, the Ministry of Defence or the Cabinet Office. I think it absolutely is now.

What I can say is that the report as it stands is the one that I am discussing today; the official one that has been released is the one I am talking to today.

Like I say, I was a bit confused about the futures report.

Okay, so that is a separate thing. We cannot comment on internal machinery on national security assessments, the methodologies used to formulate them or the different versions.

I don’t know. I cannot comment on what there is between international intelligence and security agencies on these issues. They would not tell me if they did this, and I could not tell you if they had told me.

I genuinely do not know. What I can say in terms of our international partners is that we have strong relationships with embassies and Governments right across the world. We have a global demand for our expertise to help with how they value and account for nature. We have had a particularly successful partnership with the Government of Ecuador, who as a result of our technical assistance have put nature into their national accounts. There are a wide range of excellent projects. We are working now on global ocean accounting for small island developing states and the people that rely on the ocean for their food—I think 2 billion people rely on the oceans as their primary source of protein. We are trying to get into how we account for that and how they account for that in their national accounts, because it is clear that the primary risk they face is the loss of that food supply. We can talk about particular projects, but not in an intelligence and security framework. But, of course, it is about the security of the lives and livelihoods of the inhabitants of those places.

We set out our international climate finance strategy, ICF4, on 22 June. That set out that nature is a priority for the UK’s international climate finance—protecting and restoring nature, including forests, oceans and coastal, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. That is a key part of the work that I do with Minister White and with Baroness Chapman in a triumvirate way, if I may use that slightly old-fashioned word. The “Chronic Risks Analysis”—a UK document—highlights biodiversity loss as a vulnerability, outlining the impacts on medicine, food security and food supply, because much of our medicine comes from forests and from plants that are at risk of extinction. We are trying to encourage international companies to understand that things that may not have been discovered yet are in these forests and that we have to protect these forests in order to protect the future of new and novel innovative medicines, for example, or beauty products or whatever it may be. So we have put biodiversity loss into our climate finance strategy, and it is part of our “Chronic Risks Analysis”.

The G20 next year is an important opportunity for us to shape the global multilateral agenda. It is our first G20 since 2009, and it is going to be followed by our G7 presidency the year after, in 2028. The Prime Minister has outlined a five-point plan for growth at the G20 summit in South Africa, and it has included supporting global growth, reinforcing stability, and advancing economic stability and prosperity in the UK and beyond, but our environment and nature priorities are still in the process of being determined. We are going to announce our decisions on that later this year.

No.

Yes.

We went through those yesterday, because I thought this question might come up, and we are doing much better than you would think. These are global biodiversity targets—they are for the entire world to deliver—but clearly we want to play our part. If we look at the green, amber and red, we have things where we are on track and things where I think we are off track. There is quite a lot where I think we are on track. For example, on target 3, the 30 by 30, we have a plan and we will be setting out next week our intentions. We are going to do a slightly innovative thing, which is that we are going to class-land as a—I do not know whether I am allowed to say this—

I have said it before. We are going to class-land as bronze, silver and gold in terms of our trajectory towards 30 by 30. Not everything is going to be gold, but it cannot just be sitting at 7% and we say, “Oh, it is terrible, we have had a failure.” We have to look at what land is consecrated for nature, if you like, or is always going to be managed for nature. The land use framework has been interesting and important in being encouraging about what we need to do to go further. Our EIP has clear delivery mechanisms, which the previous Government’s EIP simply did not include. We have trajectories and we have financial allocations alongside it. On target 13, we have played a crucial part internationally on access and benefit-sharing regulations. That is that bit about these big companies, the Cali Fund and putting cash into it. On target 17, biosafety measures and distributing the benefits of biotechnology, again we are doing well there. On target 20, I think we are really world leading. This is about capacity building, tech transfer, legal understanding, and scientific and technical co-operation. We have had 250 years of going around the world and bringing back interesting specimens, whether they are plants, animals or fungi. Target 23 is very close to my heart, and I launched the gender-inclusive principles for biodiversity action. Often in this nature discussion, women’s voices are crowded out. So we developed, alongside indigenous people and local communities, what we wanted to do. That has informed a lot of the programming that we are now doing. It is very easy to get into an “It is all terrible” mindset. Things are bad, and I am under no illusions, but I think we are on target also to get the cash in that we said we would get. Looking at that, I am reassured that we are on target to hit the amount of money for global biodiversity. There is a huge interest from a variety of corporations that want to do this. They understand climate change and the risks associated with it. They are less confident on nature and biodiversity loss. They are certainly working very closely with us on projects that they feel are going to be good nature projects that will deliver stuff. It is only three targets, but I think we are underselling our achievements.

My colleague Minister Hardy attended the Ocean conference in Kenya. We are leading players in the global plastic pollution treaty, and we have been working on that. We are obviously very disappointed that it has not been effectively concluded. We are coming into a triple COP year and we are extremely keen to play a full part there. We have not been that involved in the desertification COP previously because it has not been seen as a thing that Britain needs to worry about, but I think the UK does need to worry about it. Perhaps I can ask Ros to say something about FCDO’s involvement in that.

We know that we have a water Bill coming in the second Session and we are certainly looking at what Bills will go forward in our third session. It is clear that there are issues with some of the nature and wildlife protections that have not been updated since, in some cases, 1989 and, in some cases, going back even further. I am very keen that we tackle that but, as you will understand, we have had 15 years of very little nature legislation, so we obviously have to take our place patiently in the queue.

I would say that we are allocating around £6 billion of international climate finance from our aid budget over the next three financial years. That is going to be allocated between mitigation and adaptation, and it is going to also retain a strong focus on nature. Our goal is to deliver an additional £6.7 billion of UK-backed climate and nature-positive public finance, non-ODA, through our contributions to the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Trust, our guarantees to multilateral development banks, UK Export Finance and British International Investment. We are also keen to mobilise billions more from the private sector over the three years, including by leveraging the City of London’s position as the green finance capital of the world. The nature of the world has changed. That money has gone in order to meet our NATO obligations under defence. But we are talking about national security today, and both parts of that security are very important. I would also say that our partnership on climate security with the EU has been formalised under the security and defence partnership last year, and we have some joint priority projects for joint delivery and holding initial technical exchanges. So there is some work going on with the EU in the security and defence space as well.

Public finance cannot do it all. The idea that we can have a pound for the climate, a pound for nature and a pound for desertification is over. We are not the only Government that are ramping up war readiness and national security as a result of the changing geopolitical situation. In reviewing the projects, we are generally looking at the ones that have reached completion or where we feel there has been less impact; we are looking at this through that lens. Perhaps Ms Ledward would like to say something; I do not know about the Congo Basin partnership.

Well, she said what she said. I would say that, given the new realities of the funding, we have been laser-focused on making sure that nature and the oceans are at the front and centre of this and that every pound delivers for not just aid but climate mitigation and adaptation as well, and levers in money from elsewhere. It is a change from the old 0.7%, money out the door programme through DFID offices, with all the visits that I did back in 2006 to the DRC—it is an incredibly difficult country to work in, by the way, and there are issues around that. I feel like we are not going to do it on our own. We have to do this in partnership. In terms of the old days of Germany doing this, USAID doing that, France doing this, and everyone turning up with their flags on it, we just have to get better at this.

I cannot say; that is above my pay grade. I would say that the Prime Minister was quite clear last year that it was not never. It was about not now.

I genuinely do not know. We have announced our approach to tackling deforestation in our supply chains. We have 29,000 hectares of deforestation associated with our consumption in this country, and we have said that we will aim to introduce regs in Great Britain that operate consistently alongside that EUDR. I think that is a very significant moment. We think that that will be good for forest peoples, good for the businesses and also good for us as UK consumers, in terms of our consciences being clear that the coffee, cocoa and rubber are using are free of illegal deforestation.

It was launched a year ago in Rome. It has received one contribution from a UK AI start-up called Terra Viva and that came in in COP30 in Brazil. We need businesses to see the benefits and invest in the fund as the most appropriate mechanism for sharing benefits from the use of DSI. What we have done at Kew is digitise the 7 million specimens, going right back to Darwin, of all the plants from around the world that it holds. That is just the most incredible database, and people can go and find those plants, because it is all geo-located. They are getting the benefits of this, but they are not giving anything back to the custodians of those incredibly precious areas. We have progress on the Cali Fund. We have the Armenian presidency working closely with us on the biodiversity convention, and we have UK, Chile, Colombia, Armenia, the Netherlands, Norway and the European Commission working together as Governments to try to encourage the funding into the Cali Fund.

You are right about the Tropical Forest Forever Facility. It is a critical evolution in forest finance. We have supported its development. We have pledged £2.5 million to support the establishment of the fund, and we are committed to it being a success. We have done a lot through FCDO in the REDD+ space, which is tackling deforestation. There is data that will be critical to inform TFFF monitoring, and we have contributed £48 million of funding towards that at this date. Paradoxically, I am not the international forest Minister—that responsibility is held in DESNZ—so I might ask FCDO to say a little bit more.

We are indeed. I didn’t manage to tell the Committee that we have also launched our “Government Estate Nature Plan” as well last week. It is quite niche, but the Government own 4% of the land in England and we have crowded in other large landowners, like the Crown Estate and some very large private estates. We have got to about 10% of the landmass in England, and we have developed some principles about how we are going to manage that land and how we are going to experiment using different nature-positive approaches. It has been hard, and I did make a joke that it was worse than the Labour party in terms of getting the standing orders and the terms of reference established—that took us about six months. But we are now in a position where we have these landowners signed up to these principles, and there is some exciting work going on there. In terms of cross co-ordination, it is a bit weird when you go to these COPs. Often, Minister White will be doing her stuff and I will be doing my stuff, and we might see each other for 20 minutes over breakfast. She has very specific and particular things that she is doing, and often I will be doing my very specific and particular things—oceans, methane and the saltmarsh declaration, for example, last year—which are not the areas where she is working. I have covered stuff in the past on transport and education. Often I am the catch-all Minister and she is much closer, as you would expect, to the actual detailed negotiations.

You would have to ask her, but I would say that there is this aim to bring the COPs together and to get out of this artificial segmentation of, “This week it is climate, next week it is nature.” That is not how the world functions. These are all massive systems, and they are dealt with through an accident of United Nations history in three completely different conferences, which all have their own carbon footprint costs, secretariats and wranglings going on. There is a move to see how we can do more together; that is not about me and Minister White, but about taking a look at the UN and how it functions better.

I don’t, but we are engaging with partners. Our nature security assessment, which is obviously the subject of this session, has generated significant international interest. It is strengthening our evidence base for international engagement and shaping how we are talking to our partners.

She is not coming to my biodiversity COP, but I am going to her climate COP, and we will both be at the UN General Assembly where all these issues will be discussed. Of course, during London Climate Action Week just a couple of weeks ago, we had the first ever Nature Day at Kew Gardens. At Kew they have a tree, the Kew Oak, that died in the heatwave the previous year, I think. They have left it there to say, “Climate change killed this tree.” There are some quite interesting, creative and innovative actions happening. Is this happening at the speed or intensity that I would wish? Probably not, if I am being honest, but we are bringing nature into the climate in a way that it has not shown up before, and that can only be a good thing.

They are global targets. They are not “us” targets; they are “everybody” targets. That is the thing. Can I just say something about the Dutch Government? They have looked at our nature security assessment and they have asked Wageningen University & Research to examine their national biodiversity research needs. They are copying what we have done on the NSA, which I think is quite an interesting development. We are also in a partnership with them on circular economy finance, because we know, domestically here, that we need to invest a lot more in our circular economy infrastructure. They have lots of brilliant operationalised methods and techniques. We have the money in the City of London, and they have all the people who know how to do it, so we have signed a partnership for some joint working between us. Again, this was during climate week, and this is what I mean. You say, “Where is nature showing up?” It is like, “We don’t want plastic bottles in the environment, so what are we going to do on the recycling side?” Even here there is a bit of an artificial distinction between climate and nature. But, actually, everything is connected.