Thank you very much for having me here. It's a great pleasure to have this opportunity to speak.

I've provided a presentation that has a lot more detail for your records. I'm not going to go through most of those slides today, but rather jump straight to the highlights that are not already featured quite clearly, but exhaustively, in the summary for policy-makers.

That presentation and the summary for policy-makers highlight the substantial declines in nature and nature's contributions to people, including cleaning our air, cleaning water, mitigating floods, helping to grow our food, etc., and how that's undermining our collective global ability to meet crucial societal goals for nature and sustainability.

That basically sums up the first half of the assessment, and I'm now going to move on to other aspects.

One key point that isn't well understood about this assessment is that the chapter that I had the pleasure to lead was actually the first of its kind, thanks to the scoping document, which I can't take any credit for. That scoping document laid out an exhaustive pathway and scenario analysis with linked literature reviews. The way that we implemented this was via pathways and scenarios. We examined all available literature about all pathways towards achieving future goals for sustainability and nature according to six different, linked global goals, including feeding humanity, resourcing cities, maintaining fresh water, protecting the oceans, maintaining biodiversity on land, and mitigating climate goals while still providing energy for humanity.

This kind of an analysis had never been done on this scale before. It was absolutely crucial in enabling us to make statements about what was likely needed to achieve the kind of world that was envisioned in the Rio+20 process. Never before have we had that kind of an analysis. In previous assessments, the solutions part of the assessment was really based on opinion that was based on an analysis of the problem rather than an analysis of the solution.

What that meant was that in Paris, when we negotiated the text for the best global assessment, when nations were requesting changes in our proposed solutions, in many cases we had to say, “Actually, that's not what we found. That is not consistent with the evidence about what would achieve this transformation towards sustainability.”

Now, that scenario analysis and the literature reviews of 13 different aspects we called.... There are five levers, including governance interventions. There are eight different leverage points, meaning in global systems where you would intervene, like total consumption and waste. I'm going to sum that up in terms of just five key points, without which, based on our analyses, we will almost certainly not achieve the kind of transformational change the report says we need to achieve our global goals for sustainability.

The first of these is about going carbon neutral, and incentivizing and enabling businesses and individuals to do the same. Leaders in businesses are already doing this. Some governments are committing to it. Most recently the U.K. has committed to doing this by 2050. It's possible to make this normal, and eventually, perhaps not in that distant a future, mandatory. In that way, we can reshape what is seen as good corporate citizenship or individual citizenship by committing to no longer being part of the climate problem. Clearly, that's not going to happen immediately. It is the kind of aspirational goal the U.K. has committed to achieve by 2050.

The second part is to make it easy, enjoyable, inexpensive and then eventually normal to be earth positive. What I mean by “earth positive” is having net positive effects on all biodiversity and ecosystem services—all of nature and what nature does for people. The global assessment is very clear that as far as environmental problems go, climate change is large, yet only the tip of the iceberg. What that means is that if we don't attend to climate change—and this came straight out of our analysis—along with other important environmental problems, like land-use change, over-harvesting, pollution, and invasive species, then we're likely to undermine those other problems and make life more difficult in many different ways and places.

Now, it is not yet possible for individuals and organizations to have net positive impacts on the planet, but this can follow the kinds of developments we've seen in climate change in terms of carbon offsets, learning from some of the mistakes that have happened. I have a lot more to say on that, but I'm going to save that for later.

The third point is to make all subsidies and incentives work for the transformation and not against it. One of the key things that was in the global assessment, including in the summary for policy-makers, which was extremely contentious, was about the need to overcome in this transformation opposition from vested interests, right? We did not beat around the bush in terms of what those vested interests were and what that opposition looks like.

It looks like folks are receiving a lot of funding through subsidies, which are understandably but perversely enhancing production at the expense of the environment. It's unavoidable this should happen unless we specifically tailor those subsidies to encouraging the kind of production that enhances stewardship. Unfortunately, currently in Canada, most subsidies are not structured that way, such that we have a lot of money being spent to enhance production on the one hand, and then a lot of money on the other hand going to counteract the negative effects of that production. We can streamline those two processes by dovetailing them.

In particular, in terms of fossil fuels, this means moving those subsidies away from production for fossil fuels and towards transition—towards clean energy. That should include, of course, retooling programs for workers.

The fourth is about decision-making itself in environmental management and resource management to make it precautionary, adaptive, inclusive and integrative across sectors and jurisdictions.

This means on the one hand, for example, restricting chemicals—this is a precautionary measure—until there is sufficient reason to believe that they are safe for people and the environment. This would follow from the REACH legislation in the European Union. A second point would be to govern through transparent and participatory processes that involve all major stakeholder groups—and also rights holders—without privileging special interests through special or secret access, as is currently quite normal in all jurisdictions in Canada. The third is to zone in an adaptive way, recognizing that the world is a changing place. We can no longer zone based on 100-year flood plains, for example, when we see 100-year floods occurring in many jurisdictions three times a decade. We have to plan as if surprises will come.

The fifth and final one, which is clearly within your mandate, is to strengthen environmental laws and policies and to ensure the consistent enforcement of all laws and policies—not only the environmental ones—at home and abroad. This is crucial for so many reasons.

It has become normal, in that our economy is founded upon a 19th century mentality, to expand our economies broadly. This was appropriate in the 19th century. It is less appropriate now, when we have quite a crowded world, where all of our productive and extractive activities have delayed and diffuse but large and crucial negative impacts on nature, and also on people as mediated by nature.

Now, a key part of this, as I pointed to, is the need to do this both at home and abroad, so it requires action in terms of diplomacy, because what we have currently is a kind of global race to the bottom. It is undermining our ability to protect the environment in place, because producers can rightly say that if they don't produce these products in these ways that have negative impacts on the environment, then that will happen elsewhere and Canadian jobs will be lost. There is a lot that we can do locally, but in the long term it's going to require that international diplomacy.

If we managed to succeed in that task, it would constitute the global sustainable economy, and all five of those changes together would help to realize that world envisioned in the Rio+20 process, which is also entrenched in the global assessment and the achievement of all of the nature-based goals for sustainability—albeit late—and a sustainable world more broadly.

Thank you.

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