'NATURE NEXT’ MUST BECOME ‘NATURE NOW'

At a Sydney roundtable co-hosted by ANZ and KangaNews in October, experts from the worlds of finance, academia, consultants, conservation and First Nations people discussed nature issues, with a focus on the challenges of intersection.

PARTICIPANTS
  • Sarah Bekessy Professor RMIT and Lead Councillor BIODIVERSITY COUNCIL
  • Kristy Graham Chief Executive AUSTRALIAN SUSTAINABLE FINANCE INSTITUTE
  • Jody Gunn Chief Executive AUSTRALIAN LAND CONSERVATION ALLIANCE
  • Alexander Liddington Sustainable and Agriculture Analyst BLOOMBERGNEF
  • David Major Director AUSTRALIAN LAND CONSERVATION ALLIANCE and Founding Director THIRRIWIRRI
  • Steve Murphy Co-founder and Chief Executive CONSERVATION PARTNERS 
  • Gina Pavlovic Head of Sustainability ENDEAVOUR ENERGY
  • Guy Williams Executive Director POLLINATION GROUP
ANZ PARTICIPANTS
  • Dan Ota Executive Director, Environmental Markets
  • Nancy Wang Portfolio Director, Sustainable Finance
  • Katharine Tapley Head of Sustainable Finance
BRINGING SCIENCE TO FINANCE

Wang Conservation Partners has been working with the Shephard family on Artemis Cattle Station to save the Golden Shouldered Parrot. This includes restoring natural habitat using a variety of land management methods, such as parrot-friendly savannah fire management. At the same time, this work earned ACCUs [Australian carbon credit units] for Artemis. Can you tell us more about this, Steve?

MURPHY The property is Artemis, in the central part of Cape York, on Kuku Thaypan and Olkola country. The story on the Golden Shouldered Parrots began 40 years ago with Sue Shephard, a young wife and mother of three children, living in a remote area. She developed a passion for a beautiful parrot she saw flying out of termite mounds – which is where they nest.

Fast-forward 20 years to a time when the Queensland government was investing more in ecology and research. It stationed two researchers on Artemis to work with Sue, to start understanding what was going wrong with this parrot, a bird that used to be a lot more widespread and had disappeared. They gathered ecological information that created the roadmap for understanding the causes of decline and describing what needed to be done.

Then another 20 years lapsed, during which nothing was done. Next, I was given the opportunity to develop an onground project that had impact. I knew Sue, and together we started a very small, incorporated association called Artemis Nature Fund to pick up the information that was already there and apply it.

“We can’t afford to oversimplify things. If we do, shonky operators will come in and tell stories everyone wants to hear, without integrity underpinning it. I urge everyone to develop their scientific literacy so they can understand what good quality science looks like. It’s a challenging balance to get right.”

The threat we were dealing with related to the advent of pastoralism on Cape York. Pressures interacting from changed fire regimes and cattle grazing meant the environment up there was becoming too thick with trees. It used to be a lot more open with natural grasslands, which is where the parrots nested.

As the trees moved in, the entire ecosystem changed, including new predators coming in and hunting in a way the parrots weren’t used to. The conceptual model we were presented with meant we thought it would be quite easy and straightforward to cut trees down. The basis of our management actions is to reset the ecosystem to what it looked like before intensive cattle grazing.

We do a lot of threat mitigation actions. The major ones come down to habitat modification to more open states. A key component of this is fire management. We started from the perspective of doing what needed to be done for the parrots. But then we saw overlap with what was happening with fire management, greenhouse gas emissions and savannah burning carbon farming.

We worked with the landholders to restructure their existing savannah burning project so they gained more control over it. Because we helped them with this process and the annual management of running the savannah burning project, our organisation was entitled to a share of the carbon credits from the property.

We had a backlog of credits to sell at the beginning of this year, so we were happy to work with ANZ – which was interested in purchasing ACCUs and also in the work we were doing from the conservation perspective. As a result, the Shephards are happy, Conservation Partners is happy because we get to reinvest the money in our conservation programme, and ANZ is happy.

Ota How do we bring together the strengths of science, knowledge and data from the conservation sector with the strengths of market and finance forces, to improve the sustainability of our planet?

GUNN There are a couple of key starting points. One is to recognise the long history, knowledge and experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the knowledge and strength they bring to these conversations and the critical nature of their role in engaging with the private and finance sectors in these discussions.

Another starting point is understanding each others’ perspectives and recognising the strengths we bring to the table. Our sector, the conservation land management sector, is becoming more sophisticated in how we work with finance. At our core, we are and will continue to be a conservation organisation – and the finance sector likewise. Nature is a significant issue the finance sector is working to understand better. Our sector can help with this and thereby together unlock the opportunities that can increase investment in nature.

One of the risks of not bringing conservation and finance together is that investment might not go to the right places. One of our key strengths in the conservation land management and Indigenous sectors is understanding and ensuring that investment flows to the right places, thereby creating a win-win for business, community and nature.

There are some real practical examples of where conservation and finance have already come together, where direct investment has occurred and where genuine partnerships have been formed, leveraging off the skills of both sectors. This is why more and more of these types of innovative partnerships are being formed.

GRAHAM At ASFI [Australian Sustainable Finance Institute], we have found that part of what makes cross-sectoral collaboration works really well is translation between different sectors. There are entirely different languages spoken by different groups and one of the roles of translation organisations like ASFI is to bridge the gap and make productive collaborations rather than just different sectors ‘talking past’ each other. This translation function often needs to sit outside individual organisations.

Ota Sarah, your work on biodiversity conservation includes designing buildings for ‘everyday nature’. Does sustainable finance provide a way to add awareness and increase the impact of your work?

BEKESSY We are moving the discussion from the country to the city, which traditionally hasn’t been a place where we thought too much about biodiversity conservation. The residential and commercial property sector hasn’t had nature on high alert until quite recently.

There are a few reasons why nature is suddenly a hot topic in this sector. First, the benefits of having everyday nature – nature where people live, work and play – are becoming extremely apparent. This is the idea that cities can be resilient to climate change and that we can have First Nations engagement on a really genuine level – which generates a respect and knowledge of culture of everyday Australians. There are also health and wellbeing benefits of engaging with nature.

These benefits are driving government agencies and residents to start demanding that we shift to a more regenerative approach – where we start to invite nature back into cities. Second, the risks are becoming more apparent to developers. The risks of clearing threatened species habitat, for example, are not something any developer wants to be associated with. We also know developers can’t just offset their way out of these effects.

Third is a market advantage. For the developers we work with, sales increase and occupancy rates for high-rise buildings are higher when they have green roofs and courtyards, for instance.

Developers are moving toward a more regenerative approach to nature, in addition to the first step of avoiding damage. They are aiming to invite nature back in. For example, we have been working with Lendlease on its Queen Victoria Market redevelopment site [in Melbourne]. This doesn’t have much biodiversity but the developer is thinking about how to build on the space and provide a new park – so we can bring back and celebrate biodiversity even on a site like this.

The approach we use is called biodiversity sensitive urban design1. It has been legislated for in South Australia and there are many clear planning guidelines for it in other Australian states. It is also used internationally. It is really exciting, but we need to have incentives for developers to genuinely pursue this approach.

One thing the investment sector could do is start demanding that, at the bare minimum, developers are not doing damage when it comes to nature. We have established a pledge for developers, investors, consultants and certifiers to commit to stopping the clearing of threatened ecological communities and threatened species habitat2.

1 icon-science.org/bsud-home/
2 naturepledge.org.au

Wang Endeavour Energy is one of the early adopters of including a net habitat gain metric in its sustainability-linked loan (SLL). What are the key takeaways from this process?

PAVLOVIC Our journey started when we were considering our material issues. This is a standard starting point for a lot of organisations that don’t have a sustainability strategy. But what surprised us was that nature came up quite high as a material issue. The context is that we had just seen the back end of the summer bushfires that affected 40 per cent of our network – and managing vegetation is one of our biggest commercial contracts.

The next step was to find an opportunity to do things differently and think more strategically about minimising impact. We set a target to be nature positive by 2025. We didn’t have all the answers but we used an external framework to start measuring net habitat gain. We are now thinking about how much we remove, how much we are protecting or maintaining and what we can do in the planting space.

We have committed to the SLL as well as having the strategic target. It was really great leverage to start our journey of thinking about a holistic approach to managing the risk and opportunity from nature.

This required a lot of collaboration. Teams in the business that traditionally don’t work together had to do so. But we noticed there was really good buy-in to this target. Having diverse views in the room when we discussed how we could solve for nature impacts has been really important.

“We set a target to be nature-positive by 2025. We didn’t have all the answers but we used an external framework to start measuring net habitat gain. We are now thinking about how much we remove, how much we are protecting or maintaining and what we can do in the planting space.”

Three years on, we have chipped away a bit but there is a lot more we can do. We are identifying other organisations to mature our journey toward how we calculate our nature impacts and how to drive better outcomes. For instance, we are working with universities to measure biodiversity impacts that are broader than ‘trees in, trees out’ – what type of planting is regionally advantageous for a particular area, or whether there are threatened species that would benefit from certain habitat protection, restoration or maintenance programmes.

One of the best outcomes we have seen coming out of this focus on nature is how wonderfully it brings people together. Nature is such a great teacher, and it offers such a great opportunity to learn and heal. We have combined community outreach programmes that also include volunteering opportunities for staff and planting or nature restoration events. It has been a real culture uplift for our organisation to embed nature as a priority into our business.

Liddington As the grid will expand exponentially with renewable energy buildout, are you worried about the cost of becoming a nature-positive organisation?

PAVLOVIC There are lots of ways of expanding our network that are cohesive to also improving nature outcomes. For example, overhead versus underground. There is an additional cost to an underground network. But when we factor in the benefits of being able to plant on top, minimise vegetation maintenance – which is a huge cost to our organisation – and considering the lifecycle perspective rather than just the short-term capex increase, we start getting better longer-term outcomes and potential business cases that stand up to scrutiny.

At the end of the day, we have customers’ affordability as a key priority and the cost of electricity needs to be passed on. We need to be prudent and efficient for these outcomes and create long-term value for sustainability priorities.

WILLIAMS It is important to value nature properly when building infrastructure. The cost of not valuing nature and not costing it into potential tipping points with water systems and land change hasn’t been done particularly well by any sector. But as this gets more sophisticated, I think we will find the opportunity to create value through nature far outweighs the cost of not properly valuing it in the first place.

INCLUDING FIRST NATIONS

Wang We have alluded to the importance of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. David, could you share your perspective on Aboriginal land access and economic opportunities as well as the importance of partnerships?

MAJOR I always come to these conversations unsure about whether to be negative or positive. Mostly these conversations have been negative for my people, and continue to be so. This is sometimes about different perspectives on the connection with nature and the opportunity to be in conversations.

I’m keen to hear from Steve about the connection with the traditional owners of the country you’re working on. So many of these projects happened without us, on our country.

We don’t look after nature, we are nature. I don’t think people really understand this. That bird is our cousin. That country is our mother. It’s not people doing things with nature, it’s nature working with itself. No matter how long we have been torn away from it, it is still our family. This is the thing we yearn for. This is the pain and trauma you hear from my community in trying to be part of this. I hope you can understand the massive dislocation and real lack of confidence in trusting sustainable relationships.

I’m also interested in being able to find a shared space for a world view on this – not commodifying nature, which unfortunately is what this kind of conversation ends up being about. So back to your project, Steve, I’m keen to understand how the local mob have been part of it over the last 30 years – the people whose land it would have been before the family took over the property.

MURPHY I feel awkward speaking about these things in some respects. But it’s important for the whole group to understand the Artemis context. The impact of colonisation on Aboriginal Australia was different depending on where we look. There are some places in Australia where physical connection to country is still very strong, and there are other places where it’s not. I’m not saying First Nations people from these places don’t feel connection to country, just that they were taken away and this has repercussions for how they reestablish actual, physical connection.

On Artemis, non-Indigenous people – the Shephard family – settled and established their lives and livelihood. Tom and Sue Shephard are well respected by First Nations people living in the region, especially the older generation who they worked with closely in the early days of the cattle industry. In fact, this was a way people were able to maintain at least some physical connection to country. But changes in the cattle industry have seen even these connections break down over time.

We are in a challenging position, as an external conservation organisation working with the people who have the legal right to that place, through a pastoral lease, with the native titleholders which was only granted late last year. It is a story that goes back 200 years but it is also one that only happened recently.

We are navigating this process. From the perspective of Conservation Partners, we know the value of engaging properly with First Nations people. We also have to acknowledge the history and connection the Shephard family has to that country. They would say they love the country just as much as anyone else. And we respect this too.

How do we navigate this? It is really complex and challenging with no simple solution. It’s also important to understand that a whole lot of people need to drive this, not just Conservation Partners. Our main job is to save an imperilled population of parrots that is facing novel threats, and we don’t have a lot of time left to do this.

“The opportunity for partnerships with First Nations people in this space is boundless, but we are carrying generations of baggage that we need to talk through and understand. A different world view about nature being us, as opposed to something we do things with, really changes the dynamic.”

MAJOR Thank you for being vulnerable in your response. What you have described is the reality. The point I’m trying to make is that the opportunity for partnerships with First Nations people in this space is boundless, but we are carrying generations of baggage that we need to talk through and understand. A different world view about nature being us, as opposed to something we do things with, really changes the dynamic.

Partnership is about understanding where we start from and also where we want to end up. The challenge First Nations communities have is that we are often trying to reestablish connections with place, with our family. We need to understand how we can be part of this, when our communities have nothing. We have massive social and cultural issues – including conflict with ourselves – because the non-Aboriginal system wants to classify us into different things in order to give us rights.

This journey is really heavy. It’s really hard and it takes time. Whenever decisions about land or business or money come up, it has never worked for us, in 250 years. Trusting that it could work for us isn’t easy.

The other inconvenient challenge or truth for us, is that in order to be at these tables it is often easier if we are less like us and more like other Australians. Sometimes we feel we need to leave our culture at the door, to be more like a business person, a public servant or a city person – to make people feel more comfortable with us. This is the opposite of what we really want to be doing. It makes our people try to deal with their own identities and the anger this creates for them about their legacy that they owe to their grandparents and great grandparents after what has happened to them. We carry these scars with us every day.

First Nations people are the right partners for this work but you have to understand what it will take to get to a place where we feel we understand each other. In some places it’s working really well, in others it’s really hard. Country is here where this building is – not just in Cape York. To us there’s no difference. Really, it’s about taking the time, having hard conversations and being courageous, but also being vulnerable.

Wang BloombergNEF is working on the follow-up to its When the Bee Stings report, which will be launched at COP16 later this year. The report will present 10 case studies on companies that are making money from nature restoration. What are some of the key findings from these studies?

LIDDINGTON With When the Bee Stings, we highlighted 10 organisations internationally and found around US$83 billion of risks to these companies. They are in all kinds of industries – shipping, food and agriculture, resources, tourism, and so on. The next iteration will be on nature opportunities – where can we make money from restoring nature.

One we have written extensively about is nature-positive agriculture. One of the technologies is called optical spot spraying. It reduces herbicides used on farms, which currently have serious knock-on consequences to nature. This technology can reduce the amount we spray by up to 97.5 per cent.

One of the companies, a French company that is very popular in Australia, was recently acquired through its parent into a joint venture that was dubbed the biggest ag-tech deal ever – a US$2.4 billion opportunity. It is reducing the nature impacts of agriculture. This is just a taste of what is to come.

Existing resources to improve starting position

While nature may be a new consideration for many as an economic input, this does not mean there is no existing knowledge and understanding available. An effort to bring some of this together in one place could help participants make a running start.

WANG There are nature related risks and opportunities for investors. Pollination Group recently helped launch the Nature Investor Toolkit from the Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA). What was the rationale for creating this toolkit and what are the risks, responsibilities and opportunities forward-thinking investors should be considering?

WILLIAMS The toolkit is a wonderful and useful resource for investors to access what is a real bounty of new reports, frameworks and initiatives happening in this space. But in itself it is nothing new. It is a toolkit to enable investors to go to existing resources in a relatively efficient way. It is the next in the series of toolkits RIAA has developed covering a range of issues.

Over last couple of years, we have had more than 800 conversations with investors – in Australia and overseas. The reactions we get from them are now pretty clear and consistent. In other words, what is making some investors lean into this conversation and start to believe there is something in it, versus what is making other investors lean away from nature, is relatively consistent.

The idea that nature is just coming up on our list of sustainable development priorities is offensive and it’s also fundamentally wrong. But it limits the perspective of a lot of organisations because they view it as an area where they need to build resources and capabilities, and employ experts, to help them on the journey.

GUY WILLIAMS POLLINATION GROUP
DATA CHALLENGES

Wang There is no one, simple way of measuring nature or biodiversity improvements – as there is with carbon, for example. How can we deal with this?

BEKESSY We know biodiversity and nature are more complex than carbon to measure, account for and understand appropriate responses. David has pointed out the cultural values of nature, for example, which are incredibly significant.

There are also place-based values. People talk about nature being untradable – which makes it much trickier. One molecule of carbon in the Amazon is the same as one molecule of carbon in Antarctica, which makes it tradable. It is possible that nature may not be.

There are probably different scopes, just as there are for carbon. We know there will be direct impact on nature – positive and negative. There will be upstream impacts through supply chains, and there will be downstream impacts.

I understand why some people throw their hands up and say it’s too tricky. But I completely agree with Guy that it’s complex but not impossible, and there is absolutely no reason why organisations shouldn’t be jumping in. Some organisations have already demonstrated really excellent progress in this space.

I’d like to talk about a couple of really significant lessons by showing the work we have done with Yarra Valley Water. It wants to be Australia’s first nature-positive water authority. It buys and discharges water, clears vegetation to put in pipelines and has a lot of construction materials.

We have worked with the company on its different scopes of impact, assessing what would be the most significant for biodiversity. The on-site stuff is the most tangible and obvious. Clearing vegetation to put in pipes where there are threatened species is a really important impact the business needs to look at carefully. But then within its supply chains are parts that are also very significant to biodiversity.

Every organisation will have different emphases. Once it has nailed down which of its scopes it has to focus on most, the really important thing is to get measures that mean something. By this I mean species and ecosystems, cultural values – things that people care about. This is what we need to be measuring, monitoring and reporting on.

“We are moving the discussion from the country to the city, which traditionally hasn’t been a place where we thought too much about biodiversity conservation. The residential and commercial property sector hasn’t had nature on high alert until quite recently.”

Yarra Valley Water has identified species and ecosystems it really cares about and that it wants to focus on being nature positive within, even if it is to offset some of its supply chain impact. It owns land and it is investing in it, so it has surveyed customers to understand the appetite for investment from Yarra Valley Water. It had a resounding yes from customers: they want the company to be investing in nature. So the company has the mandate, it is investing significantly in nature and receiving really good feedback from the community.

The company can now tell stories about species and cultural stories about working with First Nations groups to help restore traditional management practices. These are very healing and wonderful stories, and they are genuine.

There is a risk that we move to commoditising nature with abstract terms for the measurement of nature positive. We need to keep it real: keep it about species and ecosystems, with really good stories that people really care about.

If you have your eye on the ball for the species and ecosystems you care about, it doesn’t have to be an enormous expense to monitor, get the data and tell the stories.

Australia lays down a marker

On 8-10 October, the Australian federal government hosted the first Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney – with the goal of bringing together sector leaders and developing a deliverable agenda for progress. Roundtable participants share their hopes for the future.

WANG What are participants’ hopes and expectations for the Global Nature Positive Summit and COP16?

BEKESSY We have spoken today about the tension between monitoring and spending on action. This is the kind of question we can help solve.

For example, are entities best off using a budget to monitor or to act – and when does the balance shift? How do they deal with complexity versus the need to have measures in place? How do they deal with uncertainty? These are all questions where science and academia have a critical role.

Measures are critical and complex, but it is no excuse not to jump in – and the best actors are already doing so. The motivations and risks won’t disappear. In fact, they are likely to grow in importance as time goes on.

Collaboration is important, too. In this room are nongovernment organisations, universities, the business sector, First Nations groups and consultants. We can all work together in this space to drive approaches that meet the balance between reality and complexity in natural systems.

I’d love to hear the ambition we have heard today expressed wholeheartedly at the summit. The government needs to know that we are ready to act in this space.

There are five years until 2030. We need to put our money where our mouth is and get action in place. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of progress. Let’s get something tangible and scaleable out of it.

ALEXANDER LIDDINGTON BLOOMBERGNEF

Ota How important are measures and metrics in ensuring Australia can meet its national and global biodiversity targets?

GUNN ALCA [Australian Land Conservation Alliance] is very supportive of the Australian government joining 195 other nations to tackle the biodiversity crisis by committing to the 2030 targets in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We are now committed to some of these targets – there are 23 in total. This framework seeks to change the relationship between whole of society and nature. It is not a small thing.

The targets are quite specific. We also know that our commitments to the previous framework were not met – because we didn’t have really strong measures for what organisations, countries and state governments were required to align with. It was very hard to track our progress and ensure we were delivering on the ambition we set ourselves. I therefore believe it’s really important to set meaningful targets and then have measures we can track to, to hold ourselves, governments, organisations and industries to account.

Measures and metrics involve complexity but I also agree with the idea of keeping it real. When we get down to real examples, we are talking about material risks and locality. This takes us to place, to community, to people. It’s a really great way for organisations to drive and deliver outcomes for nature, and also for people and community to build resilience in landscapes. Doing so touches on all the other targets that are part of the framework.

Our activities are broad across the private land conservation sector. They range from protecting areas of biodiversity to enhancing degraded landscapes, controlling and eradicating invasive species, and restoring degraded landscapes. Each of these activities is tracked to a target in the framework, with information and data.

There are also a lot of corporate indicators, such as the science-based targets network. There is value in lining up these targets to reduce the complexities and ensure we can achieve nature-positive and net-zero targets.

Even so, a level of innovation in data will be important. The environment sector has been chronically underfunded for a long time. There is also real value in investing in the capability of the sector that will drive the work to apply on-ground outcomes.

“Our sector, the conservation land management sector, is becoming more sophisticated in how we work with finance. Nature is a significant issue the finance sector is working to understand better. Our sector can help with this and thereby together unlock the opportunities that can increase investment in nature.”

Ota Is ASFI working on the challenge of measuring impact on nature and biodiversity?

GRAHAM ASFI is a mission-focused organisation. The mission is to realign the Australian financial services system so more money flows to activities that will create a more sustainable, resilient and inclusive Australia. This means we work on climate, environment and broader sustainability issues as well as social impact.

When we started our nature and natural capital work programme, about two years ago, it was about building awareness of nature across our membership of financial institutions. This was the time when the TNFD [Taskforce on Nature-Related Disclosures] framework was just getting started. TNFD and the common language it created has enabled the finance sector – as well as the corporate sector – to understand how to talk about, and really focus attention on, nature as a sustainability issue.

As the finance sector has become more fluent in this language our work has evolved to help our members not only identify nature as an emerging sustainability issue but also how to integrate it into their investment decisions. This means integrating nature-related risk but also allocating more to nature-related opportunities in the agricultural sector. Agriculture is a focus of this work given the nature-related risks and opportunities in this sector in Australia.

Our natural capital work programme is in partnership with Farming for the Future – a research organisation that has been collecting farm data to link natural capital indicators with the profitability, productivity and resilience of farming businesses. We translate the data and insights it collects to help financial institutions better price risk for agribusiness customers. Ultimately, we want to enable financial institutions to collect and aggregate the most relevant data to inform their own sustainability-related reporting and targets, and raise their own ambition on nature, working with their agri-sector customers.

I’ll give a few insights from the first 12 months of the project. It won’t come as a surprise that interest in natural capital from financial institutions is very much driven by commercial factors. They want high-performing assets and clients in their loan books and their portfolios. The financial materiality of nature risks and opportunities is absolutely key to speaking to a business and commercial audience about these issues.

Banks in particular are setting decarbonisation targets in their agribusiness portfolios, which means the focus on natural capital in productive landscapes is valuable for banks from a climate and nature perspective.

Nature risk and how it manifests for financial institutions comes from a range of different sources. For our members, it is about complying with EU regulation and managing civil society expectations – particularly about deforestation.

The other drivers for interest and action on nature are water availability and efficiency, which very much affect productivity in the agricultural sector. Also, soil health and invasive species, – again, because of the very strong linkages between soil health, long-term productivity and resilience.

There is lots of piloting of TNFD by financial institutions in various ways. There are some challenges for the application of the TNFD framework to financial institutions, which are aggregators of large amounts of information from others: they have to work out the scope of exposures and their financed nature impacts and dependencies. Lots of financial institutions are still working through how they manage the risks that have been identified through the piloting process.

Many are also developing nature strategies, which are often linked to climate strategies. They are thinking about nature-related targets in the medium and long term, and how they interact with the achievement of climate targets.

“Ultimately, we want to enable financial institutions to collect and aggregate the most relevant data to inform their own sustainability-related reporting and targets, and raise their own ambition on nature.”

Wang One of the TNFD metrics covers hectares of land restored. Steve, how have you measured the improved biodiversity outcomes of the Artemis project?

MURPHY To frame this answer, it’s worth mentioning the difference between proximal and ultimate metrics. The principal thing we are interested in restoring is habitat for parrots. The obvious thing to measure is how much habitat we have restored. We have done this quite accurately and this is what we talk about when we apply for grants.

We did this for three years. But we were monitoring the parrot population at the same time, and it was going down. It was fortuitous that we were looking at reproductive success out of the nest because without it we would have been merrily going on our way restoring habitat and not having the actual impact we were aiming for – which was more parrots and not more landscape. This is a proximal measure of a project.

This triggered a re-evaluation of the kinds of actions we needed to do to secure the parrot population on this property. We didn’t give up restoring habitat – because as we increase the area restored it will begin to have a more significant and enduring impact – but it also made us realise that we have to develop and implement a set of emergency actions right now to secure and bolster the number of parrots in the short term. The ultimate measure, what we are after, is the number of parrots on the landscape.

We are doing both. We are doing a whole range of proximal measures like habitat restored and amount of country being burned. The ultimate measure we use is not the number of parrots, but the daily probability of survival of the parrots.

The way we do this is: we capture birds, put individual colour bands on their legs, so we know exactly who is who, and follow them through time using trail cameras – automatic cameras set up at food stations – and AI to recognise who is coming in.

We can follow individual birds through their life. What we are expecting to see is the daily survival probability of parrots increasing through time. Number of hectares measured isn’t going to cut it. ‘Are parrots living longer’ is where we need to be. I agree about not making things too complex. But ecology is complex and the kinds of things we need to do to measure it properly are complex.

The other point I’d like to make is that there is a tension between doing good science and doing conservation. In the case of these parrots, we have 50 left on the property. We can’t afford to do perfect scientific experiments and reserve half of the population to monitor as a control population.

It’s something we grapple with. When universities offer to help we are quite wary because we know a lot of academics want the perfect experiment and the perfect data. We have to be a lot more pragmatic and take a real-world approach, saying we will throw everything we have to save every parrot we find. We might not know what tool works at the end of the day, but we will know we have more parrots.

Williams Is your approach very hard or complex?

MURPHY Both. It takes specialist skills, it’s a licensed activity and there are not many people who have the licence to do it. Are there other ways to do it? Maybe, but once we move away from really intensive, specialised ecological approaches we start having to rely on assumptions.

This is when things start to get a bit wobbly. We could just put up camera traps at the feeders without the birds being colour banded. Parrots come in and we could say we have seen them. But are they the same parrots? How do we count them and account for this? We have decided to invest heavily in robust metrics to increase the integrity of our work.

We can’t afford to oversimplify things. If we do, shonky operators will come in and tell stories everyone wants to hear, without integrity underpinning it. I urge everyone to develop their scientific literacy so they can understand what good quality science looks like. It’s a challenging balance to get right.

Wang First Nations peoples have a wealth of knowledge to contribute to science. How is this working in practice, in relation to data and reporting?

MAJOR There are amazing opportunities for partnership on knowledge. I view science as a subgroup of knowledge, rather than separate from it. Some of the knowledge we need is what we do from now onward but we have had some of the knowledge for thousands of years. It’s not as empirical or as easy to measure, but it is relevant.

In the work I’ve done over the last 30 years, I have found there is a lot more knowledge within First Nations communities than even they know. Disassociation with country makes people second-guess themselves about the stories they carry through more intangible methods: through the language we use, through the song and dance we carry, through the little bits and pieces of stories that families carry in their lines that don’t come together into whole pieces of knowledge until we get people together on country.

I’ve done this dozens of times in places where people have been disconnected from the landscape for two or three generations. When they get together and talk about the things they remember from their grandparents, the stories they were told, the words they remember and the places that are connected in these cultural landscapes that are related to particular species, we start to build an amazing wealth of knowledge. This can be brought to the table to help ensure we are making nature-positive moves. I don’t know that First Nations people are necessarily the best immediate partners. But they are certainly really good long-term partners to get the balance between people and nature right.

Tapley The challenge that has been laid out in relation to the mob connection to the work on Artemis Station is possibly the next layer for Steve. For there to be more parrots, what is it that the disconnected mob could bring, from their stories from the past, that could add to the science?

MAJOR Sometimes we know things but we don’t know how we know them or how they fit together until we talk to someone else. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.

The other thing that’s relevant here is that nature, science and finance is doing its own thing, and it doesn’t have room for much else. First Nations people in Australia are in a nation-building phase. What we are doing now, by connecting through native title and other things, is starting to change our identity from being Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to being Wiradjuri people or Barkindji people.

We are trying to reconnect our cultural governance to live in the world we live in today. This is really rocky because our old culture isn’t ready for the modern world. We have to think about our negotiables and non-negotiables in terms of what we keep and what we leave behind.