Well, thanks very much for having me here, the Royal Society of Victoria. Today it's great to have the opportunity to talk about this topic that I think is really crucial to our own persistence as a species. And obviously it's very important to me in my work and I hope you'll find it interesting. Back in 2010, Minister Burke declared that by 2020 the extinction of known threatened species will have been prevented. Their conservation status, particularly those most in decline, will have been improved or sustained. And that promise has actually been transcribed almost verbatim into sustainable development goals. It take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity, and by 2020 protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species. So how are we doing? Back in 2016, the governments that signed on to the Convention for Biological Diversity developed a program called the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodeiversity in Ecosystem Services. And a key output that came out in 2019 was the IPBS Global Assessment. And that's really tracking how we're progressing in terms of ecosystems and biodiversity as a planet. One of the key questions in conservation science is how much would we weight this ecosystem service angle? This kind of, you know, we need species to survive ourselves, angle versus, you know, the existence value of a species, what it means to actually have a species go extinct, I believe largely, that it is about not so much the right to exist, but the right for everybody to experience nature and biological diversity in its most magnificent form. And if we take away future generations opportunities to do that, then I think that's a dreadful breach of contract with future generations and it's extremely tragic. And it's also about our own quality of life because, my God, if you can't go out into the bush and just see how incredible it is and see a possum or see a plant, you know, because it's gone extinct, I just think that's in a minstratuity as well. So the Global Assessment of Biodeiversity in Ecosystem Services found something that I'm sure you're all quite aware of, nature underpins all aspects of life. Two billion people rely on wood as their primary energy source, four billion people rely primarily on natural medicines. And 70% of all drugs are natural or copies of natural drugs, 75% of all crops are animal pollinated. And natural systems are the only carbon sink that are going to be viable for actually reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Natural pollinators, it's estimated to worth around five hundred and sixty billion dollars a year to the global economy. So the loss of natural pollinators is potentially an immensely, an immensely troubling existential crisis that we face as humans. But of course, the capacity of nature to deliver these benefits to us is declining everywhere. We are in the middle of an extinction crisis that's identified very clearly by the IPBES assessment. You'll see here the trajectory of extinction loss globally since the 15 hundreds. Mammal loss has been fairly consistent and linear across that time. So the point where since 15 hundred we've lost about two percent of our mammal species that existed at that time, the dramatic exponential increase in amphibian loss is particularly disturbing. And you can see here for these other groups that we're looking at globally, these groups losing around two percent of their membership since 15 hundred. Now, are we in an extinction crisis? This little gray wedge here is the proportion of those species that we would expect to lose through the natural processes of extinction that have occurred across geological timesgales. So you can see here that we're in that sort of 10 to a hundredfold extinction rate that we hear used or cited as a figure to indicate that we are in fact in the midst of an extinction crisis. Australia, as I'm sure you're all aware, is a mega-diverse nation. It has more species than any other developed nation. We have incredible rates of endonism. Australia is very unique. We have very many plants and animals that don't exist anywhere else on the planet. 87% of our mammals are unique to Australia. 93% of our reptiles, 94% of our frogs, they're only found here. Despite all the good efforts of conservation organisations and the things that people are doing well now, we are currently looking at an approximately linear increase in extinction over time. Our contribution to global biodiversity loss is now very widely recognised. You can see here that Australia is identified as the second highest country in terms of loss of biodiversity on the planet and the highest in the developed world for modern losses of biodiversity. So what's driving these losses in Australia? Modern loss of habitat is still the number one driver of extinctions and biodiversity loss in Australia and continues to this day. We're still losing habitats. But of course in Australia we've had a special impact of introduced species. The most famous cases of course are feral cats, foxes. It's introduced fish species like trout. It's introduced rabbits, introduced diseases. And of course extreme weather and extreme events that we're now seeing under a changing climate are contributing to species losses. So these extremes are adding a new type of pressure to already highly stressed ecosystems and species. The global assessment of the IPBS found that goals for conserving and sustainably using nature cannot be met under current trajectories and only transformative change with all our goals to be met by 2030. If we're going to actually have any chance of meeting our sustainable development goals by 2030 a lot has to change. When we spend money on biodiversity conservation it works. This graph here shows that the more you spend the less biodiversity you lose. We do have a tendency to think of things in percentage of GDP which I understand the habit and obviously the treasury needs to allocate its GDP, allocate its tax revenue across a lot of different things. Let's talk about some other things. We need to learn from traditional owners. There's a lot of amazing knowledge there. There's also a lot of value for traditional owners in incentives that we can provide for them for conserving culturally significant species and species that are significant to white fellas because of the EPC act listing as threatened. So this is a huge opportunity. Some great work being done here by Anja Scrublin from the University of Melbourne who has been working with Mato ranges up in Mato country and on that country is some of the last remaining strongholds of the greater bilbi that's been set up partly as an environmental instrument in order to solve some of their pressing environmental problems. They're really trying to bring their country back to something that is a state I guess that some of their older members can remember. Coming back to the grabby business of law and policy, the independent review of the EPC act came out in October 2020. Professor Samuels identified significant weaknesses in our current flagship threatened species legislation. He set out a pathway for reform. There's a huge opportunity for us to engage with that pathway. We just have to make sure that the government understands that they need to look towards the recommendations of Graham Samuel in order to get this right and at the moment we're not seeing much evidence of that over 90% of the vegetation loss that has occurred in Queensland in the last decade I think was never assessed. It never came to assessment under the EPC act. So we're losing huge amounts of habitat and native vegetation without it even being checked by the Commonwealth. I generally like to sort of go back to, can we or can't we afford to lose these species if the answer is we can't, then we've just got to have the rules in place to make sure that we don't. Coming back to some of the more scientific elements, one of our key challenges in biodiversity conservation is just knowing what's going on. Mostly the problem is we don't have the resources to do it. Here's a great example of some recent work that was been done by Darren Southwell in collaboration with the Australian Department of Environment and the Victorian Department of Environment, looking at how we would design monitoring programs to understand the impacts and track the potential recovery of threatened species across Australia after the 2019-25s. Of course you don't have to go everywhere to monitor biodiversity impacts of something like the fires. You do need to do some observation of species throughout their range, but it can be and is often a very small proportion of their range that you actually survey less than 1%. I don't think cost is a particularly strong argument for not monitoring. I think if we really cost it out and we decide we need to know, we can afford that too. Finally, we need to keep people engaged and involved in conservation. Places like Pull and Pull and where this wonderful species, the Knight Parrot, was recently rediscovered in these conservation organisations, light bush heritage and Australian wildlife conservancy are conserving these places to ensure that these sorts of species can stay in the game. The key message is the situation is dire. These reports of biodiversity lost our view, but we can solve this and we can afford to solve it and we basically know how to do it. We've got to do it, we can do it, so let's do it.