Keynote speech to the Global Nature Positive Summit

I would like to acknowledge the land on which we meet, Tumbalong, the land of the Gadigal clan of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to Gadigal Elders, and First Nations people from around Australia and around the world who are with us here today.

There are a lot of special guests here to acknowledge, but I’d particularly like to welcome those of you who have travelled from far away. 

I’d like to acknowledge my fellow Ministers who have joined us from the Pacific and around the globe.

And state Environment Ministers and members of state parliaments.

I welcome business leaders and NGOs, scientists and specialists; campaigners for nature.

My thanks especially to the NSW Government for co-hosting the Summit. I know you’re all looking forward to hearing from the NSW Treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, later this morning.

I hope you all get to enjoy some of our beautiful harbour – and the great work of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust – who are managing world heritage sites around the harbour. 

It is two years since many of us last met, to help land agreement to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022.

It marked a turning point. The world came together and got serious about solving the next big global environmental challenge – to halt and reverse biodiversity loss – or as we say now to be ‘nature positive’. 

To do for nature what the global community is trying to do for climate. 

In Montreal, I announced Australia would host the world’s first Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney in 2024. 

Thank you all for coming.

Sydney gives us the chance to take stock, examine how we are doing together and individually, share our successes and challenges and learn from each other. 

This Summit aims to accelerate collective action to drive investment in nature and strengthen activities to protect and repair our environment.

The next meeting of parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Colombia at the end of this month will take us further along this path.

And I am confident we will get there.

Australians love our country, and love the landscapes, plants and animals that make it unique. 

First Nations Australians have a deep connection with their lands and waters. Their Country is central to their spiritual identity, and this connection has been maintained despite colonisation.

All of us agree; if you love something deeply – you want to protect it. 

And that’s why we must work together to halt and reverse the impacts we’re having on nature. We can’t continue our current trajectory. 

Reversing our impacts on nature is a systemic challenge. 

That means looking at how our economy works – how we invest and use resources, how we value nature, and whether we’re building or eroding the natural capital our society and economy depend on. 

Like the transition to net zero, we can’t do it without business. 

I look forward to more businesses joining with governments to look after nature.

Today I’d like to talk about what we – in government – have been doing to tackle these systemic issues to turn things around for nature.

I want to talk about how we are:

• Changing the economic settings to better support nature;
• Increasing reporting so we can get a clearer picture of the health and abundance of nature;
• Driving investment to help nature; and 
• Increasing protections for nature.

But first, I want to say something about our Government’s approach to conservation and working in partnership with First Nations. 

Australia is lucky to be home to the world’s oldest continuous cultures – who have been custodians of this country for more than 60,000 years.

We respect the aspirations of Australia’s First Nations peoples and recognise the value of their traditional knowledge about our ancient landscapes. 

Indigenous Protected Areas are areas of land and sea that Traditional Owners have agreed to manage for nature conservation and are one of the best ways we have of protecting and caring for Country.  

Our government is establishing 12 new Indigenous Protected Areas, adding an area the size of Tasmania to our national reserve system.

And we are investing $1.3 billion in Indigenous Rangers, including doubling their number.

Rangers help manage the feral animals and weeds killing our native species, they undertake cultural burning, and use their knowledge in so many different ways to protect and care for Country.

That’s a great source of pride for Traditional Owners – and for our Labor Government that has such a long record of respecting and backing First Nations’ aspirations.

I also want to acknowledge the contribution to this Summit of Pacific partners and regional neighbours. 

I’m delighted to have been able to spend time with some of you at the Annual Dialogue of the International Partnership on Blue Carbon in Cairns last week. 

Between 2020 and 2025 Australia expects to provide almost $3 billion in climate finance for countries to reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change, including using nature-based solutions.

This includes almost $9 million ($8.75m) to support blue carbon projects. 

And you can see pictures of some these fabulous projects in the exhibition area.

As a global community – we have had successes before. 

Around 99 per cent of ozone-depleting substances have been phased out and the protective layer above Earth is being replenished. 

Commercial whaling was banned in 1986, and many species have seen marked recovery. If you go whale watching along the Australian coast, you’ll see increasing numbers of Southern Right whales and Humpback whales. 

And when it comes to climate – we are tackling climate change by decarbonising economies and working towards net zero.

Of course, these are works in progress: What they have in common is we have globally agreed targets and we are working towards a shared goal.

What we saw in Montreal was 188 countries agreeing on another goal: to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put nature on a path to recovery. 

To have any chance of achieving that goal, we must define what we mean and track our progress.

That’s why I’ve introduced laws into Parliament to define what nature positive means for Australia.

We’ve defined it as “an improvement in the diversity, abundance, resilience, and integrity of ecosystems from a baseline.”

This will be the first time any government has defined nature positive in legislation. 

The legislation also sets up Environment Information Australia. 

Environment Information Australia will be independent, and it will be their job to report on Australia’s progress on becoming nature positive.

They’ll provide trusted, public data and reporting about the state of our environment.

Environment Information Australia will also report on how we’re progressing with the new priority national goals that all Australian governments have agreed as our contribution towards implementing the Global Biodiversity Framework. 

Together with our Australian Bureau of Statistics, they’ll publish natural capital accounts that show the value of the natural assets we rely on: the forests, rangelands, soils, mangroves and seagrass that stock our seas with fish, support our food production and help us build our homes and our towns.

Where these natural assets are located, whether they’re growing or shrinking in size, and what condition they are in.

We’ve got an international partnership with the United States and Canada working on natural capital accounting because, like us, they know a strong economy depends on nature.  

As a government, we’re also Measuring What Matters for our national wellbeing.

Alongside our normal economic accounts, our budget papers now report on metrics to evaluate:

• How our threatened species are faring;
• How much land we have protected for conservation; and
• Whether our air is getting cleaner.

So as well as tracking the health of our economy, Australians can see whether our natural capital and other things that matter for our quality of life, are getting better or worse.

And we’re helping business to do the same thing – to understand their impacts and dependencies on nature. 

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures – launched in 2021 with the support of G20 and G7 governments – is about giving businesses and financial regulators around the world a consistent way of understanding and reporting on nature-related risks. 

Having an agreed way of measuring and reporting on nature provides a shared language for businesses, regulators, shareholders, and consumers. 

That’s why government backing and the work of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) on nature positive metrics and reporting is so important. 

It provides consistency and creates a shared language.

Until our businesses and economic decision makers are factoring the value of nature into our economic decision-making – until our economic settings change – nature will continue to go backwards.

For agricultural businesses like AACo – the Australian Agricultural Company – and natural health supplements company Blackmores, the business case for understanding and managing their reliance on nature is obvious. For other companies, less so, but that’s changing.

That’s why it was great see the joint statement signed by 11 Australian organisations across business, finance, investment and the environment emphasising the importance of nature to the economy, released last week.

And why it was great last night to be able to launch Nature Positive Matters. 

Nature Positive Matters is a network of business leaders working towards a shared goal - making it easier to report on nature, reduce their impacts on nature and invest in nature repair.

We want to help business do the right thing by nature - and get the recognition they deserve for having strong environmental credentials and investing in nature repair.

I was also delighted to announce last night that we’ve doubled the number of Australian businesses that have signed up to nature reporting using TNFD reporting. 

Twenty-three Australian organisations have now committed to nature reporting.

Once businesses can see the impact they are having on nature and understand what this means for their bottom line, they’re more likely to invest to protect the natural assets they rely on. 

We’ve seen the same thing happen with climate reporting.

We’re also making it easier for businesses to invest in restoring nature.

We’ve legislated to establish the world’s first national nature repair market – with scientifically robust, transparent rules for establishing baselines, repairing nature and measuring the outcomes.

So that everyone – investors, customers, shareholders – can have confidence that projects are delivering what’s expected, with a national, public register of nature repair projects. 

This means anyone can easily verify and track the outcomes of a project, who owns it and the claims being made about its benefits. 

And by making sure that when someone invests in a project to repair nature, the gains for nature are protected long term, via legislation and enforced by a government regulator. 

We’ve designed the nature repair market so it works together with the carbon market. This means landholders can be rewarded for nature benefits as well as earning carbon credits.  

We’ve got pilot projects underway to set the groundwork for the nature repair market including blue carbon, biodiverse plantings, and vegetation management projects. 

You’ll have the opportunity on the third day of this Summit to see some of these projects.

The nature repair market will open at the start of 2025, with the first method already out for public consultation.

The Government is also making it easier for the financial sector to back the Government’s climate and environment agenda through our Green Bonds Program.

The first $7 billion Green Bond was issued earlier this year with funds raised going to support Australia’s net zero transition. 

The interest from superannuation funds and other investors showed the level of demand for quality nature and climate investment.

Critically, we are significantly increasing protections for nature too. 

We’re fixing our environmental laws and setting up a national Environment Protection Agency with stronger powers and penalties.

We know what we need to do to protect and repair nature. 

Our Strategy for Nature sets out what we’re going to do to implement the Global Biodiversity Framework. It includes six priority national targets and three enablers of change.  

We’ve chosen to focus primarily on these nine areas because it’s where our actions can make the biggest difference.

We’ve committed to no new extinctions and to tackling invasive pests and weeds that are the biggest risk to many of our threatened species. 

We are investing more than $1 billion in biosecurity – the system critical to our planning and response to bird flu, for example, and preventing introduced pests and pathogens that can be so devastating on an island continent like ours.

And we are investing more than half a billion dollars in threatened species protection. 

We are fighting the threat of feral cats, for example – which kill billions of native animals every year and are implicated in two thirds of mammal extinctions that have occurred in Australia.

We’ve committed to improving our rates of circularity, so we use fewer virgin resources and reduce pressure on our environment – with a $1 billion to boost recycling capacity, increasing it by over one million tonnes a year.  

And we’re using government procurement to support the development of markets for recycled materials through our new sustainable procurement policy.

We’ve committed to minimise the impacts of climate on our biodiversity.

Climate change has meant less water in our river systems like those in Australia’s food bowl, the Murray Darling Basin – and it will mean even less water in the future.

Our multi-billion-dollar investment in the Murray Darling Basin Plan is restoring life-giving water to the rivers and wetlands the length of the Basin – from Queensland to the mouth of the Murray River – thousands of kilometres away in South Australia.

Restoring the Basin to health has been one of the biggest and most difficult environmental challenges our country has had to face but we are now back on track.

I could not be prouder of the work we’re doing with Basin communities to manage our water for the future.  

We know climate change is also the biggest threat to our beautiful Great Barrier Reef. 

We are investing $1.2 billion to protect the Reef.

I was in Queensland last week, to inspect efforts to repair it. 

The most recent example is a new program preventing 130,000 tonnes of sediment from flowing onto the Great Barrier Reef. The sediment can coat sea grass meadows. The sea grass dies and the dugongs have nowhere to feed, the fish have nowhere to breed. Sediment prevents coral growing properly.
By revegetating creek beds and gullies, restoring wetlands and mangroves, we are preventing the flow of sediment and rehabilitating entire, complex ecosystems. 

We have also committed to protecting 30 percent of our land and 30 per cent of our seas – and restoring priority degraded areas – by 2030. 

Since our Government was elected a little more than two years ago, we have protected an extra seven million km2 – or 70 million hectares – of Australian ocean and bush – an area bigger than Germany and Italy combined.

And we’re protecting more of our marine environment – including our precious wild places like Heard and McDonald Islands.

I am pleased to announce today that the Albanese Labor Government has signed off a massive expansion of Australia’s most remote marine park – bringing more than half of Australian oceans under protection, for the first time ever.

This means that Australia is now protecting more ocean than any other country on the planet.

The Heard and McDonald Islands marine reserve will increase by almost 310,000 km2 – an area larger than Italy – and will provide greater protections for an environment unlike anywhere else in the world. 

The World Heritage-listed subantarctic islands are about 4,000km southwest of Western Australia and 1,700km north of Antarctica, and are home to glaciers, penguins, seals, whales, albatross, wetlands and our country’s only active volcanoes. 

The islands are also globally significant foraging areas for seabirds and seals.  

The expansion means that 52 per cent of Australia’s oceans are protected marine parks – so I’m proud to say we’ve blitzed our 30 by 30 target when it comes to oceans. 

This decision cements Australia’s role as a global leader in marine conservation. 

It is the biggest contribution to ocean conservation anywhere on the planet this year and follows our tripling of the protected waters around Macquarie Island last year.

We are at the start of the road when it comes to nature positive and turning things around. 
Our job is not just to do the work, but to take others along with us. To build coalitions, with unlikely allies as well as our traditional partners.  

To talk and to persuade – and not demonise those who might need convincing that nature needs help.

Those who need to better understand what it means to be nature positive.  

To those who might demand perfection and jump on anyone who falls short while they are learning and trying – I urge you to listen, talk, and persuade instead. Make the case. Win people over, don’t alienate them.  

All of us in this room are ambassadors for the idea that nature can’t continue on a downwards trajectory.  
That we must halt and reverse the decline – by each of us trying to leave the places around us in better shape than before. Nature positive.  

And it is our job after this Summit to champion this approach, which intuitively makes so much sense.  

In nature everything is so intricately and exquisitely connected. And it is our job as leaders in our different fields to keep these delicate webs of connection intact.  

I’m optimistic. We have seen previously entrenched systems change and adapt, as society’s values and needs change.  

Just as we are seeing, with the shift to renewables in our energy grids.

The time to start the shift to nature positive is now – to strive for an economy that is net zero and nature positive.  

Thank you for being part of this crucial work.