NBN Trust Patron, Lord Selborne spoke at the Lord's World Biodiversity Debate on the 24th November, where he talked about the NBN and Atlas of Living Scotland (see extracts below).
A transcript of the full debate can be found here (Lord Selborne started his section at 6.21pm):
“I draw attention to the National Biodiversity Network, which is bringing together all these records held by any number of agencies. We now have more than 110 million biological records and they are accessible to anyone online. That is the key. There is no point recording where you find one particular plant or see a bird if that is not available online in order to inform policy-makers. That was a great springboard from which to build up the information required for monitoring, valuing and accounting for natural capital, as well as identifying the required investment and management programmes—the risks, the costs and benefits. Those are what was really meant by developing programmes in order to protect biodiversity.
An investment programme has to be based on the strongest evidence of economic benefit. That could include woodland planting, peatland restoration, wetland creation, the restoration of commercial fish stocks, urban green spaces or improving the environmental performance in farming. These are, of course, happening in some instances. There is a feeling that these must be funded by government grants, but that will not happen, particularly when we hear the news tomorrow. We need to be a little more inventive about sources of funding that might include a wealth fund derived from rents from non-renewable resources and compensation payments from developers.
Other parts of the world clearly do not have access to the same amount of records as we have. But we should not minimise the amount of information that we can get from remote sensing. I do not know whether other noble Lords heard, as I did, Professor Kathy Willis of Kew describe recently on Radio 4, Oxford’s local ecological foot-printing tool for mapping remote sensing, which gives specific information on biodiversity, which, of course, has to be supplemented, ultimately, by fieldwork. But she made the point that using this tool they were able to provide information that had escaped people on the ground.”
Atlas of Living Scotland mention:
“Scotland is to be congratulated on the online publication last year of the Atlas of Living Scotland, an online biodiversity database built to inform the world of just what biodiversity, soils, climates and habitats can be found in Scotland. I much look forward to the day when England can do the same.”