Thank you, Antony, for the introduction, . I'm Martin Mitchell, as Anthony said, I'm currently SIA's chief sustainability sustainability officer. I have a colleague with me who's taking some photographs at the back, Suzie Ramsey from Siva UK.

I actually work for the international company. It was it's quite a strange journey for me today because I come from a farming family just down the road, in fact, right next door to Robin. We went to school together.

Talking about it and we we grew up in farming families close to here, and it was really interesting to hear Lord Trees talk because the changes that we've seen in our lifetime we were exchanging over coffee. I mean, my father died a year ago, he was he was a farmer and he wrote his childhood experiences which interestingly have just been published by the local History Society. But it talks about growing up on a farm, it's a place called Salterforth, which is sort of between here and Skipton if you know it, on the, just off the A59 and you know, he grew up, he played football with his cousins and the farming families around there.

In the spring they went birding and. All those wonderful photographs that Robin's taken, I was asking him, are there still curlews, are they still tulips? And, you know, but that family farm went from, my grandfather probably had 1020 cows to 40 when my uncle took it over, 200 sheep, 200 hens, and when my uncle finally retired, I think he was milking 120 cows plus whatever on the same acreage and probably making less money.

So it's very interesting to talk about farmers being the custodians and they really are the custodians of nature in the forefront, but they're not being rewarded for that. And that's not just in the UK, it's it's across the world. So how are we going to achieve that?

Somebody talked about food security being a buzzword. Well, I'm sorry, but it's not a buzzword. You know, with the Kokover Dam being blown up last week, one of the world's bread baskets has disappeared or it is going to be under severe pressure, which is going to put more pressure on food prices, which is look what happened, the Arab Spring was created by failure of the crop in Ukraine.

So when people don't have food in the stomachs, that's when they start to riot. Or they create revolution. Food security has not gone away.

We're very, very lucky in the west here where probably our food costs us in single figures, less than 10% of our income. If you go to Africa, where I worked for 30 years, it's totally the reverse. It's probably 50 to 60% of those families' incomes, so food is important, as is how we produce it.

And that that really was, so I'm gonna talk to you about Together Beyond Animal Health, which was a slogan that we developed 10 years ago. I'll come back to that and and how that impacts on biodiversity. I think my colleague Emily from Merck, you said, so what, why, why is it important?

And I actually work, I sit on the same committees as Merck, we have our global association, we have our European association, so although we're competitors, we work together on subjects like sustainability, and it's important that we do. But is it real or is it just greenwashing, because so many companies, I think are. You know, accused of green greenwashing.

I mean, the question was raised about offsets and we were talking Chanel, you know, is it a good thing, is it a bad thing, does it just, cover up for what is not being done? 3 years ago, actually, what I work on most now is, our company's, business purpose. And, that might sound like, you know, having a vision, a business purpose, it might just sound like, it's a lot of hot air.

But I don't believe it is because if we go back to things like food production, more and more, farming, agriculture has a bad press. So if we have a bad press, then people don't want to work for us. It's very difficult to attract talent.

We don't get the bad because we seem to be doing harm. And that is incredible when you think about it as a veterinary company or as veterinarians that you know you could be considered as as doing harm, but in a lot of parts of society, mainline media, that's almost the perception now. So having a clear vision, setting out what is important for you is extremely important.

And two years ago we . We, we updated our, our vision, our business purpose, and we asked our employees what subjects, what themes do you think are most important to you? And this was the analysis.

It's actually very similar to your mega trends, Emily, so not surprisingly, you know, one health, animal welfare, sustainability, biodiversity, one i is, it's about our internal community. But recently, any of you know about ESG reporting, to do an ESG report, now you have to do a double materiality analysis. I wasn't allowed to show you the slide, which unfortunately for.

But what that showed was, and basically you survey not only your employees but your stakeholders, customers, anybody with an input, and you look at the impact on your business and, and the impact on society and you basically take a matrices to measure the two, and these themes were almost identical. So in both cases, both one health and biodiversity came in the top three. So is it important?

Excuse me, yes it is. So, you know, if our employees and if our stakeholders tell us that it's important, should we do something about it? It just seems so self-evident.

And this is really the . These are really the three points that generate our commitments. Siva is actually, it's a slightly different business to some of our competitors.

We're a private business. We're entirely funded by a raft of private investors, although as managers we own the majority of the business. That doesn't mean to say that we escape shareholder pressure because all of our investors now, largely private equity funds, etc.

They have ESG reporting and they are required legally to assess whether their portfolios are doing, if I characterise it as good and bad, you'll understand what I mean, but. So holding portfolios that are either environmentally supportive or they're doing damage becomes extremely important to them. And obviously if as a company we are we're doing harm, we're not respectful of animal welfare, we don't have a strategy in terms of protecting the life of antimicrobials, then clearly in their eyes we're a business risk.

So things that might Been far off a long time ago, are very close to us now, and they impact us in terms of our investment, but also that also impacts our borrowing levels because companies who are doing good now fortunately can borrow at lower levels. So these are not like hairy fairy things, they're very practical things. I talked about our employees and what their expectations are, both our existing employees, but if we want to attract talent, then we have to have, strategies and we have to have a vision in place that, is in line with that, .

So, you can't manage what you can't measure, it's it's just very obvious, . We, I think, you know, honestly we were quite, I think we were quite slow in terms of our environmental policies. It's only really 2 or 3 years ago that we started to wake up and understand that we had an impact and that we had to do something about it.

So at that point we, we started to, to measure and now we have a very strong understanding of what our environmental, what our carbon footprint is. And you can see. Excuse me.

Is it possible to get a glass of water, thank you. Only about 15 to 20% of our footprint relates directly to what we do and what we produce, so our scope one to emissions, . Scope 3 accounts for 80% and Lord Tres was talking about that not being calculated in terms of carbon targets for the country and Scope 3 becomes very very tricky because we have suppliers from throughout the world.

I mean, most of our active ingredients come from China, India, countries where they don't have the same environmental criteria that we we do. And thank you very much, Antony. We're not the only company.

Virtually every pharmaceutical company in the world is drawing its active ingredients from there. Europe has killed its active ingredient producing industry. There's discussion now as to whether that should change, but until that does change, clearly the most impact we can have is through pressure onto those suppliers, which is not always so easy because we live in a world where It's difficult enough to get those products anyway, so you can apply pressure, but do you get product?

That said, we have, I'm, I'm, I'm very pleased put into place our own EHS governance. We have our policy in place, this has been shared with all our employees, if you just look at the environmental part. What we're looking at specifically and in terms of our own factories over the last year is somebody talked about energy independence.

More and more we're looking at energy independence as well as energy renewable. Again, you can, it's very easy to not offset, but just by buying green energy or so-called green energy from the grid. We could solve that tomorrow, but isn't that a little bit cosmetic?

So we're going further and we we really for every site that we have now, we are, we've analysed, we've got plans in place, both in terms of reductions and all our new buildings, all our new facilities are designed to be energy efficient, but carbon neutral. So that brings me to the subject matter, which is biodiversity, isn't it? So how does biodiversity fit into our vision?

12 years ago, 2010, I I came back from Africa. I've, so I'm a local boy, but I've, I haven't worked in this country for 33 years, I think it is. And you know, I think being in Africa, it's .

One health becomes very obvious, you know, where you have, I, I see, I know Simon, you spend a lot of time there as well, but where you see animals are healthy, people are healthy, and you have a healthy environment because. You know, people are so close to their their animals. I mean, if their oxen are not fit to plough the fields, then the maze doesn't get planted and nobody eats.

So it's very obvious the notion of one health, and we sat down and we with our senior management team, we worked on this whole vision, which is very close to one Health, but the slogan was summarised as Together Beyond animal health. You know, is that important? Well, or is it just a slogan?

And, but what I can tell you is that at that time, around 28% of our portfolio was made up of vaccines or preventative health products. In the interim time, that's shifted to over 50% now. So I think about 52% of our our our products are now preventative health products.

You talked about the importance, Emily, and you know you've you've moved much further in terms of digital technologies. I think you know our emphasis is and each company has got its own strategy, but it's been more towards vaccines, vaccination, and the benefits of vaccination. But that's a huge shift in any, any business to move from there.

And why was that achieved? Because we sat down, we wrote a vision. It just didn't happen by accident.

So that's why, you know, vision, I, I believe is important. And Two years ago we started and we sat down again with our employees first and we consulted them and through a whole process it lasted 18 months, consultation of our 6500 employees, face to face meetings. We came up with this very simple sentence.

I hope I can remember it. Together are passionate people, and that's important because you know people talk about being customer centric and you know we use the word passion, passion as a value of ours because we don't think customer centric is good enough. I mean customer centric is table stakes, it's what you expect, but what we want is our people to be passionate.

We want them to invest in relationships with audiences such as yourself and be emotional and go that extra mile. Drive innovative health solutions for all animals, and that was a big change, and I'll explain our approach to wildlife just, in the next few lines, contributing to the future of our diverse planet. And that was the first time that we'd introduced the idea of biodiversity.

Why? Because it was one of the expectations of our employees. So there's a lot of different ideas in that simple sentence, but that's really what drives us.

I mean, Emily, you said it again, you come to work for a purpose and you know whether you're working for Merck, whether you're working for Siva, whether you're working for Vettokino. You want to feel that you're working for a purpose and that you're, you're doing good in in in what you do. So again, just coming back to our employees, what we have done is we've set up 5 employee working groups working on these themes which are, they're huge themes on health, sustainability, animal welfare.

I coordinate the work of these groups and it's, it's incredible to see the passion. So each group is made up of 8. We have some experts in the area.

We consulted our our young generation managers, so the millennials and gens, so the 50 of those that we have globally, we've seeded the teams with the next generation, and then we asked people to volunteer, so there's a third of the group made up of volunteers. So these, these groups are really invested in what they're they're doing and they're coming up with some fantastic ideas as to each was required to have three smart objectives, so specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely, and so these objectives have now been set and they're starting to transform things within our within our company. Just to give you an example, maybe if I just go back, .

Yeah, so we have a biodiversity and wildlife group for a number of years. I've got the slightest sort of wrong way around. We, we have a lot of what we call flagship projects, so we've supported, .

Amsterdam Island albatrosses where we had a species that was almost extinct. I think there were 7 breeding pairs, and we worked with the French government there to to produce an autoogenous vaccine against the foul cholera that was threatening to wipe the species out. We worked with the .

African pangolin network, pangolins being the most, you know, traded endangered species in the world, I'll finish on some work that we're doing with koalas, but you know, these are all great projects, but what we found is that a lot of our employees felt too far away from them. So the objective that they set was, you know, let's bring biodiversity close to home. And what's happened as a result of that is that Ridgeway is a, I don't know if you know Ridgeway, it's a notogenous vaccine facility that we have, I think it's close to Compton isn't it, or I've never been, but the employees themselves have now surveyed their own site and they've put into place a an enrichment programme to enrich biodiversity in that area, .

South Africa has done the same. It was amazing. I was lucky enough to attend we're members of the UK International Coronavirus Network and we had a a meeting of the network in Belfast just a couple of weeks ago.

So a lot of scientists there, including one from South Africa who's been surveying the the bat population in South Africa and and and some of the neighbouring countries. Anyway, I was able to link her back to the employee group. I mean our offices in in South Africa, I don't know if you know are between Joburg and Pretoria.

I mean it's and it's just a concrete jungle, but they've surveyed what they're doing there, they've set out a plan to enrich both plant, insect, wildlife. And they planned to build bat houses or bat houses. So I was able to link them back to this expert and so you know, that's just one thing that's going ahead and.

I think this is what is for me is important in terms of you can have, you know, your flagship projects like these, but when people get their hands dirty and they can do it in their local community, a bit like Anthony, you know, you're doing it next to your home, then these are the things that really I think engage them. Climate change, I mean, we, we talked about it and I don't know how I'm doing it on time, my time has gone off now, so I'm doing it on time. Never has it, you know, yeah, give me, we're getting towards the end.

Give me a shout if I'm, if I'm running over. You know, I really believe this. Never has it made more sense to invest in nature, but, you know, these are just some figures from the last COP, you know, the, we've got 1 million species estimated at risk, .

But you know, only 1% of species are currently being monitored, and when you look at, I was doing some research and actually we've got no idea how much biodiversity we have on the planet. I mean, the estimates, you know, range, you can see the figures there, I don't need to read them out. I mean that's pretty shocking in the maybe I I can work it out for us, but we certainly haven't worked it out in the last 200 years.

It sort of leads me to one health and you know we've got some one health experts in in the room here and you know I said like Africa really interested me in this thing, but one thing that really shocks me is that, you know, people talk about one health, people and animals together, but when we look at the, you know, where is the reservoir of infection? It's basically 3/4 of human infectious diseases are coming from animals and 3/4 of those are coming from wildlife, according to Edinburgh University. So, but nobody ever talks about wildlife.

They don't even think about that that reservoir infection, the spill over that we're getting from that interface. So one health is not one health unless we consider that, it's only 28% help my maths are right. You know, we talked to, we talked about, avian influenza, and, we are one of the two companies with Boehringer that just had our vaccines, .

Registered and the French government announced this week that all the duck population will be vaccinated in France in the next, I think it's October, the campaign will start. It's taken us 12 years to get to that 0.12 years of lobbying.

I remember going to an international poultry conference in Cape Town where we'd just had an outbreak in the states where they'd killed 50 million birds. They didn't know what they they couldn't even find a big enough pits to burn them all, can you, can you imagine environmental chaos caused by that? And we had a European expert and the Chinese government, and we had a round table, and I can tell you that the whole discussion was not about about animal welfare or about pandemic preparedness, it was about trade and the current rules that we've got are out of date.

They're totally trade driven. Now that Brazil also has AI, let's see, I think things will change much more quickly. But why can't we vaccinate wild birds against AI?

Perfectly possible, logistically difficult. We've already started to do it in in wild animals, so we over the last couple of years we've acquired two businesses that specialise in bait vaccines, so for wild fox, raccoon populations in the states, so one's in the USA, Canada. Another that's er Germany based and clearly the whole campaign that was done on the eastern edge of the European Union was very, very successful using vaccines, so that shows that it is possible.

We we're now adopting that technology for dogs, so for stray dog populations where the campaigns with parental vaccination worked pretty well. I mean, Merck very involved in that as well, but when you start to add that to using bait technology, it really does give possibilities for total eradication and we're looking at . There's a trial going on in Goa at the minute that that is aiming just at that.

When we say we're committed to the, to provide health for all animals, . A few years ago in Australia we were asked by, we had a an old antibiotic, chlorophenyl, I mean not a great product, well, it's a very old product and we took it off the market because there was very little demand. But when we did that, it was the only product that wildlife vets could use to treat chlamydia in in in koalas, and the chlamydia problem there was causing huge problems in terms of reproduction.

Obviously that triggered with the wildfires that we experienced, you know, has led to the species being listed as endangered. I think it was was it 2022 or in the last few years it's it has become an endangered one of the world's most endangered species, so. We've been supplying er we brought the product back and we've been supplying that er free of charge to wildlife vets, which is, is good, it's it's certainly helped things, but it's not er necessarily the solution.

We've recently set up this endowment fund called the CIA Wildlife Research Fund. It's an entirely independent business to CIA. We put in the seed capital, but we are looking for other sponsors.

And the look at the supporters and and the whole objective of that fund is to support projects that can develop things like vaccines for wild animals and solve situations like we have with the koala. So there should be just a short video that describes that rather than me. Containing conduct at Yundi RSPCA Wildlife Hospital in Queensland, Australia, veterinarian Doctor Claude Lacass is treating a sick koala.

Errol, as the staff there have named him, is suffering from a chlamydia infection. Together with habitat loss and deaths due to bushfires, chlamydia is a serious threat to koalas, and all of this resulted in the Australian Federal government declaring them an endangered species. 2 But this marsupial is being injected with a new vaccine.

Developed by researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, which is designed to treat koalas in the wild. Vaccines do work and so we'll be developing this vaccine for a while now, and we're at a pretty exciting stage, I think. I think we've done the majority of the research, you know, we never finished that.

We've done quite a few trials in controlled conditions, but now we're at that stage of getting to vaccinate animals and letting them go back into the wild. CIA's Independent fund established specifically to promote wildlife research, the CIA Wildlife Research Fund, is supporting the development and registration of this new vaccine designed to prevent the spread of chlamydia in the koala population. The Mundi Hospital and Doctor Lucas have also been involved in the field trials to establish the effectiveness of the new vaccine.

What the funding will provide is to support the trials that are required to register the vaccine, and so we have some experts who will be giving advice about the final manufacturing processes just to be sure that the process is as good as it could be. I think the koalas would have really struggled. Siva's intervention, I think it's 8 years ago now, that was a lifesaver.

So the fact that they're trying to get involved with the vaccine, that's that's even better, and yeah, because we want more people involved so that we can get more money to actually get some of the product that works and that anyone can use. So we need to do basic science all the way through. We need to understand how many different strains of chlamydia there are out there.

It's a bit like the flu and COVID. There are different strains out there and so we have to make sure that the vacc Seeing matches with those strains, it'll help the majority of koalas most of the time, so I'm pretty confident it is a good outcome happening now and can only happen better in the future. Initial results in the hospital have shown that none of the koalas that have been vaccinated have so far returned with chlamydia, and the hope is that Errol, who's now been returned to the wild, will also have a positive outcome, together with many thousands of his fellow koalas.

OK, I think there are a number of wildlife, interested people in the room, so if you have any interest in the fund, I can talk to you about it, afterwards. Anton, if you just give me one more minute, I added one slide. Oh, that's my timer.

Really through what Lord Trees was saying, and I, I just wanted to, I just put it in because I wanted to bring your attention to this report. So again with my colleagues from Merk and Health for Animals, Noreen, do you know Noreenbren, we. My boss, our CEO, was president of Health for Animals 2 or 3 years ago and we commissioned this research that's been done by Oxford Analytica.

It's just been published at the start of the year. There's just a few sort of headline figures here, but it's it's a very interesting and I think it's the first report of its kind coming through from our sector, so I would encourage you to have a look at that. Thank you very much.