Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our environment committee hearings today.
The idea for today was to have a couple of panels to talk about the recent report that we saw on the biodiversity loss we're facing worldwide.
Thank you to each of our panellists for joining us today. We are expecting votes some time during this period. We don't know exactly how the afternoon is going to unfold. The way the process works is that we will have opening statements from each of our three panellists. We're hoping for opening comments in the seven-minute range and then we can get into questions and answers.
I use a handy card system. The yellow card means there is one minute left in the time allocated, and the red card means it's time to move on to the next person, but don't stop mid-sentence: just wrap up whatever it is you're saying and finish the thought. We're a fairly amicable group.
On our first panel, we have Dr. Kai Chan, Professor and an author of the report we'll be talking about today. We also have Dr. Jeremy Kerr, Professor of Biology, Faculty of Science, from the University of Ottawa. By video conference, from the Nature Conservancy of Canada, we have Dan Kraus, Senior Conservation Biologist.
Thank you to the three of you for being here.
Dr. Chan, we'll start with you.