As I think that I said earlier, we have not simply followed the line of the Committee on Climate Change. Our approach to agriculture was developed in two ways and, as I said, that resulted in the sector’s emissions reduction being increased. I think that you know what I mean: over time, agriculture came out with a tougher challenge than was originally envisaged.
Forgive me, because this is quite technical—I had to ask about it myself. An assessment was made on the marginal abatement cost curve, which is about the extent to which, as one attempts to abate, the gains reduce until they are really very small. We had to look at that aspect. The approach was not planned to be used as a model for calculating emissions, because it describes measures at farm level, which cannot be delivered through policy—agriculture is a particular area—and because some measures would be undesirable for reasons to do with health and safety and other aspects of farming.
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It brings us back to the need to make sure that we have the proper balance and that what we are doing is proportionate. What we are talking about was still part of the process, but we had to revise it for the TIMES model. We could not have simply gone with the straightforward approach, because it would not have given us the result that we wanted.
Analysis by agriculture officials concluded that we could get fairly reasonable emissions reductions through policy interventions—again, this is also about policy interventions. We had to analyse trends in agriculture since 1990, which in any case projected a reduction every year in addition to our policy efforts. All of that is being fed in as part of the process. That is why our approach has not simply been lifted from the Committee on Climate Change, and why there has been an actual process to look at some of that stuff. As I have said, the TIMES model is international, and we cannot just lift something from somewhere else without looking at the conditions in Scotland.
What we and Transport Scotland have used to look at transport is research from Element Energy, which was published just after the publication of the draft climate change plan and is available for people to look at. It provided more detail than TIMES, and because the projections for emissions reductions were broadly consistent with the output from TIMES, that research is what has been adopted.
That is quite a long-winded explanation of the two areas in which the approach was not simply lifted and dropped into the TIMES model. We think that, in both cases, it was the right way for us to go, because otherwise the results would have been distorted.