Chamber and committees

Jonnie Hall spoke about making a distinction between a catastrophic event, such as a point-source pollution, and longer-term practices that might degrade the environment over time and which we might not know about until it is too late.

Can you point to particular risks around ecocide in each of your sectors? Are you saying that you do not see ecocide applying at all to your sectors and that you are more concerned about a wider definition that could capture long-term management of farms, the seas and Scottish Water assets over time? Are there other examples in farming—say, a pollution incident in which hundreds of tonnes of slurry goes into a river and kills it off—that you could clearly call ecocide?

Earlier, if I picked it up correctly, Elspeth MacDonald said that there are some concerns within the sector about the lack of investment in enforcement. Is your point that there could be situations in which fishers go into an area where a species gets fished out, which could constitute ecocide, but, because there is a lack of enforcement, licensing and enforcement of the licence should have kicked in earlier and people are therefore left in a difficult situation? I am just trying to imagine it from the fishers’ point of view. What is your concern? What changes as a result of the bill? Are you reliant upon the state effectively requiring you to stick with and enforce the licences, or does the bill bring in a new set of responsibilities for you? How do fishers address that challenge?

Anyone else?

This has been a fascinating evidence session, and I certainly welcome the bill coming to the committee at stage 1. Sometimes members’ bills can highlight the Government’s blind spots, so the session has been really interesting. I want to pick up on a couple of things that came out of Kevin Stewart’s questioning.

First of all, we have this system of environmental regulation and environmental permitting, and I am interested in other jurisdictions that have adopted ecocide as an overarching offence. Has that driven reform of regulation, permitting and licensing, simply because of an underlying fear that some of the regulations are not fit for purpose and that, even though companies might have a licence under those regulations, they might, in some extreme examples, still be found by a court of law to have committed ecocide? I am just interested in finding out what this overarching legal change will do, if anything, to drive further environmental regulatory reform.

Professor Fogleman, I see you nodding vigorously.

The committee has done very good work on this issue over a number of years, and I think that writing back to the stakeholders who responded to our original 2023 inquiry has brought us up to date.

I am a bit concerned that the regulations in Scotland are continuing to fall behind the best evidence that we have of the health impacts of air quality, which we know are substantial; the fact that we are not keeping pace with European Union standards is a concern. I note that the Scottish Government will look at all of this when it comes to revise its air quality strategy in the next year, but it is worth our writing to the Government now, asking it to adopt the WHO guidance, which is based on the best health evidence, and reflecting that in regulation. I note that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency—our environmental regulator—and Environmental Standards Scotland back that approach, as do many of the people who responded to our recent call for evidence.

Therefore, I am content for us to draw a line under the petition now and close it, following a letter to the Government urging it to adopt the WHO limits and to consider the steps for doing that in its next cleaner air for Scotland strategy.

I am reading the submission from the Institute for Public Policy Research in Scotland. It says that MSPs will have to decide to approve the carbon budgets

“effectively in ignorance of the policies they would then have to support in order to see the budgets delivered.”

The lack of information is concerning, and it perhaps plays to those, such as Mr Lumsden, who want to weaken ambition for the carbon budget, rather than people such as me, who want to strengthen that ambition.

No climate change plan—not even a draft one—has been submitted. We have only an incredibly thin indicative statement. The Government has rejected the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee on livestock and on peatlands, and policies on heat and on traffic reduction have been dropped. There is no energy strategy as yet. When it comes to Peterhead power station, there is uncertainty about the existing power station, let alone the prospect of a second one.

There are a lot of unknowns here and, quite frankly, I do not know whether this carbon budget is ambitious enough, because it lacks the transparency that successive committees of this Parliament have called for in advance of setting targets, objectives and aspirations around climate change. Although I will not vote against the budget, I find it very difficult to vote for it, because, without that detail, I do not know what it is that we are voting on at this point. I will therefore abstain.

Thank you. Gabi, would you like to come in?

Are there any other thoughts on that from the panel?

Should we be measuring, for example, the carbon impacts of dredging and trawling on the inshore? Is that the kind of approach that we should look at in Scotland? We do not have mangrove forests, but we have seabeds.

Is that correct?