Chamber and committees

First, biodiversity loss and climate change are inextricably linked and we must have protections and mitigations for them both. In every situation, decisions have to be made that take into account various pieces of evidence on environmental impact. The consent application processes are robust for offshore and onshore wind, but I think that we will be making them even more robust, particularly when there are consultations about things such as community engagement and the benefits that are associated with developments. Those consultations will become stronger as time goes on, because we need to be able to see that developments of any sort will not damage the environment and also that they put things back into the environment. For example, developers have taken action to restore peatland, and offshore wind developers are helping us with data collection on seabirds and fish species. Much of that is voluntary at the moment, but much more will become mandatory in that space—that is the trajectory.

One of the interesting things in relation to my portfolio is the restriction on how money that is associated with developments can be used for nature restoration. As a hypothetical example, let us say that funding has come from a wind farm as a result of its impact on the seabed. I cannot necessarily use that money for other mitigations in nature that would have a material impact on sea health, so it is very restrictive. However, things are adapting and changing, and I think that they are getting stronger.

You mentioned energy, so I will talk about what is happening in that space. The Scottish ministers have the power to amend the Habitats (Scotland) Regulations 1994 within the parameters that are set out in the UK Energy Act 2003 in respect of offshore wind activities only. However, that power does not allow for amendments to the regulations in respect of emerging technologies. A number of colleagues who represent the islands are at the committee today, including those who represent the Orkney Islands. The UK legislation does not allow for any flexibility with respect to the roll-out of our nascent wind and tidal energy technologies. That is because those technologies are not yet on the horizon for the UK Government—they are being developed in Orkney and in the waters off the Highlands of Scotland. We are aiming to plug a gap and give parity to other nascent technologies so that we can have flexibility. Rather than having flexibility in respect of one power generation sector, it is agnostic in respect of the means of power generation.

As a particular example, let us take wave technology. Scotland could lead on that once it becomes commercially viable, so I would not want to stymie it at all. At the same time, the protections in the bill, which are robust, will ensure that flexibility is not given for anyone to do anything that they want in our marine environment. We have to do something to reduce our impact on climate change, which is the biggest impact to our biodiversity.

I am willing to explore that. If committee members do not feel that the protections that we are putting in place are robust enough we can talk about that, because this is the first stage of the bill process. However, I do not believe that a non-regression clause would be particularly workable or that it would enable us to respond to each case as it comes before us.

Statutory targets are not a silver bullet. As I said in my opening statement, it is important to keep successive Governments’ eyes on the ball by requiring them to meet the targets and take the actions that underpin the targets.

The committee will know intimately the range of workstreams that we have designed to provide policy and action, because that is what there must be. If we just have targets, we will not achieve anything, but, if targets are statutory, that means that there has to be reporting associated with meeting them.

The targets cannot exist in isolation. They are underpinned by the strategic framework, which was published in November last year and includes the biodiversity strategy, which sets out the goal to be nature positive by 2030 and to have sustainability restored and regenerated by 2045. There are also six-year rolling delivery plans, which will have cross-sectoral action.

Plans exist in other Government portfolios as well. Mairi Gougeon has been taking on work under the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024, including the whole-farm plan and work with the agriculture reform implementation oversight board, or ARIOB, and she has been implementing policies from the fisheries management strategy in the marine environment. We are also doing work across the marine protected areas network, for example. There is also the budgeting that is associated with those things, such as the nature restoration fund in this year’s budget, and other historical pieces of work that have been done to hold planners and those who make planning decisions accountable, such as national planning framework 4. There is a raft of policy areas and duties on public bodies—councils, for example—that will underpin this work.

It will not be easy. I am setting out that, by 2045, we will have regenerated and restored biodiversity. That is only 20 years away, so there is an urgency, and we have got to the point where we need statutory targets. Statutory targets hold to account not just Government but Parliament, public bodies and future Governments. Biodiversity is far too serious a matter for us to leave it to chance or place hope in policies alone. As the convener rightly said, the “State of Nature 2023” report did not make good reading, which is why urgency must be associated with the actions that are set out in the bill.

The targets will be set out in secondary legislation should the bill pass. We are at the end of a parliamentary term, and the chances are that there will not be time to enact secondary legislation before the next session. It will be quite sobering for the new Parliament in 2026 that a bill has been passed which sets out in law a requirement to have statutory targets. The Parliament will have to discuss what those targets should look like, and it will be able to look in a granular way at each specific target and assess how far we can go on it. Some agility will be associated with the ability to scrutinise targets as well as to set them out.

Additional targets might end up being associated with the bill as it passes through the process. I do not know how the bill will evolve—that is the beauty of parliamentary work. I keep going back to the fact that the bill will allow us to respond in an agile manner. It will allow targets to change or be ramped up should there be particular pressures or changes in technology, or if new data sets or evidence were to become available. We might need to say that we will do more on a particular target in response to a “State of Nature” report, for example.

A great deal of work is being done by our academic institutions and by the Government with the likes of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, other public bodies and NatureScot to gather more data that will allow the Parliament and the Government to make decisions quickly and in an agile manner.

I recognise that some stakeholders, and people who have given evidence to the committee, have expressed that there is potential for a narrow interpretation. I will take you through how the topics were arrived at. They were recommended in expert scientific advice that was provided by the biodiversity programme advisory group—for brevity, I will call it PAG from now on.

The group comprised a panel of experts and was chaired by the Government’s chief scientific adviser for environment, natural resources and agriculture. It advised on all three elements of the strategic framework for biodiversity, and the bill includes the group’s recommended topics for which we must have specific targets. The bill also contains the power to add other topics. What stakeholders say on that aspect is interesting, and it will be interesting to see, in future years, whether we require to add other topics.

On the particular topic that you mentioned, which is the status of threatened species, we felt that it was important that it was the status of species, not the rarity, that had to be considered. That effectively meant that it would cover more than just rare species, including species that are under threat now and those with declining populations, which might not be classified as rare but are under threat. We might be seeing a threat to their existence, or they might have restricted genetic diversity. They might be under threat because of impacts on their habitat or food chain. There might be impacts from other factors, such as has happened with avian influenza whereby pathogens have devastated particular species.

We wanted to ensure that we had—and PAG advised us to have—a broader definition, because we did not want to exclude certain species. We do not want species to get to the point at which they are rare; we want to be able to intervene at the point where we see threats to them. That is why there is a broader definition.

Public bodies already have duties in this area. The Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Act 2011 made it a requirement for public bodies to report on their compliance with the biodiversity duty. That has been happening for 14 years. Every three years, all of Scotland’s public bodies have to produce such a report, together with an associated action plan. Bodies such as Scottish Water, SEPA, Scottish Enterprise, Registers of Scotland and all the local authorities already have that duty.

If we found that the action plans were not being delivered on, I would be open to investigating that further. My team regularly scrutinises those action plans and the policies that public bodies have set out to address the biodiversity situation. We need to address delivery on the action plans, but public bodies already have a duty in relation to biodiversity.

I often have discussions with the Welsh Government on a range of subjects in the portfolio. I am interested in your suggestions. The beauty of the relationship between the Welsh and Scottish Governments is that we often learn from each other and take on each other’s good ideas.

I am alive to Tim Eagle’s point that local authorities may be delivering on reporting but might not be taking the associated actions that are identified in those reports. Having 32 local authorities across Scotland means that there will be different ways in which each local authority can contribute or not—we want to get rid of the “or not”. There will obviously be different actions for Highland Council, the islands councils and Glasgow City Council, but we want to make sure that their actions are proportionate and relate to areas in which they have identified that they need to go further.

The Welsh idea is interesting. Their bill will create a duty for the Welsh ministers to give guidance and direction to particular local authorities. We need to make sure that Verity house is always taken into account—local authorities are in charge of their own destinies and we do not want to dictate what actions they have to take on the ground. However, there is already a statutory duty on them to report and to put their action plans in place. I will take away what you have mooted. I was in a meeting with the Welsh Government just yesterday. I imagine that, in the next couple of weeks, I will have the opportunity to speak to it again, and I will certainly look at some of the provisions in its bill.

I do not see why not—I am just looking at my officials. The advice that PAG gave us is very robust. I am getting the nod from Lisa, so we will of course pass it on.

Of course.

Yes. As I said, the legislation has been drafted in a way that allows us to modify the topics and add other topics. It is important to recognise—I am not telling the committee anything that it does not realise—that threats can come to species and changes can happen very quickly. Climate change can have an effect on a particular species very quickly, and the displacement or removal of a species’ feedstock into other waters can have an effect. There may be an explosion in the population of a particular predator, and that could have an impact on a species very quickly. That part of the bill allows for agility—I will keep on saying that word—to be able to respond to things and to look at the evidence and the trends, and the pressures that particular species are facing.