Chamber and committees

You are right to recognise the work of volunteers in protecting and restoring nature. Indeed, Matthew Bird and I went to the launch of the UK’s plant atlas, after an estimated 8,500 volunteers went around the UK, over a 20-year period, counting every flowering plant. It is an incredible achievement, and that is exactly the kind of data that we need in order to understand the challenges that native species—such as those at Langlands Moss—face and how at risk they are. Unfortunately, the plant atlas shows that our native species numbers have declined significantly, but introduced species numbers have increased significantly. You are absolutely right that the challenge is enormous, and protected areas make such a difference.

As I outlined to Jackie Dunbar, one of the streams in the biodiversity strategy, under actions, is to

“recover and protect vulnerable and important species.”

That is exactly the focus that we need. We need to manage existing and emerging pressures so that species can continue their recovery, and we should reintroduce species when that is needed.

Lisa McCann or Matthew Bird might have some specific information on newts.

It is part of the cross-Government work that we do. Addressing consumption, which relates to the other part of my portfolio, will be covered largely through the circular economy bill and the route map for waste in Scotland. It is about bending that route around. However, that does not mean that the issue of consumption does not relate to biodiversity. These things are always artificially put into categories, but the member is quite right to point out that our work on the circular economy will be important in relation to biodiversity, too. I am absolutely confident that we will reference consumption in the strategy, because it is an important part of how we deal with the issue.

Absolutely. The Scottish Government has already committed to maintaining broad alignment with EU environmental standards, and we have been monitoring with interest the development of the EU’s ambitious nature restoration law. In fact, our strategy sets out the metrics that we would use to measure against the targets that the EU has set out.

At the moment, the EU law and the targets are proposals, and they are subject to negotiation between member states and amendment by the European Parliament. Our approach is not to wait for them but to develop our own targets and delivery proposals; however, we will take account of what is going on in Europe as those developments emerge.

I am very happy to take that under consideration. I can write to the member on that point.

The member is referring to the NatureScot agreement with Hampden & Co. As he suggests, that is an investment model that is based on a bridging loan from Hampden & Co to a private land owner to support that private land owner in creating woodland. The loan bridges the gap between the initial investment and the flow of carbon revenue. That is a way of helping private land owners do that woodland generation.

As the member will know—or she might not have been present for the committee’s evidence session—

We are looking at a variety of measures to support small producers. As I outlined in my answer to the convener, although hundreds of producers are signed up, there are some who have not yet signed up. We are digging into the detail of what the challenges are there. In response to conversation with those producers, Circularity Scotland has already put in place considerable cash flow measures—£22 million-worth of measures have been put in to reduce up-front costs and help with cash flow, because that was identified as a barrier.

Another identified barrier for small producers was labelling. Getting their bottles redesigned with a different barcode requires minimum order quantities and it takes a long time. To remove that barrier, Circularity Scotland will be issuing sticky labels to producers. When they have fewer than 25,000 of any particular product, they can get those labels from Circularity Scotland. They will kind of already be pre-registered, because the labels will have been issued to them.

Those are two—

[Inaudible.] A return point must be registered in order for it to be a return point; anyone who sells these materials has an obligation to register. That is so they can enter exactly the detail that Mr Kerr was pointing out in terms of how much storage they have and the volume of returns that they expect to receive so that the logistics can be organised. If a business wishes to be exempt, it needs to apply for an exemption. Zero Waste Scotland is managing the exemption process.

The matter of recovering and protecting vulnerable and important species is one of the five themes that the biodiversity strategy covers. The strategy has 26 actions that we are taking for nature, grouped into those five themes. Theme 4 is to recover and protect vulnerable species, and one of the actions there is to

“Revise the Scottish Biodiversity List of species and habitats that Scottish Ministers consider to be of principal importance for biodiversity conservation in Scotland”.

Perhaps Matthew Bird or Lisa McCann can add some detail on that process.

Thank you, convener, and thank you for inviting me here today to discuss the outcomes from COP15 and how we are integrating them into our biodiversity strategy. I know that you have already heard overwhelming evidence about the extent of the biodiversity crisis that we are facing here in Scotland and across the world, and about the importance of taking action now to tackle the decline in nature.

You have also heard about the historic Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework, which was agreed at the end of last year. That framework builds on a vision, which I hope you share, of a world that is living in harmony with nature and where, by 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, through maintaining ecosystem services.

As you are aware, I was honoured to attend COP15 with a small Scottish delegation, which culminated in our presenting the Edinburgh declaration to that conference’s high-level segment, on behalf of subnational bodies. As well as calling for a high-ambition outcome from the meeting in Montreal, the Edinburgh declaration also called for the critical role that subnational bodies play in addressing the biodiversity crisis to be recognised and allocated the necessary resources and powers to help to tackle it. I am delighted that the declaration was adopted at the conference and now forms part of the new global biodiversity framework.

The Scottish Government led the Edinburgh process at the request of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s secretariat, and I am very proud of the work that was done to promote it and to garner support for it. That work is demonstrated by the fact that, at the final count, the declaration had been signed by more than 300 subnational bodies from around the world.

Our draft biodiversity strategy was published to coincide with COP15, but it remained in draft form to allow us to take into account the new global biodiversity framework, thereby ensuring that we are meeting the global ambition. The strategy is where we set out our high-level vision for a nature-positive Scotland and our ambition to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 and reverse declines by 2045. I have often wondered whether that is ambitious enough; although there has been a huge amount of really positive activity across Scotland in recent years—for example our scaling up of peatland restoration and our groundbreaking nature restoration fund—it is clear that there is still a huge amount of work to do. The type of change that we need takes time, which is why it is even more important that we start taking action now.

We are currently refining the strategy and are now very much focused on developing the delivery plans that will sit underneath it. Those plans will be where we will set out how we are going to achieve our high-level vision and outcomes.

I was very grateful to the committee for the careful and detailed consideration that it gave to the draft biodiversity strategy last year. Your comments formed an important part of our consideration in developing the strategy and, as I set out when I wrote to the committee in December 2022, many of those points were incorporated in the final draft.

We are also starting to explore with our subnational partners the next steps on implementing the Edinburgh declaration and how best we can work together to really deliver on the new global framework. I welcome this discussion today and I appreciate the attention that the committee is giving to this important matter.