Seòmar agus comataidhean

On the basis of one or more of them, yes. However, the Parliament needs to scrutinise that and decide whether it can be done. I am open to having a conversation about whether those processes can be strengthened, but that is where we have put the safeguards for the use of that power.

Could a future Government that does not believe in climate change and that does not think that biodiversity losses are a threat to the very existence of human beings come in and be full of people who are climate change deniers? That is a possibility that we always need to take into account in a democracy. They could do anything—they could rip up any legislation that they wanted to. However, I do not believe that the Scottish Parliament will be like that and I do not believe that the Scottish Parliament is like that now.

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.

I am open to exploring that if you want to take it forward. I think that you are right. The nature of climate change means that species are arriving in Scotland that we have never seen before. The danger is that some of them might be causing a threat to biodiversity; some of them—some insects, for example—might even cause a threat to human beings. There are also pathogens associated with some of the smaller species that arrive; for example, there are the various strains of bird flu that have been adapting and changing. If you want to speak to me about something like that, I would be open to exploring it with you, and my officials can take it away and look at it.

The bill does not say that reviews must be carried out every 10 years; it says that they must be carried out “not less than” every 10 years, so there is flexibility.

Environmental Standards Scotland is already the body that can advise us on bringing forward any review of targets. We set ESS up to be an independent advisor to us on whether we are meeting certain Government objectives and whether our legislation and policy direction in the area are working. I would have thought that ESS has the ability to advise that we review our targets anyway, but I can take the question away and bottom out with my officials whether it actually has that capacity or power, if you like.

It comes back to the whole responsiveness thing—if it looks as if targets are perhaps not as robust as they could be or they need looking at again, should it be our independent body, ESS, that is allowed to say to the Government, “We want to see a review of that target”? However, nothing in the bill says that there has to be a review every 10 years. That is a minimum. The targets have to be reviewed “not less than”—that is legal-speak—every 10 years. I will take the question away and look at whether Environmental Standards Scotland has the ability to hold us to account in that way, but it seems reasonable to me.

Yes. You are also welcome to come and speak to me if you want to raise anything before stage 2 to bottom out that particular issue.

Yes, I am.

It is important to say that we do not have that clarity from DEFRA. I want to bottom that out with DEFRA, because, as it stands, our assessment is that the provisions in regulation 9D do not permit individual sites in the site network to be adapted in the ways that might be required to mitigate the effects of climate change. They do not allow us to modify the boundaries of sites or to remove features from site citations. Nothing that has come from DEFRA has given us any confidence that we would have the ability to do that on the basis of regulation 9D. If we had that confidence, we would have taken a different view, but we have bottomed that out and we have no idea what DEFRA is doing in relation to that. In saying that, we are in communication with DEFRA and are asking it those questions directly.

This particular power would allow us to mitigate the effects of climate change in a responsive and dynamic way, modify the boundaries of sites, remove features from site citations and do everything else that I have set out as part of our ability to protect nature, habitats and species in an agile way.

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.

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.

Of course.