 Welcome to the 28th meeting of the 2018 ECCLR committee. We have apologies from John Scott and welcome Morris Golden back to the committee as his substitute. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, I would like to remind anyone present to switch off their mobile phones, as they might interfere with the broadcasting system. The first item on the agenda is for the committee to take evidence on the climate change emissions reduction target Scotland bill. This is the first of the committee's evidence sessions with stakeholders, and we are delighted to be hearing from the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the climate exchange and the committee on climate change this morning. These important contributions will provide an excellent foundation for our evidence sessions over the coming weeks, and I will say a little bit them now. The committee intends to hear from witnesses in other countries who are setting emissions targets and responding to the commitments made in Paris. We will consider the behaviour changes required from individuals and communities in order to achieve targets proposed on the bill, and we will hear about the governance arrangements in place to support and motivate the public and private sectors. Turning our attention to specific sectors, we will hear from panels on agriculture and transport, two of the sectors in which the most progress is still to be made. Innovation and creativity will be an important part of developing the technologies required to achieve climate change targets, and we will be hearing from a panel on what is already happening in Scotland to progress this. We will also consider the detail of the bill itself, with two panels of stakeholders representing those working in environmental and climate change fields, as well as representatives of different sectors. Finally, we will conclude by hearing from the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform. The committee will consider its draft report in December and January, and is anticipating publishing a report in January 2019. We have a very busy but fascinating few weeks ahead of us. Anyone who is interested in the committee's work on the bill can visit our website for details on our evidence sessions or contact the committee clerks. Although we hosted call for views throughout the summer, if people wish to make further contributions ahead of specific evidence sessions, please contact the clerks and we will let you know when those would be most usefully received. Can I, on behalf of the committee, thank everyone who took the time to send us submissions on the bill? We received more than 90 of those, and they will be invaluable to our scrutiny, so thank you very much. We also invited our Twitter followers to let us know what changes they would make to their lives in order to help to achieve more challenging targets and receive lots of helpful insights. You can still join in and let us know what you would do, so please tweet us using the hashtag myclimatechanges. Okay, so now we go to our first panel. We're joined in the room by Andy Kerr, who is the co-director of the climate exchange, and via video link from London we have Jim Ski, the co-chair of the IPCC working group 3. Welcome to you both. Good morning. We're going to start with some questions, mainly to Jim Ski, the first half of this session, on the IPCC's recently published special report on global warming, and I'll go first to Finlay Carson. Good morning, thank you. The IPCC uses levels of confidence, for example, high, medium and low, when you're explaining evaluation of underlying evidence and argument. Can I ask how does the IPCC quantify levels of certainty, and how certain are they in the science behind the predictions? When we say that something is there with high confidence, we say that that is because there's a lot of literature that addresses the issue, and there's a high degree of agreement in the literature about the conclusions, and it is corresponding. We also use low level of confidence and medium level of confidence to reflect circumstances where the literature isn't so large, or where there may be some differences of opinion there. So, when we say something with high confidence, we really do mean that, because there's a lot of literature out there, it's scientifically robust, and there's a lot of agreement. Also in that, the IPCC refers to agreement in relation to the level of confidence. Does that relate to scientific or political agreement? It relates entirely to scientific agreement. IPCC's job is to assess the scientific literature, and that's what we do. It is not a political body at the level at which we're putting together the underlying report. The summary for policy makers states that global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees centigrade between 2013 and 2052. If it continues to increase at the current rate, does that mean that there's sufficient action prior to 2030 that could mitigate the rise to 1.5? What that 2030 to 2052 range is referring to is what happens if the world continues to warm at about a fifth of a degree a decade, which is the centre of the range for current warming. If emissions were to be reduced from current levels, the warming rate would be reduced, and that would mean that you could either limit warming to 1.5 degrees or you could take that date at which you reach 1.5 degrees further into the future. Action is possible. That is only if we, as it were, carry on warming as we are at the moment. That's very much a business as usual perspective on when we would hit the 1.5 threshold. I'd like to follow up on asking about chapter 3 of the report, because it's significant. It sets out the impacts of the 1.5 degrees on natural human systems. Can you outline for us what the headline impacts would be for the northern Europe, the UK and Scotland in particular? One thing I should just say to start this off, before IPCC started on this report, there was really no scientific literature targeted at 1.5 degrees warming. There was some that was relevant, but none was really targeted. What we've really seen during the course of this report is new literature being produced that is very much targeted on the 1.5 threshold. Just to say that the IPCC, in the time available, and given the need for science to produce new evidence over a very short period of two years and get it into the literature, the report doesn't to the level of depth of even northern Europe, never mind the UK and Scotland, because that is going to require a lot of follow-up work. What the report did do is to identify generic trends that would be relevant, and it also targeted in particular hot spots around the world. In Europe, that happens to be the Mediterranean region, which is at risk of desertification and drought to very significant degrees, but some of the generic conclusions apply to Britain and to Scotland. For example, the level of sea level rise is robust, because that's a global phenomenon. There are also the conclusions about more intense and greater frequency of extreme weather events, storms. That would be a robust kind of conclusion. As things warm up, you would expect to see threats to species and biodiversity as well. These generic conclusions would apply to Scotland, but at this stage, given the level of detail at which the work was carried out and the very global focus of the work, it's not really possible to go down even into the depths of the report and produce robust conclusions that are very specific to a country the size of Scotland with that degree of specificity geographically. I'm sorry, we didn't answer that question. I think this is for a follow-up. That's fine, thank you. I'll move on to Miles Golden. Thank you. I wonder if you could reflect on an overshoot scenario whereby by 2100 we reached levels below 1.5 centigrade, but in the intervening period in mid-century we overshoot and what would be the implications for the planet in that scenario? I mean, this was something that, you know, there's a group of countries that are engaged with IPCC that are very concerned with overshoot issues. The challenge with overshoot is basically the issue that some climate impacts are irreversible. If you lose a species, you can't get it back again. If you've lost coral reefs, you can't get it back again. The question of irreversibility and overshoot is absolutely critical. Quite clearly, getting to 2100 and overshooting 1.5 degrees is far worse in a sense than keeping below 1.5 out of the 21st century. So what the report did, because many, many scenarios out there do overshoot, we divided them into two groups. There are limited overshoot scenarios that go as high as 1.6 degrees warming during the 21st century and what we call high overshoot scenarios that go to higher levels, you know, somewhere between 1.6 and 2. So we have distinguished between these and it is a very robust conclusion that overshoot scenarios have worse outcomes than those with no or limited overshoot. I have a question for you about our Government's proposed bill. I want to ask you first whether the targets set out in the climate change bill in Scotland represent an appropriate contribution to a 1.5 degrees scenario? Well, I know that you will be speaking to Lord Deepin, you know, Chair of the Committee on Climate Change later, which has already got the invitation from the Scottish Government, the UK Government and the Welsh Assembly Government to look at that question. What the IPCC report came up with was the conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions specifically would need to reach net zero globally sometime between about 2040 and 2070, given the uncertainties around climate, the possibility of different pathways being followed. So that is the kind of the global bracket, you know, for net zero. And the report, I think the Paris Agreement does say that developed countries should be aspiring to hit net zero before developing countries, for example. So on that basis, combining the Paris Agreement and the IPCC conclusions, you would be suggesting that a country such as Scotland would probably be aiming for something a little earlier than that 20 to 40 to 2070 bracket if you were if you were making a reasonable fair contribution to that global aim of net zero. So more recently, our Cabinet Secretary has said that we have got an aim for net zero when it becomes scientifically possible and we're looking into them targets up to then. So I think that's a wise move given that, you know, the drive for net zero at the moment with science as it is, with innovation as it is, might not be possible or should we just make a target for net zero and the rest will follow. I mean, that seems to be the debate that's going on at the moment. Yeah, the question of feasibility of targets like net zero was one that did Vexus during the production of the IPCC report and we deliberately did not try to answer that question in a yes or no kind of way. The different approach we did was that we identified six sets of conditions that would need to be fulfilled if net zero was going to be achieved and the first one was whether, frankly, whether it was geophysically possible and in that sense, we answered the question very unambiguously. It is geophysically possible to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees centigrade and then we went on to consider other factors like technical and economic feasibility and again it is technically feasible to do it but you would probably need to address the issue that there would be stranded assets, there would be existing investments that would have to be written off early if you were going to reach that kind of level which has economic implications but our last set of conditions related to social acceptability and the right political conditions and these are actually questions that I don't think the scientists can answer. That's up for the governments. If you look at the history of the report, I mean the 1.5 degrees idea did not come from the scientists, it came from the governments at the time that the Paris agreement was signed and they then invited IPCC to answer the homework question what are the impacts and what would need to be done to get there and we have answered that question in a scientifically honest kind of way but the question of the political feasibility is not really one that we can answer that's kind of back to parliaments back to governments again to decide whether they are up to the very great challenges that the report has set out. Okay I've got a short supplementary from Stuart Stevenson before I go to Claudia Beamish. I just wondered if the IPCC considered the differential effects of the carbon dioxide at the top of our list and then we've six further gases starting with methane. Carbon dioxide naturally will disperse in 30 to 50 years but the other ones disperse very much more rapidly. To what extent has the researcher looked at the differential effects of the non-CO2 gases on climate change? Yeah it has actually considered that very fully so carbon dioxide in fact stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years it's effectively permanent and nitrous oxide is also a long-lived gas but the scenarios that were covered in the IPCC report also covered the short-lived climate forces like methane for example as you say so if you go to the summary for policymakers one of the figures shows the trajectories through the 21st century for gases other than carbon dioxide and basically the message is that they would all have to go down but none of them actually get to net zero as is the case with carbon dioxide. worthwhile also saying that I mean IPCC is now considering things beyond the six gases that are covered by the Kyoto protocol so we're on to black carbon you know for example you're basically suit emissions as well which is now one of the forces that we're actually thinking and it's worthwhile saying with the Paris agreement because it's bottom up the pledges that countries have been made are actually going beyond the Kyoto six gas backed basket and they're also starting to consider other ways of waiting the different greenhouse gases as well and that's very much an open scientific agenda as to how you weigh the different gases in scenarios in which there are very substantial reductions in emissions. Thank you convener and good morning. Could you please expand somewhat on although you've highlighted of course it's difficult to be specific about Scotland because it was a global report but is it possible to expand on the comment of the report which warned of the need and I quote for rapid far-reaching change to stay within the Paris agreement and that significant emissions reductions will be needed by 2030 could you say something about that and how that might relate to Scotland please. Yeah yeah I mean the full phrase was rapid far-reaching and unprecedented you know and these words were actually quite carefully chosen I think that the message is that the scale of the changes that would be needed in the emission pathways that we've got really frankly have no precedent in human history for the kind of rate of the emissions reductions and in fact the changes in social and technical systems that would be required they really are extremely demanding. Now one thing to flag up is that there are one or two areas in which the rate of change is not unprecedented and that particular area is actually in electricity systems where in the past we have seen investments in new electricity generating capacity that has taken place at the speed and the scale at which would be needed you know to actually make the changes so in fact I mean over the last decade or so the changes we've seen the uptake of renewable energy globally is actually causes a lot of signs for hope that's an optimistic sign because we've seen the costs following we've seen deployment going up exponentially you're in Scotland as well as well as so that's a sign and that kind of progress that has been made in electricity systems and renewables would really need to be replicated in other sectors like transport, built environment, heavy industry etc so there are signs of progress in some areas but it is not far and far reaching enough at the moment. Right thank you that's very helpful and you've highlighted the sets of conditions that were within the report and I'm wondering while I appreciate it it's a scientific report whether you are able to comment on you've highlighted the stranded assets but to look at this more positively would setting a net zero emissions by 2050 within our bill quickly rather than later on send a clear message to investors and to those who develop our skills for the future and to the whole broad spectrum of sectors about getting our act together. Yeah I mean just to say since the report came out I mean there's been intense interest from governments and media and we do feel that the report has actually changed the conversation a bit regardless of optimism or pessimism about whether any specific target can be met so in that sense I think I think there is evidence that setting ambitious targets does change the conversation in the way that the Paris agreement itself you know changed things globally we saw the oil and global oil and gas industry suddenly waking up to things so in the sense of sending a strong signal I think you know a net zero target you know would do the job it would wake people up but I think the other condition it would probably be need to be backed up by more specific policies and measures that gave effect to that long-term ambition because one of the things that we've been very clear about in the report is the need for near-term action to leave open the option of keeping to 1.5 degrees warming so if a long-term target is backed up by a short term ambition and a sense of urgency in terms of moving forward across all sectors I think that could be quite effective in terms of moving the agenda on. Thank you very much. Mark Ruskell. Just in terms of that near-term action I mean what are you looking for governments to do in terms of looking at their current action plans for the next 10 years and their interim targets? I was in Iceland for example at the weekend listening to the Icelandic Prime Minister who was saying that on the back of your IPCC advice they're now going to be looking again at their action plans to reach a net zero by 2040 target is that the kind of action that you're looking for governments to do to look at what the near-term changes should be or is setting a long-term target enough? I don't personally think that setting a long-term target enough or that it's enough to look at an action plan I think it's looking at an action plan reformulating it and implementing it is what would actually be needed to move yourselves forward so I mean obviously I know a bit a bit about the Scottish situation there's been great progress on renewable energy on the electricity side but getting a movement on electrification of transport, changing transport patterns, upping the ante on energy efficiency and renewable heat are all the kind of things that would be needed in the short term to move yourself forward but I think the important thing also about the net zero target we've said that there are no scenarios out there that achieve net zero globally without some form of carbon dioxide removal and I think you know Scotland would probably need to consider that as well if it's going towards net zero because there will always be some sectors in which there are residual carbon dioxide emissions and you may need just negative emissions in order to offset these more difficult sectors so land management, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage you know keeping up the afforestation rates are all examples of things that would help take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere so even if some of these things can't be done immediately because the technologies and the techniques aren't mature then there's a real need for sort of R&D demonstration projects to set you in the right direction for the longer term so that you have the preparation for the more difficult things that may be needed to be done a few decades down the line yeah do you think then that the Scottish Government should be requesting the UK CCC to look at the 2032 target and the actions that are required to meet that target in light of your report well just just to say I do recall the letter that you know came came from the ministers inviting the committee on climate change which excluded the third, fourth and fifth carbon budgets and I think there may be legal niceties about that that I'm not qualified to you address but I cannot see that given the statement about urgent action that is needed in order to keep the option of 1.5 degrees warming that anybody doing a scientific consideration of what net zero in the middle of the century might imply cannot also think about these shorter term or medium term targets and what kind of pathway you need to put yourself on to get there recalling that carbon dioxide emissions accumulate in the atmosphere so everything you do now will buy you benefits further down the line following up on that is there a cost saving talking you've mentioned about the economic impact of the transition and the changes that would have to be made in order to reach the targets but is there a cost saving to be made by acting more quickly and meeting these interim targets in the long term yeah again I mean the the kind of models that IPCC assessed are do have are strongly techno economic models that actually assess the value of acting now versus acting later and trade these off so the kind of pathways that the models came up with within the centre of the range of 45% reduction in global co2 emissions by 2030 were based on least cost considerations if you were to delay any more in the long term the costs would be would be higher and that's a fairly clear message coming out of the models that urgent you know immediate action is needed and in the long term that's the least cost way of doing it otherwise you will incur greater costs further down the line and the other thing to flag up about these models they don't actually include in them the benefits of early action in terms of avoided impacts they are purely models that look at carbon dioxide pathways and the least cost way of getting to a pathway they don't include the avoided impacts element which would also be very important to think about in the wider sense could you give me an example of of one particular scenario where there would be a huge cost implication if you didn't act I mean just for the benefit of people watching this committee would you be able to give me an example that illustrates what you just said one thing that we have really highlighted quite strongly and drawn up to the summary for policy makers is that there is more than one way of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees and basically the trade-off is between early action now in what you might call the more conventional areas system changes in energy transportation buildings and doing that now versus postponing action and relying on carbon dioxide removal techniques in the second half of the 21st century and there are so many unknowns about many of these carbon dioxide removal techniques that you could be looking at significant costs associated with these and these may not be costs that are captured in a conventional kind of economy they may relate to issues like food security globally issues like biodiversity the health of ecosystems are all the things that you may pay costs for if you don't take more immediate action okay thank you very much we're going to move on to questions specifically directed in the direction of Andy Kerr. I know that Jim Ski may have to go at one point so if you do have to go at one point your nevendence has been given by Andy Kerr then thank you very much for your contribution today. Right, we move on to questions from Alec Rowley. Nun, Andy. Could I begin by looking at international comparisons and ask you how does Scotland's approach compare with other countries and where there are we in terms of what we are achieving? So Scotland has been at the leading edge in terms of setting these targets I think if you look through the way in which other countries have tried to adopt targets over the last few years they've all actually adopted or they've taken a wide range of approaches to adopting these targets because Scotland is not a party to the UNFCCC in a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change it's not a member state under the EU we haven't been using the frameworks that have existed within that so what we're seeing is different countries taking different approaches and they're not directly comparable let me give you an example you know Sweden has set a net zero target for 2045 that looks great but actually what they've said is there are only need to see 85% of that from domestic action in other words they're expecting 15% to come from flexible mechanisms where they're buying in credits or doing other things like that so in that comparison that is very comparable to us perhaps saying an 85% target or an 80% or 90% target by 2050 so we have to be quite careful about trying to make direct comparisons with countries that are saying we will be carbon neutral or net zero by a particular date because actually they're using very different mechanisms which are not always directly comparable okay and do you think that that legislating as we are doing because i note that some countries have set targets but they have not put into legislation simply its policy do you think that it's important that we do legislate in order to achieve those targets yes i mean i think we've seen a lot of what what we might call virtue signalling by different countries saying we intend to do this i think what distinguishes the UK and Scotland specifically is the very tight monitoring and evaluation framework set up through legislation and we're going to be hearing from the committee on climate change shortly so i think that we have a much more robust framework within which to operate the many countries and we know that a number of other countries are looking specifically at the UK at Scotland at this monitoring and evaluation framework because it is much more robust than the ones that they have in place at the moment do you think i mean sometimes i i get the impression that climate change if you take the general population climate change is something that happens over there someplace and it's not really anything to do with us and there's no much we can do about that is there good examples international examples where we're actually engaging and involving the community if you like in trying to tackle these issues a greater awareness is perhaps what's needed we've seen some good examples in some countries not necessarily at a country wide level we've seen some outstanding examples at sort of city city state city region levels where they've done this much more effective engagement and i think it is worth saying i mean jim talked about the change in narrative with the report um i would argue that we're also currently seeing a change in narrative because until now climate change has always been something that was needed an additional cost it was something that was you know it was it was if you wanted to be do the right thing for climate change it was going to cost you a bit you can have to subsidize renewables you're going to have to add a carbon tax the focus has always been we need to pay more in order to deliver the benefits i think one of the big things that we are seeing changing and we're seeing it even in places in scotland is with the rapid changes in technology costs we are seeing opportunities where actually you can deliver cost savings and deliver social and economic co-benefits at the same time as hitting environmental targets and i think that's the the crucial change that we can see in terms of how we do how we deliver changes over the next five 10 15 years so let me give you an example um you know even in scotland if i'm if i put solar panels on a on a building or in a business here in edinburgh it's cheaper than delivering than buying grid electricity you know and that's so as long as it's behind the grid i'm not trying to sell it into the grid i'm using it my for myself self-generating it's cheaper and so i can get a financial return on that so if you start to tie in that with the introduction of electric vehicles you start to tie in that with the reduction in healthcare costs from air pollution in cities you start to tie that in with much improved energy efficiency in buildings so you reduce again social costs and health costs associated with poor quality buildings you can start to see how you can build a very very effective system where you're delivering local jobs you're delivering a reduced cost base for the society and you're hitting environmental targets that is very different from the the narrative that we've had over the last few years so i just think we're we're just at the point where we can start to talk about some really interesting opportunities at cities in towns and in villages across scotland uk across europe which are fundamentally different from the conversations we've had in the past yeah so to you would agree that government at every level i local government has a particular role to play in that and can i ask finally in terms of the international sanctions for the failure to meet emissions and reduction target is there international sanctions and what are those so within the paris agreement i mean that was very explicitly designed as a bottom-up agreement so what people have put forward are ndc's nationally determined contributions these are essentially self-regulated by the countries what we have got away from because the keota protocol wasn't accepted by certain countries was where you had if you like an overarching body that was would check on and oversee those and then try and apply penalties if countries did not meet that so what we've got is a bottom-up system so we don't have a formal way of if you like what we can monitor but we don't have a formal way then of saying if you don't meet your target we're then going to impose some sort of sanctions on you uh no we don't have that within europe we have a stronger system within the european uh sharing framework for emissions we have a stronger framework tied to the to the wider opportunities within to the tied to the wider governance within europe but that's not the same the same internationally okay thanks might rascal wanted to pick up yeah i just wanted to pick up briefly um and you said that the swedish government has this provision to use uh up to 15 percent uh to to meet up to 15 percent of their emissions reduction through credits i did hear that the deputy swedish first minister had explicitly ruled out using credits in policy terms so although they have that backstop mechanism as indeed we do in our current legislation the policy intention is not to use that i just wondered if you'd heard that but also you said about virtue signaling i'm wondering to what extent government should be innovation signaling so actually by having a gap we don't have a complete pathway to get to 2050 but we know that there are technological developments that can come and taking a much a mission-based approach to bringing together uh academia industry and others to try and meet the gap and to develop innovation what you've seen around the world in terms of that that kind of development because we're a bit in the same position as we were with trying to put someone on the moon yeah we don't know entirely how to get there yet but we've got some very good brains and people who can work out how to do it if they give it enough time and an impetus and support by government and i guess that's a question about political boldness in the sense that we can rely on what are very good energy system models for example about saying well what are the costs and benefits as gym flagged we know technically we can do it the issue is far more around the social and economic costs and benefits that come with that if you look at examples i mean perhaps the best example we don't even need to go abroad is around the 100% renewable electricity target that scotland said if you remember back when we set the 20% target and everyone a lot of people said 20% renewable electricity that's going to be tough then it was up to 40 then it was up to 50 then it was up to 100 and at each point people were saying we're not sure that's technically possible um the answer is we're we may not hit it exactly in 2020 but we're going to be not far off i think that whole notion of saying if we make a bold statement and say can we see if we can achieve it then i think there's real value to to that political target as long as it is backed up with some serious action below the line and that's the that i suppose is this point about deliverability we're going to see a very competitive space in target setting by countries in the next few years and the question is do we try to compete in that space or we try to compete in that are we actually delivering real outcomes over the next five to ten years because the sort of infrastructure investments that we're going to be putting in in the next ten years are going to determine largely whether we're going to be able to hit long-term targets you know we've got some some work going on here in scotland where you know that there's an example of a school that's just been finished in just nearby where the energy costs in that school which were finished last year are higher than the old school which was a hundred years old you know now that's putting a carbon and a cost implication onto the city for the next 25 years so we cannot be building those sorts of buildings going forward so what happens now really does affect what happens in the next 10 20 30 years and i think that deliverability bit and making sure that those targets are set in practical outcomes in practical delivery in terms of transport infrastructure building infrastructure over the next five ten years are absolutely critical more so and that's more important than worrying too much about whether you've done a net zero by 2045 or 2040 or 2050 personally not mentioned there is one sector for whom it is a real challenge and that's agriculture and it's very important to scotland's economy with what your thoughts there i mean there might be people from agriculture watching us now thinking well you know the targets are all very well but there needs to be some kind of you know justice around the transition here and how have we going to manage that yeah and i mean if you look at the the response that qms gave to your committee i mean they were flagging that at the moment it's a very crude way of saying if you reduce emissions we you know what we're basically saying is we want less livestock we want less arable we want you know clearly what we're not trying to do is say we want to get rid of all our arable or livestock farmers what we are saying actually and if you go back to the paris agreement the paris agreement talks about balancing emissions and removals in a second half of the century and that's actually what we're talking about we're not saying we want to get all agriculture to zero what we're saying is we will need to balance we need to make them as efficient as possible but we then need to balance whatever emissions comes from that with greenhouse gas removals which could be strong afforestation you know it could be other things biomass and carbon capture and storage but but in our words we're not trying to say we're trying to stop the sector having any economic value we want that to continue but we need to balance it with other outcomes and clearly agriculture some of the chemical sector might be another one are tricky ones to deal with in terms of being zero carbon but we're not trying to get everything to zero carbon we're trying to get to net zero which means that you can still have emissions as long as you've got removals that balance those off. Thank you, Stuart Stevenson. I'd like to just close off the agriculture one what Jim Ski pointed out that the nitrous oxides are the big thing and they primarily come from agriculture and primarily from fertilizer production and that methane he was suggesting is less important because it disperses quite rapidly is that your understanding as well that I would defer to Jim on that one right okay well let me move on to the subject of targets then and you talk you used the phrase competitive space on targets in one of your previous answers there we have legislated targets in primary legislation for various decades but we also of course through secondary legislation are setting targets for each year on a rolling programme of doing that how does that compare with the approach of other countries so again what we see internationally is a complete variety some have set fixed single point targets without a glide path towards those targets others have talked about budgets which is of course where we're coming from the key thing from a scientific perspective is the area under the curve it is the entire carbon budget so rather than setting an individual year target and saying that's what we're aiming for you know all countries ought to be following what we have done UK has done which are setting carbon budgets which are defined by annual or five year targets on a glide path towards a particular target so different countries have taken slightly different approaches a lot of them as I said have have come up with very different approaches some are not including international aviation some are not including shipping others are including land use others are not including land use so we're seeing all sorts of different targets being set by different countries or by different states which is why that the comparison is so so difficult but I think from our perspective we need to be clear of what the the science is telling us which is that you need to have those budgets and you need to have those the clarity of the glide path to demonstrate what we are doing so in a sense with the UK having five year targets and scott having annual it really there is no practical difference between those two approaches that need to concern us one way or the other I think that my experience is that the annual targets have forced this issue to be addressed in parliament every year in a way that has not happened to the same degree in the UK parliament so I think there's actually been political benefit of having this issue at the forefront of that conversation because they are annual targets even if it makes little difference in in the overall sense I think from a political perspective it's been more useful to have that but clearly we are very dependent on you know if we have a cold winter our emissions are going to go up as you know we've had changes in the baseline because of land use changes in the way in which we measure an account for land use so we've we've seen the baseline jumping around so it does make annual targets difficult but I think from a political perspective the benefit of the annual targets has been that the minister has to come to parliament and explain where we are as a country and I think that's more useful on an annual basis than on a five-yearly basis so therefore the science being available and reported to parliament on a frequent basis helps drive the political decision makers and hence investment in dealing with the problem yes as long as you have the virtuous circle coming back to action and I come back to that deliverability you know we you know we have a lot of we have the public bodies reporting climate change the danger we've seen with some of the public bodies is that it simply becomes a tick box that you report but you then don't bring that sort of virtuous circle back to okay so what are we going to do as an organisation to actually then drive forward further change and that to me is a is the challenge it's not just do we report well but how do we then make sure that comes back to delivering outcomes so just finally in my segment here then are you suggesting that one of the things that we need to address in scotland therefore is is setting targets down at individual body level because they're reporting but not acting is what you're suggesting the work that we do with public bodies suggests that they already have a plethora of targets the issue is not having another target the issue is turning that into positive action and that's different from having yet another target that is about saying how do we deliver effective outcomes so if you take a city authority you know in the moment sustainability reporting is is tucked down somebody's given the task of reporting through the Scottish Government portal for as a public body the question you need to ask is does that report get read by the chief executive in the senior management team does it get read by the councillors are they actually then saying what are the opportunities going forward as a result of that report and the answer is no it's not happening only it's a tick box at the bottom of a pile so the issue is not can we set a new target for the thing it is actually how do we get how do we start to deliver action and this comes back to my earlier point that we are now starting to see with efforts around placemaking with efforts around trying to see how we as a city can store cities or city regions can start to look at mobility we can start to tie in buildings healthcare and so on so bringing that whole place based opportunity and looking where the opportunities are you can start to hit some of these bigger targets but it's around based around what we want as a city or what we want as a town or as a region not by a Scottish Government target for climate change. Time for very short supplementary questions from Claudia Beamish and then from Finlay Carson before we move on. Thank you convener just to push that a little further as you'll know there are now the mandatory targets for public bodies on climate change duties is do you see any place for there being the possibility of details being developed within those mandatory targets for action that will follow and I do appreciate it's a balance because you've highlighted placemaking and the need to involve our communities across Scotland rural and urban in this issue but do you see an opportunity for there to be an expectation that if things aren't being met how are they going to be met and then reporting on that? Yes I think we actually have a lot of the tools they're not just being used particularly well at the moment and I think again this is partly because I think the point earlier on climate change is seen to be over here or it's something that will happen sometime in the future rather than saying actually if you deliver the outcomes that we seek you know effective mobility systems with electric vehicles coming in warm home affordable homes reducing energy costs and so on actually you hit a whole bunch of the core targets that local authorities for example other public bodies are seeking to deliver and you do it in a way that actually as a co-benefit hits all the climate targets so I think while we try and keep these completely in parallel it's a real challenge I think you've got to bring them together. Okay I'm gonna have to move on to Richard Lyle. Yeah thank you Candina. There are numerous countries that are now taking action in climate change so can I ask you how does Scotland's emission accounting framework and the bills proposed changes compared with those international examples? Okay much of what Scotland is trying to achieve with its the changes within the bill from my perspective makes sense in the sense that they're trying to simplify the reporting of emissions so just to give you one example most countries who are within Europe are going to be reporting and their reporting is going to be including European emissions trading scheme credits and debits. This bill is basically saying okay we know that going forward notwithstanding the B word we're part of the European emissions trading scheme but actually for clarity we're going to remove that the way in which we report it to make it clearer that what we're reporting are national emissions from our land area rather than saying we're going to include the debits and credits from European emissions trading scheme trading. You know if you look at other countries like Sweden or Finland or Norway they will be including European trading scheme credits and debits in their accounting so we have chosen to go down a route which provides more clarity in terms of the discussion we can have internally with the citizens of this country but it does mean that we are you know it is not quite the same framework as it's being used for example in other countries across Europe because they will be using the UETS framework. There are a number of countries who have set statutory sectoral targets for transport, energy and agriculture. How do you feel about that? Generally when you've seen other countries setting sector targets a lot of them have focused on how do we support a particular sector to deliver an outcome rather as we did with renewable electricity so we set a very high renewable electricity target which we're on the way to delivering. Some countries have been setting EV targets so more electric vehicles others have been setting as you said sectoral ones for agriculture and so on. Each of those tends to be set in a way that supports their particular political conversation of the time shall we say so they're trying to use this as a way of having a conversation with their particular sector so I can't speak about New Zealand but if you look at Norway you know they or Ireland for example they actually have talked more widely not just about sectors but actually just delivering a low carbon economy by 2050 they haven't even actually put in a formal target in terms of emission reductions. Other countries have done different things so it is very difficult to say that Scotland should do something because other countries are doing it. Different countries have chosen different approaches to this so that's not a very good answer but there are things that we can do particularly in terms of the intermediate targets around energy efficiency and buildings renewable heat which can incentivise and provide clarity to investors to public bodies about that direction of travel which would be very useful and we can certainly draw on some of the examples from other countries. If you look at Norway with electric vehicles you can look at other countries doing other things so I think where they provide a very clear incentive structure to help that conversation internally they have real value but overall we're not worried so much about exactly where those sector emissions reductions come from. The issue is are we delivering them overall. If I could turn to carbon taxes and explore further a wee bit the issue of ETS you've given us some examples already in the previous question on Sweden. We know that Denmark has imposed carbon taxes since 1992 on fossil fuel industries and France imposes a tax of €22 per tonne of CO2 on certain industries. We've also heard about Sweden which expects to meet up to 15 per cent of its commitments that way although it would be good to get some clarification on what the Deputy Prime Minister on Sweden has actually said it would be good if we could get that from SPICE. We also know that the UK will be excluded from participating in the EU emissions trading scheme in the event of the looming no-deal scenario so in the event of a no-deal should the UK develop a new comprehensive carbon taxation system with an equivalent or greater burden than the current ETS and if so should it be based on energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions. That's a big question. If we were to crash out without a deal we can still negotiate as a you know so if you look at Norway not part of the European Union but its factories and sites are a part of the EU ETS so we don't have to be a member of the European Union to be part of the EU ETS. If we come out of the EU ETS then I suspect there will also be an issue around the trading of the materials the products that we are producing in our country and there will be the equivalent of a border tax anyway to sell these things into Europe because they will not allow us to essentially produce product without a carbon tax or that the carbon cost associated with the EU ETS so that we're undercutting producers within Europe so I think it's actually going to be tied much more to what the trade negotiation will be with Europe as to what is the most appropriate framework going forward that would both deliver the benefits that the current EU ETS does in terms of sharing burden sharing around all of the different sites across Europe and finding the least cost producer of carbon and therefore delivering the lowest cost way of reducing emissions so I think it's tied to the not just the withdrawal agreement and if we come out without an ideal it's actually tied to far more to what is the traded agreement that we end up with as to how we ought to frame our response in terms of regulation around the main industrial sites. We actually don't have much time very short question. Well it was just to get your view on whether the power to develop and set such a scheme should be devolved or maintained at UK level. I mean the benefit of the EU scheme was that it shared emission reduction effort across all member states so if it was cheaper to reduce emissions in southern Germany or in Spain rather than Scotland that's where you did it and you bought credit so that actually produced an economic benefit to everyone. The danger of creating a smaller and smaller scheme is that you lose that ability to share the burden across multiple sites so the cost will tend to go up and if the costs go up then it will not look as effective as tying in in some way to the existing scheme which is why so many schemes want to try and tie to that existing scheme so in that sense the bigger the scheme from a economic perspective the bigger the scheme the more cost effective you are likely to find the emission reductions. Thank you very much to Andy Kerr for giving evidence today and to Jim Ski who is no longer with us in the video link but thank you very much we're going to suspend the session to allow a change of witnesses thank you so welcome back we continue taking evidence on the climate change bill with our second panel this morning i would like to welcome lord debon chair of the committee on climate change the committee has a number of questions on the Scottish government's climate change plan the 2018 progress report on reducing emissions in scotland and the advice the committee on climate change provided to the Scottish government on the bill so welcome to lord debon i'll start off by asking you how compatible are the final climate change plan in scotland is with the committee on climate change scenarios and the bill's proposal to move to a 90% emissions reduction target well we think that it is compatible it's not our job to lay down the detailed arrangements by which you achieve ends but in terms of the targets which you've set they very much are in line with what we think is necessary and one does have to say that scotland continues to be in advance of the rest of the united kingdom in the way in which it's setting its targets okay thank you so given that at present if all the climate change plans and policy have fulfilled scotland will still miss the two the 2032 target by 5.7 percent but what more needs to be done to ensure the Scottish government's projections and the meet the target that they've set themselves well i mean it this is a universal situation but you've set a target you've set the mechanisms by which you're going to try to meet those targets and then those mechanisms when you do the adding up don't quite fit in where it is so it it's perfectly possible to have a series of different ways of reaching those targets there are two particular ones which seem to us to be really important one is to tighten up on the transport emissions which are clearly very important and the other is in agriculture which in the previous session you talked something about agriculture has a very considerable about to to offer but it's no easier than any other except indeed in the social terms it can be even more difficult particularly in the circumstance where we to leave the european union and having an entirely different kind of agricultural sport system okay and when we want questions with finlay carston it's just to stay in with agriculture your most recent report suggested that more could be done to reduce emissions and transport and agriculture and that scotland's progress had been somewhat masked by the successes in the energy sector um can ask um you gave advice the scotland's government with regards to how some targets or we could make better progress why do you think that the scotland's government haven't adopted those recommendations well i'm not sure i'm a qualified to investigate motives so why i don't think i can answer but but the fact is i do accept that some of the things that we have to do are enormously difficult particularly at a time when we don't really know the terms within which we will be operating and that is true in agriculture now that means that we should concentrate on those things that we can do something about so there's a series of things which one could do even in this circumstances of of total chaos as far as our relationships with and our nearest neighbours and i would look to do that immediately and i would be looking to see whether we can do something along the lines of feeding animals differently of improving the way in which we think about precision farming and the use of fertilisers we can do a great deal more about um disease prevention one of the things that we can do is to get better productivity without having more animals if we did a great deal more about the eradication of certain endemic diseases i mean there are a series of things of that kind which can be done not because they will solve the problem but because they are capable of being done without out with the parameters which are so uncertain when we do have a better understanding if that blessed day arrives at any near moment when we do have a better understanding then it seems to me that the there is an urgency with dealing with agriculture simply because coming from an agricultural background and interest one is very aware of the social impacts of what you do and the whole issue of what we do and how we do it doesn't get any easier because we have to do it and that seems to me therefore to demand a great deal more discussion and if i were the if i were scots politician i'd want to try to get a great deal more discussion about how we deal with for example improving our tree planting actually giving some impetus to that and where it should be and really having a proper discussion of that so there are a whole series of things i think we ought to get into the whole argument and i suppose if i'm disappointed and i'm disappointed is that argument isn't going on even i prefer it to be a little sharper than they're not existent and i don't think at the moment it's there's enough of it just just on that and trying to achieve a better understanding do you believe that there's enough funding going into support for science and research and development in that area and and as a supplementary that what areas do you think we should be prioritising when it comes to sciat soil testing or fertility or reducing mortality in animal disease as you've mentioned well first of all i don't think there's enough money going into the particular areas of very great concern which is one of which is my answer the second half of your question which i think soil fertility is actually the crucial issue because first of all it's a matter of stewardship the fact is we have allowed the degradation of our soils over the past decades which is very serious and secondly there is the issue of climate change itself because unless we have fertile soils the ability of the soil to secret straight is very much reduced so for those two reasons i would put soil fertility at the work on that and i suppose there's an additional one which is that it is extremely difficult it does demand changes may well demand changes of a sort we've not really thought through i mean a greater degree of mixed farming less monoculture well what does that mean in terms of animal numbers and does that mean that other animal other areas of animal husbandry would have to reuse those are issues which have to be discussed at the moment i'm afraid we tend to say it all is very difficult and i think we don't want to discuss it so i want to get the discussion off and finally given given the little progress and agriculture what impact do you think the ccp scenarios will have on achieving 90% well i think i think there's been a gathering of pressures there was no doubt that the amazing result of paris was hugely important because it does one thing for us all and that is that we know clearly the direction in which the whole world is moving we know perfectly well that some people won't move as fast as they said they would and other people do a bit better and that we'll have real arguments about ratcheting and that the fish the shipping industry won't do what they said and then they'll have to be helped to do so we know all that but we know which direction we're in now there are not many areas of of life in which the direction is as clear as that so i think a mixture of paris the very very clear warning of the ipcc report that has just been published and the detailed work which the ccp and the scolish government as well as the united king government have done seem to me that at least this does put a kind of pressure on all these areas not least agriculture to get some speed and the most important bit has been it has resulted in some baselines against which we can measure because previously i was very unhappy about giving any comments about how successful we were because we didn't know what we were measuring it against i think to a much greater degree we now do know that thank you and we have some supplementary questions on this theme from stevenson thank you very much convener just focusing on agriculture the what the climate change committee has brought forward does imply that scotland would be carbon neutral by 2050 but scotland of course has the potential because of huge as yet untapped tidal energy and so on so forth to be an electricity generation substantially better than carbon neutral is that an approach that could be pursued instead of in particular tackling the very difficult problem of nitrous oxides that come from agriculture or are the other broader reasons why we need to do the NO2 than simply making the numbers balance up well the numbers argument is a very difficult one because you need them if you're going to get people to do something that's real and the anecdotal mechanism for measuring things is no good at all so numbers have really are vital but i don't think numbers should hide the pluralistic situation which we really have it isn't just about saying scotland must get this balance right it is also about what kind of future do you want and do you really want a future which puts up with nitrous oxide to a degree which is actually unnecessary which could be overcome because you can make the numbers work out somewhere else i'm not sure that that is a worthy demand for scotland it seems to me that we're all going to have to find things we do better in order to make up for people who don't have the chance of doing it and when you look at the ability of some countries in terms of their their capability their capacity to meet the targets which they are prepared to sign up to then i do think that we in the richer countries have actually got to do more and this is the kind of area where we should be doing more we should be saying yeah wait there's a little bit of extra there which we contribute to the general good and i think the same is true in the rest of the united kingdom and one of my frustrations with what is being done in england is that we are not pushing hard enough to be able to have that margin and that is a really serious issue i think it's quite clear about the kind of actions and the kind of areas we need to be taking around agriculture and land use but perhaps the sharper bit of the debate is around how we get there and is it a voluntary or a statutory approach to driving some of that action particularly around soil health and soil testing do you see ways of this bill that we could be sharpening up the ambition and the statutory backstop around agriculture and land use because at the moment we have an action plan that's very much based on voluntary you know knowledge sharing and encouraging people to do things well like most of life it's not either or i think it is both and that's the first bit is that i don't think there is a an all voluntary future that that seems to me on the other hand you can't launch into statutory arrangements unless you've really sought to find the basis upon which that those statutory arrangements should be made and the best way to do that is to try to work out as much as you can on a voluntary basis recognising the urgency which must mean that you move faster than you might might want to but i don't think it's easy to be prescriptive before you've actually tried to see what it is that you need to do i remember when i was minister of agriculture being very questioning of some prescriptive arrangements over one of the environmentally sensitive areas i thought that the civil servants who were drawing it up had had thought they knew too much about this and indeed it was absolutely true after two years we discovered they got all the dates wrong and had we done it on a on a voluntary basis to start with we would have found that the dates were different it just needed that sort of thing that was a very small thing but it does seem to me that i don't despise the voluntary but i do not believe that we will solve these problems unless we have a pretty tough statutory background against which people operate and that's partly because this is tough in any case and partly because there is no doubt that people will on a voluntary basis there will be many who do not do their part and that will mean that those who do do their part will feel that people are getting away with it and that in the end will create an atmosphere and a relationship in agriculture which is not what any of us would want right alec rally could i just maybe fall on from that because there is there is a danger in scotland that we we put ourselves on the back and say we're doing really great but actually what we've done is looked at the the pick in the the low line fruit as it were so that the close of the long and at power station no doubt made a big contribution to the achievements today but in terms of agriculture is there the data available that allows us to effectively estimate emissions from agriculture and is there the knowledge available sometimes in this committee we've heard from from farmers who say that the information the support and the knowledge is not being made available to them in order to allow them to comply and start to take the necessary action what would your view on that be i think four things first it is always true that the practitioners tend to believe that their immediate understanding is much better than the way in which the government or the scientists put it i mean i was fisheries minister for seven years and you will understand fishermen are always aware of more fish in the sea than the scientists have managed to calculate i'm afraid so there is an issue there to start with but the second thing is that there's a truth there too because if you're doing it on the ground you very often do understand things which those who have never done it and who merely look at the science and the information can misunderstand it so there's a balance there for us to have but the two other things the first is that although as i said our science is better than it was our baselines are more accurate than they were they must all the time be improved and there is very great need to have co-operation from the doers the farmers to make sure that we get that ever more accurate and that we're prepared to admit when we've got it wrong and and improve it that is not always easy people don't like admitting that they're wrong but we have to do that but the all the other side is right too i do think that we've got to find better ways of informing farmers of all kinds in a manner which is comprehensible one of the most worrying things about british farming as a whole is the gap between the best farmers and the worst it is an enormous difference and we if we can do something about that end of it then that makes a huge difference because at this end we're internationally comparable not in fact at the top we funny how farmers in this in the united kingdom as a whole always believe that they are more productive than their neighbors that the productivity figures aren't all that good but the thing that's more worrying is the huge gap and approaching that is going to be one of our biggest issues so taking a an approach that is a sector approach where it's agriculture transport and and do you think that needs to be accompanied by i think the point was made earlier that that the bill we're looking at is very much about figures numbers targets but actually what policy do we need do we need more of a policy drive and does that need resources so do we need to resource the sectors such as farming and transport if we want to see significant reductions indeed if we want to meet the kind of targets that this bill's talking about well we certainly need the resources to be able to interpret the targets in such a way as people can actually meet them and in such a way as there is a graduated effect root to them i mean i am very cynical about targets which are set for a date beyond the lifetime of the politicians who've set them because it's very easy to say in 2050 we're going to do x y and z when there won't be many of us here who are there to take responsibility so if that's the case that's why the climate change act is so good because the concept of budgets and of having a cost effective way of getting to those targets is crucial because it means that you cannot put off to beyond your electoral cycle for things that have to be done so what i think is so important about the targets in in the in the act will be it will be a very careful consideration of the steps that you have to take to get to those targets because a target in 2031 is only valuable if you know what you're doing in 2020 towards doing it dealing with it not just because it makes it credible but for the reason that gymski put forward which is that the more we do now the bigger the effect the more we put off now the more expensive and the less effective it is so both reasons mean that you should be uploading this end of the of the arrangements towards that those targets and having a clear trajectory is to me the most important thing not just because i want to achieve the end but also because it's only fair on the people who are trying to do it if the farmer doesn't know what he ought to be doing now but he's told where he has to get to in 2030 seems to me that that's an unfair relationship. I wanted to turn to the issue of the request for advice that you've received from the UK Government and the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government. I noticed that in the letter the letter said that you weren't being asked for advice in relation to the carbon budgets for 2018 to 2032 and your own chief executive said that he was quite surprised that that was the case and what's your interpretation then and what you have been asked to do on the back of the IPCC report and what kind of reports will you be making over what timescale back to the developed administrations and the UK government on the back of that. Well the first thing is that the powers which the act give to the climate change committee means that we could for example have decided to do this work without being asked if we thought that that was right so it is in that sense in our hands as to how we approach it and indeed we would certainly feel that our independent position is such that we would have to decide what would be best circumstances to give the best advice the first thing not presaging anything I'm really saying that that's how we approach it it is perfectly reasonable to say that the government had already received advice from the climate change committee that there was no immediate need to change the targets for the fourth and fifth carbon budget because the trajectories which were envisaged gave you enough room as long as you move towards the if you like the left hand side of those trajectories to be able to be online for what seemed to be what was necessary to to meet a higher target so it's um I think not necessary to have much of an argument about it you can be surprised about it but you don't need I think that much an argument about it what we shall seek to do um is to achieve the real purpose which is to say what do we have to do as a united kingdom and with reference to both Wales and Scotland who have asked in the same terms to have this what we have to do to meet the commitments we've made in Paris that that is what the question is and that's the question we're going to answer now my own view is that it is likely that as long as you tighten the approach to the fourth and fifth carbon budget so that you actually do better than the least you can do it will find itself in the right direction to deliver what we need to do but we won't see that until we until we achieve them of course you can't actually do the work without going through those budgets that isn't a I mean it's an obviously logical impossibility to do that so you actually have to have to think that through and you have to work out what result from carbon budget four and carbon budget five do you have to have in order to reach on beyond that so you you'd have to do that you'd have to make that assessment um the question is would it be outside those carbon budgets where we've already suggested that it probably wouldn't be but we're now revisiting it all and we have I think probably by April to do that it's a short period of time but that's that's what we shall do and the letter specifically talked about the UK carbon budgets so it doesn't specifically relate to the budgets and the provisions within the Scottish bill so there does seem to be a lack of clarity here and I'm wondering if you would perhaps would have preferred a letter from the Scottish government saying well this is what we would like you to consider in the context of our legislation and the legislation that we're considering this committee. Well I think Mr Asger I think what we will do is to take the view that we have to be as hopeful as possible and we do after all know what you have in your bill and we do know what are the aspirations that Scotland has and indeed I think you will have seen that we have been complimentary about what Scotland has been trying to do so in the way in which we frame this particularly because it is a joint request from the nationalities that we will seek to ensure that we give the indications which would be helpful to the Scottish government in in in in thinking about how its bill should work out so we're talking about April I'm thinking about your timetable for the bill I'm not sure this will be too far out to be able to make any alterations that you feel satisfied would be helpful. That advice will come in before we conclude this bill. Well we I mean the timetable that we at the moment are working to is one which would mean that we would advise in April next year. Thank you convener the ccc the committee on climate change which you're the chair of can you give the committee a brief outline of the process of compiling the evidence in which your committee advice to ministers is based? Well first of all the committee itself consists apart from myself of the most senior scientists with interests in this field and economists so that we start off with an expert committee and this is very unusual because the other countries that have copied us have tended to have something less expert and more representative so we seek therefore to uphold what we have been able to in the 10 years we have existed very specific scientific accuracy so we then have a team of specially chosen people who work in various aspects team of some 30 people who work in house and then obviously when facing these issues we have to decide those areas where we do not have in house information when we need greater material and we therefore go out and let contracts to major universities and research places for them to compile answers that we need. We then bring that together and in a very detailed system we create a report and there's sort of two stages to it really because one of our members will be the champion for that area work through it very closely with the people who are writing it and then we as a committee will go through it line by line adding and taking away being critical and my job is to try to make sure always that the report is is accessible. I do believe that one of the problems is that scientific reports need to be accurate but they also need to be comprehensible to people who perhaps don't have more than the a smattering of O-level science and so well GCSE science so I try very hard to carry through that responsibility and therefore make sure that all of us can understand it. In regards to that you touched on it is the evidence in which the advice to ministers was based still relevant and when does it date from and has it subsequently been superseded? Well we have a responsibility under the act to keep very close to the development of scientific evidence that's why for example we encourage the government not to ask us to do this latest piece of work until we had had the full IPCC report because that has opened to us a whole body of information which wasn't there and I was very concerned that we shouldn't start on the work with the bits of information that had come out of the IPCC because you never know how true those are you must wait until you've got the full report so we do believe that we have the very best evidence that is available the people we go out to are those whom we recognise as being on the forefront of of the science and were we to find some aspect which we had not covered we would return to it so I think we are as I mean I think we are recognized internationally as as absolutely on the on the front of where the science is. Given that the IPCC had recently published further evidence given the imperatives outlined in IPCC report has the committee of climate change view changed on the advice given to the bill given to the bill and I know of your long distinguished record and politics I long enough to remember your your actual name can I can I ask you this question has not been asked I have to ask it the skeptics say that global average temperatures have already warmed over the centuries and the skeptics also say that it's only the earth adjusting itself why should we bother would you agree with me that we have to bother and with your long distinguished career that we must act now well it'd be very much more convenient for us not to bother and therefore the fact that one is so passionate that we should bother is the result of of actually understanding the science and I have taken this view since the 1980s when I was one of the first to do so as deputy minister of agriculture and I remember having a discussion with the other person in the government who took that which was mrs Thatcher and she said to me well if you and I are the only two people who believe this we're in a majority which is a typical example of her attitude to these things but she had come to it as a scientist and I'd come to it as a non-scientist but looking at the science because one of the things you learn as you and I'm sure know is that if you're working in a science-based industry like agriculture you have to learn how you listen to scientists and how you apply that you you aren't a scientist yourself but you have to understand how you question them what you say and how you make sure you're sure of it and I was very clear by the that period in the mid 80s that climate change was happening and that human beings were causing it I say to the skeptics very simply and I'm sure you do the same but I say to the skeptics very simply if you go down into the ice for a million years you cannot see a moment in which the temperature has risen so far and so fast as it has in the last 200 years and in those little globules you can find how the carbon too has been up and if you want to tease them it is always worth saying if you remember that the earth was too hot for animals and for human beings until gradually the carbon was pulled out of the atmosphere into trees and bushes and that was laid down as oil and gas and and and coal and what have we been doing over the last 200 years we've been reversing the process and frankly if you reverse the process you wouldn't be surprised would you if it reversed what happened it seems to me that you've got to have a jolly good reason of explaining that doesn't it the last thing I'd say to them very simply is this if I produce a new medicine on the on the market and I say I want you to have this new medicine it's absolutely wonderful for cancer they'll say to you well prove that it's safe I can't say well no you prove it's safe not for me this is a good medicine you have to prove it's unsafe that's not how nice works and I've never understood why we don't actually stand up to the skeptics and say very simply you prove that it is safe to do something we have never done before which is to pour vast quantities of pollution into the atmosphere and pretend that it doesn't have any effect thank you very much Stuart Stevenson thank you convener and I'm of course nearly a humble mathematician rather than perhaps a scientist with with an arts degree because it's a philosophy rather than anything else now and I want to just return to some of the some of the numbers the climate change committee is essentially recommending 100 percent a zero carbon future for us but overall a 90 percent reduction by 2050 and that we should make provision for 100 percent across the gases but only legislate once the evidence base has been strengthened and what does evidence base being strengthened actually mean when you say it I'm a practical man and I don't think you should set targets unless you have a very clear route to achieve those targets and for me this is the strength of the climate change act in the sense that it has this very clear practicality and laying on our shoulders is what is the cost effective way of reaching what is at the moment our statutory requirement which is the 80 reduction by 2050 until we've done the work that we are about to do I cannot hand on heart say we have looked at all this this is the best way of achieving it and we can achieve it and this is a date by which we could achieve it I could make a generalised suggestion and some political parties have in fact done that but it seems to me as I said earlier not very helpful because it doesn't mean anything unless you have created a route to reach it which impinges upon you now because otherwise it is merely something which you leave to your successes if you have a route then you have to start doing things now so even if what we have to do is to say that in the fourth carbon budget we have to achieve at the top end of the requirement rather than lower down that does mean that we operate in a different way and we are then committing ourselves to deliver that but I can't until I've done that work say to you what that date should sensibly be nor the sensible route to reach it so turning the thing on its head is it therefore proper that we should be driving it by the need rather than the practicality well yes the need is why we're driving it we're doing it because if we don't do it we will leave a planet for our children which will be extremely unpleasant maybe unlivable in so yes of course we're driven by the need and when people say it's all very difficult why can't we spend more time doing it I have to say to them because climate change doesn't wait for you to make it convenient that's absolutely true so by saying the practicalities it isn't that I think that you measure what is practical in the sense of doing the things you think you can do and fix the dates like that that's not what I'm saying I'm saying I need to show the practical means of reaching this at a point which is sufficiently soon to deliver what Paris has asked for so yes it's the need and after all Paris put this figure this below two degrees and is far down towards 1.5 as possible put that figure as a political figure it's for us now to make it a practicality that doesn't mean to say we ignore the need they have given us the need they're right to have done that I accept that but we must put that in practical in a practical means without allowing the difficulty to drive us off course so you're quite right to to raise the two bits that you have to have in intention as you seek to do this well finally then you use the word practical means is what's missing from our understanding of getting to net zero in 2050 a technology emission in other words we don't yet see that there are technologies that can be developed that reasonably can be expected to be developed that would deliver it or is it a financial inhibition that means we can't yet see how we can afford to do it or is it a combination of both or is it something else entirely different well I think it from our point of view it's primarily that we haven't done the work that that that we have previously been by law constrained to deliver 80% reduction by the year 2050 and that's what the law has said and that's what therefore we have done so up the prime reason for not immediately saying that's the date and the rest of it is that we have actually not done it on that basis only bit of work that we have done was the work that we did immediately after Paris for the government of our own volition to say that if they kept to the budgets within those budgets there was sufficient opportunity to keep on target for a significant reduction beyond the 80% that's all we've done and so the first thing that stands in the way of it is we haven't done the work and I we have a reputation of being very effectively science based in in 10 years it's our anniversary on the 26th of next month in 10 years I think it's true people have not been able to suggest that any of our work has been other than the very best science so I've got to keep to that I suspect that there will be some real problems as far as technology is concerned because the government of the United Kingdom has been dilatory in dealing with carbon capture and storage and carbon capture and storage is a crucial part particularly for industry to deliver what we need indeed I don't think it's just a crucial part it's a necessary part if we can't do that the alternatives are really very very expensive and very very difficult and I think the government's now more or less caught on to it but we've wasted a period of time which we should have been using for that purpose the other thing we've got to be very careful about is the George W Bush technique which is to say well it'll all be all right because we'll invent something well it won't be all right in that sense what we have to do is to set very demanding targets because they are not because we want them to be a dynamic but very demanding targets and then create the atmosphere in which people will bring forward the technology which enables us to to do it more easily than we thought and after all that is what has happened the offshore wind revolution has shown that we can deliver something at a price we never thought we could we can clearly say although I was attacked by the daily telegraph for saying it and bbc for upholding my saying it he is now true that onshore wind is cheaper to produce electricity than than all the old-fashioned ways and that's been genuinely a mixture of setting the targets and providing the means whereby technology can in fact achieve it and that's what we must do the things you've said there about onshore wind and carbon capture and storage because those are two areas where funding has been taken away the research funding was taken away from ccs and that had an impact on Stuart Stevenson's constituency and also of course the kind of subsidies for people will actually investing in onshore wind were taken away as well so that's a disincentivising and you've pointed out is that am I sensing a change in mood towards these two technologies that they're going to be given the funding deserve? Well convener it's not a change in mood from the climate change committee because we have consistently said we need ccs we've consistently criticised the united kingdom government for not continuing the work on that it's not our job to say that this or that project should go ahead it's our job to say we have to go ahead with sufficient projects to deliver what we need to deliver government is the democratically elected body to decide on the difference but but what you can't do is to opt out of it that's it now on onshore wind I have again repeated this fact and very interestingly I'm very interested how you how you phrase that because I think the pbc was criticised me because I said the government makes it impossible for people to have onshore wind even if the locality wants it now that that was criticised because they said the government of course said well we we've we've devolved planning permission to the locality it's absolutely true but if the locality decides they would like it none of the support systems which you would you used to get and which you need to have are there so that in effect the government has said that we're not going to have any more onshore wind and indeed ministers have made those points now I I just have to say there's a very simple issue here if we don't have onshore wind where people want it then the government should tell the public the cost to the taxpayer of that happening because if this is the cheapest way then if you do something else it must be more expensive and the government needs to tell the people that part of their green taxes are unnecessary because they are politically motivated in the sense of saying they don't want onshore wind for reasons which I have always found difficult to follow and that's even if you agree which I do think that it can't be forced on a locality it's if the locality is prepared to have it what would be much better is not that but to but to allow onshore wind wherever the local community will accept it and I think I've got onshore wind just up the road from me and in Suffolk hugely opposed before it went up now it's it's a lovely part of the whole picture it's amazing how it has changed now it's there but I do think we have to be very frank about it and that is it's going to be expensive enough it's going to be tough enough to deliver what we need to deliver and we really must not exclude those things which are necessary and ccs and onshore wind are two of them thank you mark ruskell yeah just on the back of that I'm interested in in how you view innovation then I mean you mentioned earlier about the us view that we'll just go and build something but it could be said that some of your analysis around innovation is a little conservative so you assume that by 2050 we'll still be extracting the same level of oil and gas that will still have about 28% of fossil generation in our electricity mix we've seen a huge amount of innovation around renewables just in the last 10 to 15 years the whole system is changing do these these assumptions that that you make in your analyses particularly for 2050 target are they not a little conservative on on innovation can we actually be going a lot farther a lot quicker if we factor in the kind of system change that are needed well I'm not sure I'd agree with the detailed assessment of what our assumptions are but don't let's go through those in detail because otherwise we might start arguing about about what we what will not get us anywhere but let's assume for a moment that you think we are conservative in that I mean I am a passionate supporter of innovation and believe that innovation will make a very very major contribution to our ability to meet these requirements I'm also always worried about assuming that innovation will deliver and that being used as an excuse for not making the changes in what we have while we've got it I mean I think it really is important not to assume these things partly because it's a jolly good excuse to getting out of doing what you ought to be doing and partly also because we haven't been all that good at timing innovation I mean offshore wind has actually moved much faster than we thought it would we've been entirely wrong in how much for example earth source or air source heat pumps would be playing a part we found it much more difficult to involve that so I just think you just try to get the balance right and I'd be a very happy to talk afterwards or some stage about things you think we have got wrong but all the time you're trying to get that balance right and after all we're not saying quite that about fossil fuel generation we're saying that without carbon capture and storage we'll have to get all gas off the generation load by somewhere in the middle of the of the 2030s and that's a pretty tough statement and so when we're talking for example about whether fracking is acceptable or not we made it absolutely clear it was only acceptable if you did not create an infrastructure which meant that there was a reason for keeping it on the grid and on the generation thing after the dates that we had laid down so I mean I hope we've been as as in favour of innovation as you can be without distorting what we have to do now because after all if we have to do more than we really need it turns out when innovation comes then we can move faster when that innovation comes if we do less than we need because we overestimated how quickly innovation will arise then we've got a mess and I prefer to be on the on the first trajectory Angus Macdonalds okay thanks convener if we could go back Lord Evan to the net zero and 90 per cent targets and the two options one and two you'll recall that in the March 27 March 2017 advice the ccc said a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 90 percent would require strong progress in every sector and is at the limit of the pathways currently identified to reduce Scottish emissions by adopting a more ambitious 2050 target than currently exists for Scotland or for the UK as a whole it would be important to identify the areas in which Scotland will go further than the rest of the UK end quote so has the ccc identified the areas where Scotland will go further than the rest of the UK and would you say part of the ccc's caution about suggesting a net zero target now is because progress is not being made in some sectors well I don't think the caution is for that reason it's much for the wider region but we really do have to explain to people that this is not an easy thing to do and that it is not a sensible thing to espouse a target without being very clear as to what that really means because otherwise you may as well not otherwise we can have any target I mean any old target works if if you don't come down to terms of how you get there and and that seems to me to be the reason the really fundamental reason for doing that now I'm extremely gratified that Scotland has wished to go to a point which we have said is at the edge of what they can do given the range of policies which they have adumbrated so I'm very pleased by that because I think actually we're all going to have to do that and I think Scotland is setting an example in the United Kingdom and I think I annoy people quite a lot by reminding them that Scotland is doing much better than they are and very good for them it is so I'm all I'm very happy about that what we now have to do is to help the government I don't think it's for us to lay down the precise details we know that it although it's at the edge that you can do it what we have to do is to help the government to see what policy changes are really necessary if they're going to deliver what what they need to do and that's why we have emphasised the role of agriculture we've emphasised the role of transport and there's a huge amount that has to be done in those areas and can be done but needs to be done now if these targets are going to be real and it's always easier to advise than to deliver it's like it's always easier to be green in opposition because you don't actually have to do the things that you have to do at the time you have to do it so our job is to try to help you deliver what you have done have set and particularly now that you've set such a tough target okay thanks if I could stick with agriculture for for a second under the option 2 scenario the ccc's advice notes that a 90 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 does so by reducing co2 emissions by or to around zero it was the residual net positive emissions comprising non co2 greenhouse gases primarily mesin and nitrous oxide from farming so I apologize for bringing the committee back to agriculture however the ccc has consistently stated that agriculture needs to do more as we as we all know now if more ambitious reductions were realised in the agricultural sector would it be possible to recommend that a net zero target be set now I do not with the knowledge that I have at the moment believe that a net zero target would be possible unless agriculture plays an important part in reaching it that I am I can't conceive of a way of doing it which would exclude what needs to be done by agriculture because agriculture is such an important part of of the emissions and it does seem to me that actually agriculture has a both a positive and a negative area here negative in the sense that it has to reduce its emissions and positive because when we think of forestry and we think of ways of of using the land and the improvement and infertility which was the point that I talked with Mr Carson about that those things are in themselves positive if we get better fertility we get better sequestration if we grow more trees particularly in the right places we not only get more sequestration but we also do something about the immediate adaptation for flooding and the like so there are all those things but certainly agriculture has to play a part otherwise we can't deliver and as you've covered earlier in the session they need as much help as they can get to do that thank you Claudia Beamish thank you convener a number of the points I was going to raise have been answered so I won't reiterate those now could could I ask you in terms of the interim targets uh if there are scenarios in which um and you have highlighted you still have work to do and I appreciate that but are there um are there scenarios which will require changes to those interim targets and um could you give us a bit more detail now about the practical implications I mean I highlighted in the first um session today about the 1.5 report um the IPCC warning of the need for a quite rapid far-reaching um change uh to to stay within Paris and I wonder really if you could explore with us a little bit more the interim targets well first of all that the government of the united kingdom has got to take on board the fact that the interim targets i.e the fourth and fifth carbon budgets have been written on the basis that they will be met from our own action and not by carrying over banked arrangements from the past so the first thing that is absolutely clear is that that can't be done because if you do that then we would have to change the targets because the targets were written on the basis that we were going to do it from our own um domestic abilities and the reason that that was so because that is what the government had in fact said previously that that's what it did and that's why it didn't bank the uh over um performance between the first and second carbon budget so the first thing one has to say is that there can be no question of going back on that or we won't be able to do what we have said we need to do that's the first thing the second thing is that uh any kind of dependency on being able to buy from outside in any case um credits really do have to be only thought of in terms of emergency in other words you could imagine circumstances where for a short period of time you needed to do that but you can't put that into your programme partly because it undermines the system in any case but more importantly because any assessment suggests that that will be a very expensive way forward because if all the countries in the world have signed up to paris even if some of them uh don't achieve what they say they will the there won't be a lot of free um freebies around to buy there'll be a lot of people wanting to buy and therefore the competition is going to be considerable and the price will inevitably rise so it is bad husbandry to think that you can depend on on that so that is another pun and thirdly i think although we will have to confirm this i think that i'm able to stand by what we said in our initial work which was a short piece of work so we could only do what we could do in that sense i think we'll be able to say that we can actually not we need not alter the targets for the fourth and fifth carbon budget as long as what we accept is that we have to perform at the top end of the expectation rather than lower down because like all these things you have a kind of v shape of of the possible outcomes of what you're doing that one being rather less reduction from that one clearly we've got to get to that end and not that end and so that will that will that will produce not a new target but a different way of looking at that target recognising that you really have to hit it at the top end and not anywhere lower and then that gets the trajectory in the right direction and could ask you also about whether in your view the sectors which um your committee are specifically to offer advice on energy efficiency and generation land use and transport as i understand it are sufficient to give a complete view and does the requirement to offer advice on contributions to be made by sectors of the Scottish economy offer adequate scope to cover all relevant emitters i think at the moment yes um but it's something we keep a very close eye on and i think the committee can be assured that if we felt that the advice that we were giving was not complete or not as accurate as we would want it to be we would ask to be able to give advice or indeed give you advice because again the the act is sufficiently open to allow us to decide for ourselves that we really feel we ought to give advice on something which we have not done so before because we saw that to be happening i mean let me give you an example we there is no statutory requirement to give advice on bitcoins but the energy use of bitcoins is very very considerable and you could imagine circumstances where that but then when the when the act was written bitcoins didn't didn't occur i just take it as a small example but we would we would not feel that we shouldn't give advice just simply because that wasn't didn't seem to fit under any of the other areas we were supposed to be dealing with thank you very much thank you Stuart Stevenson um yes the we're we're on target to go ahead of the 56 percent target sorry i beg your pardon i know why i was getting confused for a second the target setting criteria has the committee had any input to to that in itself i'm sorry i'm not really sure of what you mean by that well you provide the scientific advice but the government makes choices and takes your advice but in deciding what targets it's going to set based on your advice is there a feedback loop that means the government's checking with you what it's doing before it decides well primary of course we we set the primary target the government then as you rightly say decides how it's going to reach that primary target and may set subsidiary targets saying this or that or the other must reach this because that will add up in our annual report which we have by law to produce every June we are constantly looking at that and seeing whether it is a a being met b is it feasible for it to be met and c should there be a different way of doing it so yes and of course there are internal discussions that one has when you begin to question some of these things because we have a wider range perhaps of of scientific tentacles and technological tentacles than the government will naturally have so there will be that ongoing position but every June we assess that and then they have to answer before the end of October so they have just produced their October answer to our pretty tough statements in June it it frankly doesn't go far enough we we will be making this point very clearly they have a lot more to do and one of our problems is that we see in this government a government that wants to do it so we don't have the problem of trying to deal with somebody doesn't want to deliver but what we have to do is to keep the feet to the fire because as again gymski says the every bit quote Tesco's every little bit helps you've actually got you've got to get it on its way and every extra bit we do this year really will make a big difference next year and the year afterwards and we've got these 12 years it's as the IPPC report says there is a very crucial period now which if we don't get this in line we will find it incredibly difficult to get back on track be many a mickle mack a muckle it might be but i would hesitate as a non-stop to quote something like that indeed indeed but the final final point which i think has come up to some extent it should we be disaggregating the overall targets to to help agriculture and transport get tighter focus on the things they need to do well i think we should be making clear to the sectors what they're supposed to do and in that sense it requires a certain disaggregation of the the targets and the point that Finlay Carlson raised which i think it's important to remind us is that it is true about the whole united kingdom that our overall success in decarbonisation of the electricity supply has tended to hide our overall failures in improving in agriculture and transport and indeed in home heating and therefore setting disaggregated targets but i also think we need to be very much tougher on obvious examples of nonsense and now one of the things i really wish Scotland would do would be to set standards for house building which were sensible standards instead of the ones that we've got at the moment which aren't sensible devolution gives you enormous ability to do something of this sort and if you did to house builders what should be done in throughout the whole of the united kingdom and said i'm sorry if you want to build a house you cannot build it on the basis that it's got to be retrofitted later it's actually got to be built more or less to passive house standards and if you did that you would find that that does not increase the cost of the house in any real sense because in so far as it is more expensive that will be reduced by the fact that it will become mass production and not niche production and it will also be reduced because the cost goes into the cost of the land it actually lowers the price of land because that's how the price of land is fixed and so for me there are individual real issues that are not about sectors as much as about activities and one of the things surely as we should be saying is that no house is built today which is going to make our problem more difficult in 20 years time i mean that seems to me obvious so how have we got ourselves into a position in which i actually have to argue this everywhere and i have enough faith in the scots to believe that you could force the rest of the united kingdom to do it by doing it yourself first and you won't have one house less built but mr persimmon may not be entirely happy a mere 50 million bonus next year rather than the 75 million this year. Richard Lyle had a supplementary question. I agree with you entirely I'm pushing in this parliament for houses to be built with solar panels on the roofs more than than they already provide we have in my son's house they only have two panels where the next no neighbour has now put on an extra 10 and yeah and also and also that basically we should have houses being built now with electric charging points for electric cars rather than as cluttering the streets with all these different things or even let's mention since you mentioned tesco let's mention as the putting in the electric charging points would you agree that the houses should be built at standard and i think you do well i try to use a slightly vague title because there are various ways of doing it but roughly speaking the passive house standard the sort of standard which has to housing association has now reached for what it does which it can do within the present situation is the sort of standard we should be doing it we should be looking at all the things that stop it i mean there are technical issues about about rents for example if you if you reduce somebody's energy bill dramatically which you can do by this sort of growth there's no reason why you the local housing association or the local authority can't share some of that reduction to put that into the extra cost if there is to start with an extra cost of building there's there are ways in which this can be done and the the law to be changed in order to encourage that rather than made to be almost impossible to to encourage it i think there are a whole series of institutional things that can be done which would make a huge difference because if over the united kingdom we're seeking to build 300 000 houses a year the idea of adding 300 000 to the houses we've already got which don't come up to standards it's just seems to me frankly barmy thank you i'm listening to that discussion and i'm thinking that a net zero carbon target is is potentially achievable but how do you define achievable what's what's the key test then it seems like we've got lots of policy prescriptions that are possible different pathways what's the point what's the key test when you say this is now achievable well there is of course always a degree of judgment in that what we seek to do is to say is this within a possible financial ability in other words is this something which if we really put our mind to it we could afford is the technology there to do it or is it likely that it will be there to do it or is there a way of bringing that technology forward so that it can do it that might do the talking about carbon capture and storage can we put together a succession of scenarios over the years which clearly are credible to people and do not demand leaps in the dark about which you have no real answer i think that's the the kind of picture that we have could i stand up and defend the scenarios and go through them in detail with someone without there being some hole which they are able to say well how on earth are you going to bridge that that's a question i ask myself that's one of the things i'm very determined to be able to do i think that's all that one can do about achievable it's it's saying that taking everything into account this is by no means impossible but it's hard and that's what it should be because we've got a big job to do finlay carston okay i'm a mission accounting the ccc recommended the overall accounting framework should shift from one based it's shift to one based on actual emissions rather than net accounting now you've covered it somewhat but could you could you tell us other than obvious more transparency what the advantages and disadvantages of accounting for rather than looking at net emissions well the first thing is transparency i listened with great care and interest to the person who answered your questions earlier on on this and and he was for example talking about the annual system in in scotland as against the five early one that we have over the united kingdoms a whole and i understand precisely what he meant about having an annual discussion in parliament and it being at the head therefore of the political agenda my problem with it and i admit it is that i think it's i think one of our difficulties is to give people a target which they can hang on to and doesn't constantly change and are the fundamental reason for doing what we suggested was that it did give coherence and consistency and i think comprehensibility to the target in a way which the previous and alternative ways would not do it it really is what do you want to target for you want it to do two things one you want it actually to make people reduce their emissions that's one thing and the other thing is you want to make it possible for people to recognise that and see what they're trying to do and this is difficult because so many things alter it and if you've all if in any case you've got to explain that in a year where the where you have a brutal winter your targets are not going to be as easy to meet and similarly you mustn't get too excited if you've had them as wonderful winter where you haven't used any heating at all i think that's difficult enough and so our attempt was to give you a system which was as accurate as it could be but but really didn't confuse i should have earlier declared an interest has been a former farmer and a member of the nf us but on the back of that do you think we need additional policy measures for for sectors to get the credit for what they're doing so for example you know negative emissions are going to be really important to achieve 90% or net zero and i think farmers and land managers could play a large part or can contribute a large part to negative emissions so do we need more policy measures to to encourage that by giving those sectors whether it's transport or agriculture or forestry give them the credit for the the benefits they're bringing well i i'm a great believer in gratitude um it seems to me that saying thank you and recognizing is more like people are more likely to go on doing it than than just beating about the ears when they don't do it and so instinctively i'm believer in that particularly as in scotland uh peat restoration for example is a crucial part of what we have to do uh forestry which we've not been successful really in meeting our targets in any part of the united kingdom and it's really important part of it um and as we have said before recreating the fertility in soil where soils have been become less fertile all those things require real effort and and i think measuring it is important to make sure it happens and isn't just anecdotal but it's also important to be able in fact to recognize it now whether that means you pay people money or whether it means that you you find some other way of recompense or whatever your policy may be that's really for the government Scottish Government but i'm quite sure it's important to to make people feel that when they've done things it's recognized understood and they get credit for it finally convener okay that's fine morris golden thank you i wonder if you could articulate the advantages and disadvantages of setting annual targets contained in the climate bill rather than the multi-year carbon budgets contained in the UK climate change act well annual targets obviously concentrate the mind on a regular basis ensure that politically speaking people can't forget about them for very long because they're going to come up again so i mean there is there's an obvious advantage for me the disadvantage and i've said this publicly before for the me the disadvantage is that annually the target is so affected by the weather by the closure of one particular installation by some slight change in the inventory all those things can make a huge difference on an annual target but if spread over five years make comparisons that much easier and and confuse people less the trouble with annual targets i think is fundamentally is that every year you've got to explain them now that means it is a proper debate in parliament and the rest of it so there's a plus there the minus is that every year you have to do that and every year there will be some lot of people who say well it's no you're just excusing it no no you know you could have done better now so it actually worries ministers who are doing that you know when witnesses are doing their best i think it's quite hard when you've really done your best you've achieved you've achieved in an underlying way something really worthwhile and you have to announce you haven't hit you haven't hit the targets which is what Scotland's had to do year after year and that's not very helpful so i think those are the balances but Scotland has made a choice and we we try to work with that choice to make it as effective as it can be okay thanks and just looking at section 15 which alters existing emissions accounting will these proposed changes to emissions accounting reduce the level of risk that could be attached to inventory revisions in terms of the accuracy of targets well it won't eliminate it let's let's put that clearly what we advised was to was was the best system we thought to reduce the arbitrary effects of recalibration of new information of bringing into the system things that were out of it before a peat for example it's a very good example of that so we're trying to have the way that that that would be least distorting because the targets do have this role of of encouraging people to reach it of making people see that that's the aim and if you move the goalposts that has a a damaging effect so we just went through the various possibilities and tried to choose the one which most gave accuracy and consistency but it won't do both all the time that's the nature of life thank you we have a final question for mark ruskell on the financial memorandum yeah thank you um so i think your advice last year stated that you hadn't done a costing on the 90 target just wondering what the barriers are to that whether you will be conducting a study on that target or indeed any other target that parliament should decide on well in doing the work that we have been asked to do we will of course have to do a whole lot of scenario planning to show that what we are proposing is to come back to your own question is attainable and in doing that we will be putting costings on it because you have to show that to make them sensible in the context of that the 90 degree the 90 percent reduction will become clearer and clearer that because they are to some extent in fact not to all extent the same policies you've got to do to do that only more so we will be putting costs which will be i hope of use to the to parliament and to the government thank you thank you thank you i'd just like to say thank you for for giving them as we give you opportunities to present the nurse that you like to say in relation to the climate change bill that you feel you haven't had but you have just given 90 minutes of evidence so well you've been very kind no i the only thing i i want to say is this is a i mean i just want us all to be absolutely clear in our minds and what we're doing is is really important that there isn't anything else that could be as important in a material sense but helping people to solve this problem and i'd just leave you with this this thought my my son wrote a book on the black death it's become the standard book on the black death and as any of you know if you have a son writing a book as each chapter comes off the machine you you're expected to read it and i was busy reading it at the same time as doing some fundamental work on on climate change and what struck me was this really frightening thing that one in three of the population died in the black death but they had no idea as to why so they had no responsibility because they didn't know our problem is that we do know and therefore we have absolute responsibility not only have we caused it but we know how to stop it at least to pull it back and then finally to reverse it we know that and the responsibility is ours and i just think all of us should recognise what a high calling we have we have to do it well thank you very much that's an excellent note to end on i want to thank you for again for coming and giving evidence and also spend this meeting the second item on the agenda for the committee's consider is the land reform scotland act 2016 the register of persons holding a controlled interest in land scotland regulations 2021 draft i would like to welcome the cabinet secretary and her officials to the committee pauline davison head of land reform policy team for the Scottish government andrew ruckson Scottish the government legal directorate and dr simon cuthbert care the head of the land reform unit welcome to you all i will start off by asking the cabinet secretary if we can have an update on the development and interrogation of the 20 registers on the scotland's land information service i think the most important thing for my interests is the ones that are most directly related to the whole land reform issue my understanding is that scotless isn't going to be providing access to all 20 registers but what it will include is the land register and the saizine register which are already available through scotless and there's a crofting register that's also been introduced also available for access is the register of inhibitions the register of deeds and the register of judgments will be available imminently and obviously the register of persons holding a controlled interest this particular one will also be available through scotless when it goes live and the register is currently planning her best to do that what work has been done to publicise scotless and ensure that citizens are aware of the availability of all this information well officials are currently working pretty closely with the registers of scotland as you could imagine and there is an awareness raising exercise planned before it becomes operational before this register this new register becomes operational and obviously that's to ensure people are aware of the information that's going to be available in the register but it would also be to ensure that those people who ought to be registering are registering as well so the awareness raising covers both will cover both sides of that but will happen a little bit closer to the point at which the register is going to become live which we expect to be in 2021 i'm not sure doing an awareness raising exercise this far out would be particularly helpful i suspect people would have forgotten by the time it it came around so the idea is to push it towards the point at which the register becomes live okay thank you for that alec Rowley can ask the when we were taking evidence a number of different organisations talked about the difficulties and being able to access information on the register the described as potentially onerous can ask what work has been carried out or is planned to develop a user guide and will stakeholders be involved in such a development well stakeholders have already officials have already been working closely with stakeholders in actually developing the regulations up to this point and they are going to continue to do that both for the revised regulations as we go through this process but also in respect of guidance which is my intention to have published so that when the regulations come into force there is guidance for users also available at the same time and that's work which is currently being undertaken that conversation between officials and stakeholders is continuing and will continue up until that point and will also be working with the registers of Scotland in respect of their end of things because they will themselves carry out user testing with stakeholders and those stakeholders will be customers potential potential users of the register about access and using the system as simply as possible so there will be guidance for those who are trying to navigate their way through the system as there will be help for those who have to register as well and again that will be ready for the point at which the register goes live and do you have a timetable for finalising lane and commencement of the regulations and the publication of the guide well the expectation is the register will go live in 2021 we're not under enormous time pressure as a result of that so our consultation doesn't actually close for another couple of weeks we will be considering the results of that consultation this is not a procedure which i'm hugely familiar with myself it's a kind of unusual sort of procedure because at the point when we've analysed the consultation we come back and there will be draft revised kind of SI published and will no doubt be back at the committee and you will be able to see what changes if any have been made as a result of the consultation exercise but that still is in draft form and we're working roughly on a basis of autumn next year for that i think is a fair enough kind of estimate so at some point a year from now that draft revised SI will be available for the committee's perusal and our expectation is that the actual SI the bit of the process we're much more familiar with would happen in the early new year following that so we would be talking about early 2020 but of course the expectation is the register isn't actually going to go live until 2021 so there is there is quite an extended timescale for all of this okay thank you thank you now i have a number of members want to ask questions around the recording of address i'll start with Richard Lyle yes thank you very much cabinet secretary certain sections of society can ask for their home address to be with health for security reasons i candidate standing for election is an MP or people who are on electoral roll and also there is the laws covering data protection information being withheld so what is your view in regard to a recorded persons name and address what does that mean in practice and do you agree with the keeper that does not matter if it is a service or residential address and would an email address be appropriate or not well if i can just take the the last bit first i i'm not sure that i agree that an email address is appropriate i don't think i mean i understand why people think that's an easy option but we've probably all got experience personal experience of having any number of potential email addresses many of which we've forgotten or they're sitting there unused or defunct and that we never check so i think there's some issues around email addresses that make an email address as being the sole way of doing it not particularly useful i do think some form of physical address is is preferable and because it's a kind of physical real world address and it does give us more certainty that notification has has been achieved whereas an email address might not because if people are not checking their email i don't know that that would necessarily be particularly helpful i think from the the as i understand it from the keeper's evidence there are pros and cons in respect of a service versus a service address versus a residential address and i suppose it's really just a balance between the two if you're talking about people's residential as opposed to a kind of official address so you know that there's obviously still a conversation in and around that but i do agree with the register that the physical address is preferable so there's perhaps a bit of a conversation around how a service address might work as opposed to a residential address but i don't i don't think that that should push us into an email response an email address because i don't think that's appropriate so what about a lawyer's address or we all agree we need a contact address but we have a problem where there may be someone maybe fleeing violence from a abusive husband or partner or whatever and the owner property and that address has to be kept safe in order for them to be safe so and there also is the point that the keeper will have the discretion on whether i may be saying somebody else's question but has a the discretion of keeping you know of deciding who who she will allow and who she won't allow would you agree that you know a lawyer's address or a business address would be preferable to a person's personal address that's all i'm asking yeah i mean obviously that it would be a pro i mean i talked about there being pros and cons i think about some of this because that would be a an argument in favour of a business address or a service address and i think the most obvious one that we would all think about is a lawyer's office that wouldn't be an unusual concept but of course it could allow a person to spread their interests across numerous addresses so there are just some issues that would need to be unpacked if we went to that so i think that there are there are still some issues in and around that that probably need to be kind of thought about quite carefully it may be that i mean i don't know it may be that if a person uses a service address that we would expect them to use that same service address for everything rather than you know rather than start using different service addresses for different for different properties so it's really just a it's just managing that because this is meant to be obviously a register that makes ownership more transparent so so we're kind of trying to keep that balance reasonable so you know there are just still some issues to be bottomed out there so you haven't made up your mind yet well you know i'm looking at all the evidence the consultation's not closed you've asked me to come and give evidence at a period where at the moment the consultation is still on going i'm presuming that's because you want to be part of the consultation so i need to have a look and see what some of the responses to that will be and i don't want to terrify the officials by making policy up on the hoof here without discussing it with them but you know one way to manage the service address issue might be to insist that it be a single service address that's used for a multiplicity of registrations rather than trying to have one set of solicitors doing one and i mean the other group of people that one could see being used quite often might be an accountants address so you don't want you know we don't want to be in a position or a land agent or a you know you could you could imagine how many potential service addresses there might be if if we just opened it up like that so i think there are still some issues that need to be kind of thought about thank you Claudia Beamish thank you and good morning good afternoon cabinet secretary and myself um just to explore those issues um in a little bit more detail um would you agree that there could be a risk that by not recording a home or permanent address it might be easier for the recorded person to avoid identification um i've given you an example of um an absentee land uh lord who might only visit um a couple of times a year uh or not even that and would it be acceptable in your view to record um an address um here in Scotland for that person where they can be contacted um well as you know as i understand the position is people are going to be able to search the register by a person's name and date of birth um uh so that in a sense helps get round that issue because then you would be able to see the various different controlling interests and uh any single associate may hold um so uh that that's kind of one uh side of uh side of it in terms of i think what were you talking about a recorded sorry what was it that they had to have to have an address within scotland um where they can be contacted we we um i don't know whether or not we are currently what the current position is with that in terms of the consultation um i think the the issue of absenteeism and and um the transparency of ownership within the context of this um of this yeah i mean this the the difficulty of this is trying to trying to think through all the potential implications of what what what it might mean and i mean clearly this is really about those who own land in scotland regardless of where they yes actually live um i mean i think that that as far as the the recorded person who is the person who is providing the information about um their associates they will be they should be on the land register in some way or form because they are the actually registered as the owner what the red what this register is trying to do is capture people who don't appear on the land register so it's really that yeah this sort of associates who are trying to catch in it again i think as the cabinet secretary said it's it's about trying to find the balance in terms of what is appropriate to find the right address for that that type of person who may not be there or not so that's helpful and um i wonder i just would like to also highlight for you cabinet secretary the issue of commercial confidentiality which we've received different views on but the keeper did say in giving evidence to us that she did not think that the commercial confidentiality was a justification for exemption and i wonder if you have any comments i would be inclined to agree with that i don't know how commercially confidential actual ownership should be um you know there might be issues of detail of management that are commercially confidential but i'd be struggling to see how there's anything commercially confidential about the physical act of ownership in that sense that's probably what the register you know the register means yeah the register won't disclose things such as a financial status or anything like that it's just basically naming details that's that's what i think we need to remember that the i mean the the the register is really uh coming directly off the back of the explicit um uh causes in the land from legislation so we can't we're not in any case we're not really going to be able to go beyond that so that would i suspect kind of already protect some issues about commercial confidentiality right thank you and just uh finally from my perspective to go back to the security declaration there's been the suggestion um in terms of um the appropriate degree of anonymity and protection for those who who um could be regarded as at risk that it might be that the use of a unique reference number could be considered and i wonder if you had any thoughts on that at this stage i mean other than that it's part and parcel of that trying to decide on the pros and cons of various approaches to ensure that we capture the maximum amount of information that it's expected that this register would capture without the consequences for some individuals being so adverse as to be perverse um and and it is about maintaining that balance so um yes these are all things that we would want to keep in under consideration thank you thank you angus mcdonald yes thanks convener with regard to part three duties to provide information you mentioned hey cabinet secretary awareness raising in your opening remarks and clearly significant publicity will be imperative in the run up to the register going live to to ensure compliance when the keeper gave evidence to the committee she mentioned the possibility that someone could still inadvertently fail to comply through ignorance of the rules so do you agree with the keeper who said that there should be a grace period to allow for inadvertent non-compliance to be rectified and if you do agree how long should that grace period be i don't think a grace period is something that we could really argue against a grace period isn't unusual there are other circumstances i think in which this similar kind of approach is taken and i think it would be reasonable in this case we you know there's obviously a big awareness raising exercise to be to be undertaken and there may be people who just it doesn't dawn on them that they are people for whom this register is appropriate so there will be in some cases i suspect people who genuinely have made a mistake and i don't want to be in the business i don't think anybody would want to be in the business of hounding people where it was a genuine mistake with no real you know obvious intent to to try and fly it under the radar and i think if i'm right the keeper did say that that what she would do in those circumstances if they if they came across people in in that way that she would she would write and remind and there would be a a prodding from from the keeper themselves and that allows them to rectify it before any criminal proceedings are taken so we'll we'll work closely with the keeper on that although i don't think we can have an open ended timescale i think whatever the timescale that the grace period timescale is that you would want it to be quite clear and you know whether that was six months or around that period you know i suppose is something we can have a further discussion about but i think it should be a time limited grace period it shouldn't be allowed to go on and if the if the awareness raising exercise in the run-up to the register going live is successful we really should have gotten it down to only a very small number of people who might accidentally inadvertently or whatever fail to fail to comply when they should but i i mean the current proposition of six months feels about right to me and you know since we're already raising awareness of our plans for this register we're hoping by the point it actually goes live that we don't have many folk who are unaware of it okay thank you thank you billy karson thank you i've got two questions that are linked you know there's a duty to provide the information um and and the keeper can do some level of validation with regards to addresses that are put in so it could be post codes and whether that post code exists or or correct data births whatever but what is less easy to do is actually to to verify the information to find out whether it's a false address or a valid incorrect date of birth but the regulations are clear that the legal responsibility lies with the person who's registering what guidance and training will be given to the police who will ultimately be enforcing these regulations well i'm sure the police are going to be delighted to be advised of the purpose of the regulations what constitutes non-compliance and officials are already in contact with police scotland and with the crime office in respect of this so that the police are involved in early stage and understand the process themselves so we will continue to work with them as the regulations are developed further and i can have said in answer to an early question that we are consulting on and we will continue to talk to stakeholders about guidance and that obviously will include the police and and the crown office and there is a job to be done there but there is time that this process gives us the kind of time to do that and by the time this is going live we would anticipate that the police were at least you know well aware of what was and was not required and what their responsibilities were and i would like to jump back to looking at addresses and whether it's a home address or an agents address or whatever but also your comments on an email i wonder whether it's not very forward looking to exclude the possibility of identifying or verifying an individual using an email address because there's many methods to verify an individual using links and whatever and there is a legal responsibility to provide a valid information so there'd be no point in me providing Mickey Mouse at the Scottish Parliament if that didn't actually get to me because i wouldn't be able to verify it so is there any thought been given to using emails to verify a registration and in the same way that it would be possible to send a recorded letter to an agent or a home address which required a response within a set time to add to the verification to ensure that we're actually getting to the individual which the registration is applicable to well i hear what you say about emails but i'm still not confident that the use of an email actually gives us the the kind of confidence that we would be looking for you know as i indicated people have a multiplicity of emails and some of them kind of go into disuse aren't checked and you know i just i just think an email at this stage is not really has enough security around it to that might just be sorry to interrupt that that might just be to be in the public facing side of the register where as claudie beamish mentioned there may be some reference back to a natural physical address that doesn't need to be in the public domain i'm just i'm at the moment not convinced that email is the way to go forward and i know it may seem a bit retro but i think for everybody's confidence just now i don't think it's it's quite the right place to go that's not to say that it might not in future become more so i think you talked about recorded letters it certainly would be possible with a letter to require a response within a set period of time with an email you wouldn't even know if it had been i had actually reached to it was meant to have reached i mean i think that's an issue so i mean there is an issue about validating addresses that there is no doubt about it but it might be extremely difficult to have that applied to absolutely everybody it could make the whole process incredibly unwieldy so there's a certain amount that we will be taking on trust because there isn't really any other way to do it if we had to validate every single contact address then the whole cost of operating the register would probably spiral out of practical management so this is all about maintaining that balance between what is appropriate and practical and effective and then we have some final questions on non-compliance sections starting with mark ruskell yes thanks convener i want to ask you about whether the five grand fine is an appropriate deterrent for non-compliance or is there a danger it just becomes the price of anonymity that's obviously on the assumption that everybody on this register would be so wealthy that five thousand potentially a fine of five thousand is not for them a huge issue but that's to misunderstand when when these penalties are set this isn't to misunderstand what the what that penalty is about and that penalty is about the nature of the crime not the the financial interests of the person who commits it which is how these penalties are arrived at across a whole range of criminal activities the the fine is up to five thousand that's the normal way of expressing it and it remains to be seen whether or not there are people who think it's a price well worth paying at the moment i don't think there would be any evidence of that and not to forget that it is actually a criminal matter and therefore non-compliance however financially it might not be considered a huge issue nevertheless leaves you with a criminal record what would be the implications for a landowner then the practical implications of having such a criminal record in in this case well it would depend on the individual owner's circumstances i don't i mean i you that that would be different depending on on the owner and what the owner did and didn't do and and you know and all the rest of it and you know that's that's sorry cabinet secretary yeah so so that i mean i couldn't really answer that in the absence of an actual individual criminal case and an individual accused for some accused that would be a pretty serious issue regardless of of of the of the matter i would have expected most people don't want a criminal record anywhere so if somebody was a director of a company for example need to be a fit and proper person all of those things come into a count yeah given that the prosecution would take place against a backdrop of somebody seeking to maintain their anonymity of their connection to a particular property would the prosecution in and of itself not reveal that connection that's a very good question and thus remove the privacy which the individual sought now and therefore remove any reason for them not to register but that could of course be obviated if the court decided to hold the case in private which i could imagine it might do well but none that sorry just tiny second but nonetheless would you expect that the verdict of the court if someone is found guilty would be put on the record and thus remove the anonymity that was being sought well this is not a question that i can answer for obvious reasons i would i would you know my feeling and i may be wrong and i don't know whether or not anybody wants to chip in from the side from the kind of justice side of things i would be surprised if a prosecution proceeded on the basis of an anonymity in these circumstances i certainly would be surprised if a conviction proceeded on the basis of anonymity it may be depending on the individual circumstances of an individual person there may be an argument by lawyers that that there are reasons why anonymity should continue but i'm not really in a in a position to be able to answer a definitive yes or no in these circumstances because that would be a matter probably for the court at the time finally therefore minister would the government consider amending the proposals in this regard so that upon conviction the interest is then recorded on the register whether the person concerned wishes it to happen or not that's something that we'll take on board and have a think about it it's a fair point and the discussions with the crown office particularly perhaps can be extended to include this particular aspect of things because that would you know those in the normal course of events would be matters for the court at the time whether or not we would be in a position to be able to in advance bind that is a is a obviously a question that we would need to have a think about least empower the courts to do so i mean it's an interesting point and we will take that on board i believe that's all the questions that we have to ask want to thank the cabinet secretary and her officials for coming to give us evidence today and i suspend this move hang on next meeting on the 24th of october the committee will take evidence from the minister for rural affairs and natural environment on the scottish government's proposal to consent to the UK government legislating using powers under the european union withdrawal act 2018 in relation to the UK statutory instrument proposals for the greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme amendment EU exit regulations 2018 the committee will now move into private session and the request of the public gallery be vacated as the public part of the meeting is now closed thank you