 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 13th meeting of the Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee in session 6, and before we begin, I can ask those committee members using electronic devices to switch them to silent. Our first item of business this morning is an evidence session looking at the impact of the climate and nature emergencies on our remit. Today, we will focus on two areas. Firstly, we will focus on innovation and new approaches to the environmental challenges within the marine environment. I welcome to the meeting our first panel, who will be discussing the marine environment. That is Dr Alastair Rennie, project manager from Dynamic Coast, Rachael Schuchmott-Smith, marine spatial planning manager from the University of the Highlands and Islands, Shetland, Dr Fiona Reed, Scottish entanglement, Alliance and Danny Renton, the chief executive officer from Sea Wilding. As you will be aware, we had to cancel this session last week due to technical problems, so I very much appreciate the witnesses making themselves available to give their time again today. I am going to invite Dr Rennie to make a brief opening statement setting out the background about his innovation project, followed by Rachael, Dr Aiden Foley and finally Danny Renton. Thank you. Good morning, Dr Rennie. Good morning, convener. Can I check if you can hear me okay? Yes. Great. Thanks very much for the opportunity to provide evidence to the committee this morning. Over the last few weeks, the world's eyes have been on Glasgow, and for the next hour or so, our minds will turn to Scotland's coast and marine environment. During this session, I hope that you will appreciate the strong links between the global efforts at COP and the work that the public sector and some private partners are now doing on Scotland's coast. Whilst COP26 had four high-level goals of mitigation, adaptation, finance and collaboration, our research underlines the importance of this approach domestically. My role is to improve and explain the evidence based on coast or change, which aims to support better decision making. That will help Scotland to become sea-level-wise and climate resilient. If you haven't already, please do visit dynamiccoast.com. I hope that, through our discussions, the following aspects will be explored. Climate change is already affecting Scotland's coast, and under all future climate scenarios, coastal erosion and associated flooding will increase in rate and extent. Dynamic coast is part of the Scottish Government's approach to building climate resilience and supporting adaptation. This is an area where we must appreciate our inheritance. £15 billion of coastal assets are being protected by nature, and, as a society, we must incrementally improve this year on year to ensure future generations are better prepared. Nature and the climate emergencies, as you know, are one and the same. We need to help nature to help us. This is a joint effort. The Scottish Climate Change Adaptation programme confirms that coastal erosion is a cross-cutting threat, affecting multiple sectors of society. However, we must act to become sea-level-wise. Our shared challenge is to understand how the risks will increasingly affect us, our assets, our communities, our nature and our natural and artificial coastal defences, and how we can flexibly respond to safeguard society. Dynamic coast provides the evidence base on coastal change across Scotland. The final model run included £5.5 million calculations at 10m intervals for every decade to 2100 on high, medium and low emission scenarios for our open, erodible coast. We have mapped the change against society's assets to inform the national coastal erosion risk assessment. That sits alongside assessments of coastal erosion-enhanced flooding, detailed super-site analysis showing resilience and adaptation options at six locations, vegetation edge analysis, coastal erosion disadvantage, which explores the social vulnerability to erosion, and entirely new novel coastal monitoring techniques using satellite data. Fos the challenge posed by climate change is stark, we are improving our ability to monitor, learn, innovate, plan and adapt together. I look forward to those discussions and to your questions. Thank you very much and can I now move on to Rachel Shusmith. Thank you, convener. Can you hear me? Yes, that's fine. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence. My name is Rachel Shusmith. I'm the marine spatial planning manager at Shetland, UHI. My role here is to co-ordinate the Scotland's first marine plan under the marine act for our marine region. As one of the first areas, it has provided us the opportunity to develop a number of work streams and test approaches that can inform marine planning going forward across Scotland. As part of that, in terms of carbon, we provide an opportunity for increased representation by communities, and that's particularly important as we transition to a low-carbon future. Representational justice for our fishing communities recreational users is particularly important in areas such as Shetland or Orkney or Western Isles, where marine renewables are likely to be particularly important as we seek to decarbonise. One of the important things of providing this opportunity to participate is the provision of data. One of the things that we've tried very hard in Shetland to do is ensure that decisions are based on the best data available. That has a benefit to communities because they are represented in decision making. It prevents impact on existing uses such as fisheries, which could be avoided, but it also provides an opportunity for the developers to cite developments in the best location to avoid objections later on in the consenting process. Avoiding delays helps the developers to avoid costs. The other important thing that marine planning can provide to communities, but also from a carbon perspective, is ensuring that any knowledge of blue carbon sinks, such as horse muscle beds or male beds, are correctly identified. Marine users often have quite good knowledge of where those habitats may or may not occur. In Shetland, we've worked very closely with our inshore fisheries community to map those particular habitats, which are blue carbon sinks. For them to lead the adoption of protective measures to ensure that they are not damaged. Marine carbon sinks are of greater actual importance than are on land equivalents. They sequest greater quantities of carbon. By working with the local fishermen here, we've identified large areas of protected habitats that were previously unknown. It's been led by the local community or done in partnership with the local community. There are far more receptive but only protective measures that have been put in place. Across Shetland, we now have a series of 25 closed areas to fisheries that the fishermen led and have protected important blue carbon sinks. As marine planning is rolled out across Scotland, there is an opportunity to embed the agenda within marine planning at a local level, which will help Scotland to deliver the national objectives that we have at a more local level and to work with communities to achieve them. Thank you for the opportunity to provide evidence on marine animal entanglements in Scotland. The Scottish Entanglement Alliance, which we refer to as the sea project, was initiated by fishers. Fishers approached WDC about entanglements in their gear, such as the krill fishers. During a meeting with Marine Scotland, Wales Dolphin Conservation raised the issue of entanglements and were advised to apply for the European Marine Fish and Funding. We applied for EMF funding and the sea project started. It was a collaboration between the krill fishing industry and another five organisations, including Nature Scotland, Everybody in Wales, Everybody in Wales and Dolphin Trust, British Divers Marine Life Rescue and the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme. During the project, 159 fishers were interviewed about their experience of entanglements. That was representative of 11 per cent of the krill fleet in Scotland. Based on the interviews, we found that entanglements occurred all around the Scottish coast. We know that the number reported is low when we extrapolated the results from Smash, BDLMR and the interviews. We found that only five per cent of the entanglements had been reported to the different networks. More species were reported entangled than we had anticipated or knew about, including baskin sharks and small cetaceans, such as the harbour paupers. Entanglements are a severe welfare issue. Entangled animals suffer or die for many weeks or months carrying heavy gear, which compensates their health by feeding and diving ability and causing severe injuries caused by the abrasions of the right to the animals. For individual fishers, the occurrence of an entanglement is very rare. For most of them, it was once in the lifetime experience or experienced one around every 10 years. However, the extent and incidence of entanglement events in Scottish waters may be sufficient to impact at a local population level for some species, such as the minkie whale and the humpback whale. There may also be a population level impact on other species with high bio-catch rates in different gears, such as harbour paupers and common dolphin. The co-occurrence of krill effort and minkie whale sightings were mapped to identify potential high-risk areas for entanglement. Those were identified as the east of the outer hebrides, the west of north use and throughout waters around the sky. To identify records of minkie whales on the west coast of Scotland from a long-term project by the Hebride and Whalenthorf and Dolphin Trust, where it assessed the evidence of entanglement, it found that over 22 per cent of the animals that they encountered had entanglement-related scars. During the project, we were also able to collaborate with the International Whaling Commission for their global whale entanglement response network. We did Europe's first disentanglement training workshop for the fishermen, which was very successful. The project overall demonstrated a positive collaboration between the fishing industry, research and conservation organisations, and solutions to entanglement are available. We know that certain species are caught in certain areas of the gears, such as bastion sharks and minkie whales that are caught in the ground line of the krill. Gears, whereas humpback whales and other patients and turtles are caught more in the end line of the gear, which is the line that takes the gear up to the surface. There are solutions for mitigating against the entanglement in the end line. There is the possibility of the very weighted rope, and there is the rope lift gear, which is often called the on-call gear. We look forward to discussing this. Thank you very much Fiona, and now finally, not least, Danny Renton. Convener, thank you very much for inviting us to join the committee. I repdised an organisation called Sea Wilding, a community-led charity, and we're based up at Cragnish in Argyll. The purpose of the charity is to try and restore biodiversity to the Loch. Our Loch is about 80 kilometres in circumference. It's very typical of other Scottish sea lochs. We know from Victorian accounts that biodiversity has changed. It used to be full of fish, full of natural wonders, and it no longer is. The drivers have changed, so the likes of aquaculture and all the environmental problems associated with that. The other one is the fact that scallop dredges are still allowed to come right into the Loch and dredge right up to the shoreline and destroy the ecosystems. As a charity, we wanted to get together and look at how we, rather than just wringing our hands, what we could do to try and reverse some of this. We started looking at some of the things that disappeared from the Loch, and they were native oysters. We have a relic population of around 200 left. They used to be here in abundance and also seagrass. Just to talk a little bit about native oysters and seagrass around the UK coastline, over 90 per cent of both those priority marine features have disappeared. They are absolutely critical ecosystem builders. The keystone species for habitat is here in Loch Rage. What we want to do now is to research different methodologies for doing this at low cost, so that we can help other communities to do the same. We got a grant from the national lottery to put down a million over a five-year period, where we put down nearly 300,000 so far, and also a grant from Nature Scotland. We are very grateful for that to plant a quarter of a hectare of seagrass, which we are doing at the moment, and that grant comes to an end in March next year. Forgive me, my phone keeps ringing. I am trying to turn it off. The purpose of this is really to make it very community-orientated. We have six schools involved. We have five different universities involved looking at carbon sequestration and also environmental DNA and biodiversity change over time. The idea is to develop these low-cost, best-practised methodologies so that we can roll them round the Scottish coastline to other communities. We think that there is a real hunger for this. There is a sense among many coastal communities that they have been slightly dispossessed from the fisheries debate. We are not included in the inshore fisheries groups. We have seen chronic biodiversity loss in all those Scottish seelocks. We continue to see scallop dredging and bottom trawling right up to the shoreline. The result of that is a collapse in biodiversity and a collapse of economic opportunity. We genuinely believe that if we can work together to restore biodiversity, then there is real economic opportunity for many in the future. Thank you very much and thank you all for your introductions. We have members' questions now, which will take us up to round about 10.30. I would like to kick off. We have heard about some individual projects that are very area-based and some wider research that has been done. However, is current policy supportive of innovation and mainstreaming your research findings? Or what policy structural changes need to change to support new and on-going projects that will achieve some of the outcomes that we need to reverse the biodiversity loss? I am just going to start and go round everybody for this question. I start with Dr Rennie, please. I think that at the moment the supporting policy structures that we have as far as innovation are very reasonable. The dynamic coast project itself is a fine example of an idea that started off with a PhD project supported by NatureScot as it happens, looking into the assets that are behind our erodible shore. From that, through discussions within NatureScot and within partners across Government and Government itself, the project was born. That has spurred other innovations, both pure research but also in broader policy areas and further discussions. I am very comfortable with the achievements that we have made and the policy ecosystem that supports that. However, the challenge is rising and we will need to continue to redouble our efforts in this area to make sure that we are up to the challenge in the future. If some of the achievements that we have, for instance, creating closed areas for fisheries, that was only possible because the first act of the Scottish Parliament was to give Shetland control out to its six-mile limit. That has not been replicated to any other community in Scotland. Some of the innovation that we have been able to achieve in Shetland is not possible for any other community to achieve at the moment. The other part of that is policy and legislation and regulations are three things that underpin any statutory bringing about of management. Some of the challenges, such as biosecurity invasive species invasions, at a local level, are lacking regulations that create clear laws that we can enforce as a marine area. We have the Wain Act, which is a very good piece of legislation that makes it illegal to spread on native species, but we do not define that in the way that we do for some other things like contamination of the seabed, which has very specific things like five milligrams of copper or whether it might be, but we do not stipulate things like boats must not move if they are. It is illegal or you must clean your boat X number of times a year. Some challenges facing the marine environment are not clearly regulated for, so it makes it very difficult to enforce at a local level. Whilst Scotland does have a very good series of policies, it is not always underpinned by specific enough regulation to allow that to be implemented. Thank you. Just before we move on, I know that Beatrice has got some specific questions about what you are doing in Shetland, but you have a successful marine planning area. That might be because it is a very compact area relatively. Do you think that there should be legislation about ensuring that all stakeholders are round the table? We heard that some coastal communities were not involved in inshore fisheries or whatever. Is that something that we should see more of? Would that help to put policies in place where everybody came together in the arguments over scallop dredging or creel static gear, where it is very polarised at the moment? Would that help with that? Shetland Marine Planning Partnerships has the ability to do that via direction from Scottish Government. That will, hopefully, at some point be rolled out across Scotland, but that process has not taken place yet. It provides the opportunity to bring everyone together. The Scottish Government also has the IFGs to enable them to do that, but they do not have the power making ability. Our marine planning partnership does, and all the other marine readers will have a plan making ability, but the IFGs for fisheries in England do not have plan making ability, but they do not in Scotland. Without that statutory underpinning, it is difficult to elicit change in our fisheries practice at a local level, even if it is desired by the local communities. I have a supplementary question from Arrianne. That is a supplementary question to everybody following on the convener's initial question about policy. I would like to hear whether you feel that there is enough support in the current policy environment to ensure a timely and just transition for coastal sectors and communities to ensure that they can continue to utilise our marine and coastal habitats as new measures are brought in to reduce the impact on biodiversity. Is that specific bit around what do we need in terms of support to ensure that just transition? Maybe I will start with Danny Renton and go around. Our view fundamentally is that we are not blaming the fishermen for the destruction of the seabed. It is a regulatory failure that is permitted to do it. We want to just transition. We want financial support for fishermen who may be prevented from dredging in the inshore in the future. The policy is not there at the moment. Just to give a snapshot of where we are here in Loch Regnish, we have priority marine features in Loch Regnish. We have native oysters, we have seagrass, we have northern sea fans, we have the remnants of a mill bed, but it has been dredged. These are all supposed to be protected by law, none of them are. The Loch, as I mentioned before, still has dredgers coming up with it as close as they can to the shoreline. This is to the destruction of the ecosystem. This is the same all the way up the west coast of Scotland. It has been since 1984. Simultaneously, we have seen the collapse of fisheries. White fish stocks are now commercially extinct. All we are fishing for now is the bottom of the food chain. It is lobsters, crabs, gallops and prawns. There is nothing left. If you want to restore biodiversity, you have to respect that the fish spawning grounds and the nurseries are in inshore waters. They used to be, but they are no longer. Divers tell me that, back in the 1970s, you could dive along the west coast of Scotland and it looked like the Red Sea, not as colourful but certainly as diverse. Now in many of these places, it just looks like a desert. We need to address that. If we do not address that, then it is meaningless trying to restore biodiversity at the scale that we are, because we are just doing it right at the fringes. We are not addressing the problem. Thank you for that, Danny. I would just like to add another little bit so that you can come back on that. National Planning Framework 4 has a policy section on coasts. I would like to hear if you have read it and what you think about it. I am talking to everybody, but I did not get that to you as well. Have you managed to have a look at the National Planning Framework 4? It is okay if you have not. A lot of people have not. No, I have not. Can I just make one further point about policy? Currently, the Scottish Government says that 37 per cent of Scottish waters are in really protected areas. That is a myth, really, because only 5 per cent of that is protected from bottom trawling and dredging. We know that that 5 per cent is not really protected either. I will give you an example of that. Only the other day, I was standing at the Cregnish Peninsula overlooking one of the few NPAs that is protected against bottom trawling. That is because we have the flapper skate that exists there. It is a nursery ground for that. I am standing there. It is dark. I am looking at a dredger that has just come into the NPA because dredgers are still not required to turn on their vessel monitoring systems. That has been promised by the Government since 2017, and it has still not happened. Only 100 dredgers in Scotland and only 14 are required to turn on their automatic identification systems. I watched the dredger come in. It has its AIS on because I am following it on the Marine Scotland Marine Tracker. It gets into the NPA, turns off its AIS and turns off its lights, right in the middle of the NPA, just as it is getting dark. I am afraid that that is happening everywhere. We all know that that is happening. Marine Scotland is powerless to stop it. However, the policies might be there. Some of the policies are there, but they are just not implemented. I hear from the rest of the panel on the specifics of the just transition. Ariane, just before we move on, I think that Rachael had a supplementary on that topic. Can I just clarify, Mr Renton? Do you believe that Marine Scotland is not doing enough to stop illegal trawling? Yes. Every single coastal community that watches this believes that Marine Scotland is not doing enough. It is not that Marine Scotland does not necessarily want to do it. It means that they do not have the resources to do it. For example, if I were to ring up Marine Scotland and see a dredger in the NPA where it is not supposed to be and believe that it is acting suspiciously at night, which is what happens, then normally they turn their lights off, Marine Scotland would tell me that they do not work at night. Secondly, they will log the call, but of all the dredgers that have been caught, there is just one fixed penalty, which is £2,000, and that is absolutely meaningless when you go into an area that is protracted and start dredging it for scallops. Your catch is worth infinitely more than that. Marine Scotland does not have the resources and is not fit for purpose to do what it needs to be doing. Just on the back of that, you are making some very broad statements there that you would appear that this law-breaking is widespread. I would challenge that. That is not what we have heard in previous sessions. You suggested that much of the seabed is destroyed. You are not quantifying it, and it is a very broad statement again. We heard from Marine scientists from Aberdeen University and suggested that that was not necessarily the case. There were some isolated incidents of damage to the seabed, but it was not much of the seabed. Can you comment on what you mean by much of the seabed? I think that all the evidence is there in Scottish Marine assessment things about the amount of seabed that has been destroyed. For example, in our lock here, only two months ago, we discovered evidence of a scallop dredger inside the lock within metres of the shore. It is on a reef that is usually dived by scallop divers. We discovered that, relatively recently, a scallop dredger has been up there and destroyed that shelf. A few months ago, I was in the lock fine marine protected area just off Minard. There is a prawn trawler within metres of the shore right up inside the MPA. Two weeks ago, three weeks ago, off Gailoch, there were reports of a legal scallop dredger there. That was reported to Marine Scotland. In the marine protected area here off Isdale last summer, divers went down and found fresh dredging evidence in an area that is not only banned for scallop dredgers but is also a site of an area of conservation. To say that it is not happening, we do not know. We have evidence that it is happening, but to take it from the industry that is not happening on Marine Scotland is that they do not know. You need to speak to local communities and more than anything, you need to speak to local divers who will tell you how the seabed has been destroyed. It has been fundamentally destroyed all over the west coast of Scotland. The science suggests that that is why we do not have whitefish any more on the west coast of Scotland. You certainly do not have it in the Clyde, where all your fishing for now is prawns and lobsters. You will be aware of the Lamb Lash No Take Zone, which is just two square kilometres. That has only been around for a few years, set up by the coast group and the uptake in biodiversity is absolutely phenomenal. Against the backdrop of the Clyde, where the fisheries are absolutely dead—this was one of the richest fisheries in northern Europe only 100 years ago—I do not think that we can underestimate what the lifting of the inshore limits has done to fisheries and to the cost of economic opportunity for many. I think that we are going to go back to some questions on just transition. I just wanted to come back to the rest of the panel to pick up on the question around is there enough support in the current policy environment to ensure a timely and just transition for coastal sectors and communities? If anyone else wants to come in on that, I would really appreciate it. Also, just chime in if you have read the coast section of the NPF for it, you do not have to have. Sir, here you are, Danny. Sorry, thank you. So the two questions as far as the just transition, we have made a start in from a little higher up the water than what Danny was referring to earlier on. From a coastal perspective, we have looked at the amount of erosion that is happening and also taken into consideration the social vulnerability of our communities, and we have used the Scottish index of multiple exploration and some of the census data to support that. That is the first time that has been done, and it tries to get in to understand better the coastal erosion disadvantage, which is similar to the flooding disadvantage that the Scottish Government looked at earlier on. That is the first time that has been done from a coastal perspective in Scotland, and it provides an opportunity for local authorities and other organisations to better understand the social resilience of their communities, the social vulnerability of their communities and their exposure to coastal erosion now and in the future. Although we may not have a direct, perfect relationship there as far as that being deployed, because the science is still new, that is a tool that can be used by partners, and I hope that it will be used. To your second question of the NPF-4, I have read it and I think that it marks an improvement in NPF-3 and it builds upon early iterations. I think that there are some further improvements that could still be made. As I understand it, we are in a consultation phase at the moment, and I am sure that those comments will be coming in from various different partners. I see it as a step in the right direction with some further opportunities. Thank you. Would anyone else like to come in on the just transition aspect in your area? I wonder if I could make a comment. There are two parts to a just transition. At the moment, we are very focused on ensuring that the just transition enables, for instance, the electrification of vessels. However, for communities, a just transition is also somewhere like Shatman's. We have a lot of offshore wind plant, tidal potential, and this is true of other communities such as Orkney. The just transition does not tend to focus on where the impacts of housing that technology is going to occur. In my mind, it is quite an urban perception of just transition. It is how we are all going to recycle more, use less, electrify our homes and so on. However, it is ignoring descriptive justice, which is thinking about where the impacts of transitioning are occurring, rather than the actual whether or not we can afford to implement the measures. For rural communities, it is an important part of the transition process, because rural communities are predominantly housing those very big technologies. Obviously, we will have the potential to receive quite big benefits from that in terms of employment, but all the negative visual impacts, loss of access on land or on the sea are felt in those communities, too. When we are thinking about just transition, I think that it would be an opportunity for the Scottish Government to speak further about what justice means for those communities. A lot of the jobs that are being created at the moment are predominantly for white men. There is very little diversity in the jobs that are being created, so they are very good employers for rural communities, but they are not employing a diverse range of people on gender or race. If we are talking about renewables in justice, justice surely has to talk to some of the other elements that make up a justice society. Who are the impacts being received by, and who the beneficiaries are, and helping to ensure that that is spread across all elements of society? Thank you very much. I am now going to move to Beatrice for some questions. Thanks, convener, and good morning, panel. Fiona, I wonder if I could ask you a bit more about entanglements in creels. You indicated in your opening statement that only 5 per cent were reported. I wonder if I could understand a bit more about the numbers of fishermen involved in the project to get an understanding of the figures between those who are reporting and who are reporting. We interviewed 159 fishers across the cruel industry in Scotland, and that represents just over 11 per cent of the industry in Scotland. Of those fishers, we had 146 entanglements reported, and for the majority of fishers, they had only experienced one entanglement. A few fishers had two entanglements, and we had one fisher that had nine, and he had nine baskin sharks in a short period of time. He actually felt that that maybe he had not cleaned his gear enough in between entanglements, and the animals had been attracted. That was the only fisher that had a large number, and he said that he had released them all. For the majority, it is a very small number of fishers, but over half the fishers had experienced an entanglement. The solution for entanglements, or getting higher numbers, is not for other by-catch incidents to put observers on board, because it would not be financially feasible. We have been trying to raise the profile of the reporting schemes to fishers and that there is help for them, because the majority of them had to release the animals themselves, which is also quite dangerous. We have been trying to tell them that there is support, and if the animals are dead, could they please report them to the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme, and if the animals are alive, we have provided the fishers with brochures for the wheelhouse, and that said that they have got numbers so that they can call for assistance. The actual reporting has been low, because I think that fishers did not know who to report it to, or that when they have got the animal in the gear, their immediate reaction is to just try to release the animal for the welfare of the animal, or if the animal has already died. That is why reporting has been low. That is helpful. I think that your point is well made about the safety of fishermen as well. I think that that is across the board. I wonder if you could also tell me what happens now with the project, because you said that it is not clear where the funding will come from following the exit from the EU. No. It was actually a two-year project funded by EMMA, so the project finished in March 2020, but the final report is not out because it delays you to Covid, but it should be out next week or the week after. There currently is not any funding for the project. We had applied for funding from NERC, but it was not successful. One of my colleagues who was the project manager of this, Ellie McClellan, is carrying on small aspects of the work. She is looking at entanglements for her PhD, but the project and the funding is finished. My final question is about the impact on the fishing fleet of marine animal entanglements. Not just inshore, but there is also a problem with gilnetters. I wonder if you have anything to say on that. For the bycatch of cetaceans in Gilnet in Scotland, there is not very much data, because there is not so many observers. The majority of the work is concentrated of the south west of England so far. We are starting a project, hopefully at the moment, to speak to fishers, gilnetfishers, about bycatch, but that is aside from the sea project. What was the first part of the question? It is just the impact on the industry itself of the entanglements. The individual fishers, we asked them also about the economics of the entanglements. Nearly all of them said that they are not worried about the economic impact because they lose gears normally to bad weather and also to the mobile sector quite frequently. Their main concern was for the welfare of the animal. The problem is, if there are entanglements and it is associated to grill gear, there is quite a lot of focus in the media, social media. The industry gets a bad name, but we have really tried to say that this is not the fishers fault. They do not want to catch the animals. We have just been trying to still create a positive profile for the grill fishers because they really worked with us for this project. They initiated the project. I hope that that comes through. I read a report from back in 2016 that suggested that the entanglement of humpback whales in inshore Scottish waters were of a proportion that would mean that the species was unsustainable and that Scottish inshore waters could potentially act as a high mortality sink for the species in the whole of the north-east Atlantic. Given that we are in 2021 and that there has been a substantial increase in fixed line and creels and whatever, which have been generally unregulated, do we need to act now to regulate the industry and push forward with policies that are going to help creel fishermen to ensure that entanglements are far less frequent than they are just now, particularly given the underreporting that you have suggested? We asked fishers about measures that they think we could try for reducing marine animal entanglements. That was one that a lot of fishers reported that there needs to be regulation of the industry and that there also needs to be some solutions for the conflicts with the mobile gear. I will move on to questions from our CDs, which are reached on the end, Jim. Hi, morning Fiona. I hope that you can hear me okay. I have two questions. The first one is just speaking about solutions to marine animal entanglement and thinking about sustainability of current fishing practices. I wondered if the Scottish Entanglement Alliance has a view on the relative sustainability of creeling over trawling in the same area of inshore waters. So creelian's seen us like what they call a life gear, which is like a low impact fuel efficient gear. One of the things that the creel fishers did say is that the mobile sector often tow their gear and then their gear is dumped and they don't know where their gear is dumped so they can't retrieve it. The fishers know where their gear is and they know how many creels they're fishing with and then if they then lose a lot of gear also to bad weather or the mobile sector, there's an indefinite number of creels in the water and gear in the water and without solutions like that, even if the industry is regulated, there's still going to be like a huge amount of gear in the water that we've got no idea where it is, how many there is or mitigating that. One thing that creel fishers also said was that they don't have anywhere to actually dispose of their gear. That's another thing that needs to be improved in harbours or around the coast. Thanks very much Fiona. Then just one more follow-up in terms of reporting of the entanglements. Do you think monitoring and recording could be delivered through the use of remote electronic monitoring on the larger boats on trawlers? Would that be useful in terms of improving reporting and monitoring of incidents if larger boats were fitted with electronic monitoring? Probably, but during this project we didn't actually speak to any of the trawl fishers. We only spoke to the creel fishers so we suspect that they might have issues with bycatch but we're not sure because we didn't actually speak to any of them. Originally we had planned to speak to them but then as the project developed we just focused on the creel industry and their entanglements just to try to get an overview of the situation in Scotland because for some of the species they've never been reported entanglements in strandings or live entanglements so we actually got such a wider range of species than we initially thought and all around the coastline whereas we thought that there would be hotspots we didn't expect the entanglements to be so widespread. Thank you. Rachel will come in with a follow-up and then Jim. Thank you. Dr Reid, you're getting a lot of questions from us. It's a very interesting subject. Actually can I just be clear about how your organisation believes that you can actually improve the monitoring of the bycatch because it sounds as if you need a whole lot more people feeding into this but what is the actual process of gathering that data? I mean is it something that you want to take forward with the work that you do and do you need extra funding to be able to do that? Yes so it's definitely going to need extra funding but I think recently there's now a legal obligation for fishers to report entanglements events and so hopefully reporting is going to improve and I think because the work has been conducted with the cruel industry and it's been so positive working with them hopefully if fishers do get an entanglement they know who to contact and the solutions that are solutions available like we would really like to trial weighted rope on the ground line of the gear and we would really like to trial the rope list gear which is like an encore gear in areas where we know there might be potential for hotspots for certain species but again at the moment there's just no funding for it so yeah we've got the support of the fishers so it's just a lack of funding that the work's not going forward at the moment. Thank you and final on this topic Jim. Thanks convener and if you're not you are getting another question from me I'm afraid. I have to say somebody who knows nothing about fishing it sounds a wee bit like the Wild West out there can you tell me you said that you were funded by the EU on a two-year project how much was that funding and who did you say that you'd applied to funding afterwards that was refused? I missed that last bit. So the second part of funding that we applied for was NAC funding. Which is what? We can come back to you. We'll write to you for some further information. We'll not put you in the spot on that one because I know what acronyms are like, they're very very difficult. And then I'll have to also check how much this project received the funding but it was the European Marine Time Fisheries Fund that funded the work and it was via Marine Scotland and it was project managed by NatureScot. Okay thank you. Thank you. We're now going to move on to Sea Wilding as a topic where Ariane will kick it off. Oh a bigger pardon I'm sorry. Danny would you like to come in sorry I forgot you the indicated light to come in this topic before we move to Ariane? Yes very briefly it's just about the entanglements and stuff. I spent quite a lot of time on the island of Tyrean the last few years around 200 tons of beach litter have been collected by volunteers and about 80 percent of it is fishing gear and a lot of it is creels and they don't necessarily originate on Tyrean when creels get a certain buoyancy when they get wrapped up in their lines and when they get towed by the mobile sector so some of it may come from afar. One thing you notice that none of them are marked none of them are labelled so even if it was a fleet of creels that got washed up in a storm that was locally owned no one would necessarily know who to ring for them to come and salvage it and repurpose it if it was possible so I think some form of marking and would be very helpful in the future labelling. Thank you for that Ariane. Thank you convener yes so these questions are in general are going to be directed towards Danny so you're on and I think maybe colleagues will come in as well so yeah so I'm very impressed with your projects and you're in aim to empower communities to manage their own inshore marine environments while addressing biodiversity loss sequestering carbon and creating green jobs could you please say a little more about the benefits you have seen from community led marine restoration and enhancement including whether it has led to increased employment community empowerment cohesion and possibly even repopulation. Yeah well thank you for the question in terms of our project it's only been running now for a year and a half so it's a bit too early to be able to say what sort of biodiversity change that we're going to see over time but we're putting back a million native oysters we put down around 300 000 so far the survival rates on the seabed are around 40 so currently it's looking really good and in the and we have a long term hope that if we can restore the native oysters in abundance to the sea loft we can set up a sustainable community oyster fishery so in terms of green jobs we have one full-time person employed we have five people part-time employed that's to do with the seagrass and we're planning to scale up I mean one of the things I was saying is that the there is a real hunger for this up the around the Scottish shoreline the coastal communities network for example has 18 member groups and many of them are interested in what we're doing and next year we're planning to roll out to Arran to potentially to Noydart to the Friends of the Sound of Jura we're helping the Edinburgh shoreline with their with some sort of degree of consultancy with their seagrass and oyster projects so I think there are many green jobs in this in the future and there are potential for sustainable fisheries if we can get biodiversity to return. Thank you for that on this on the scaling up or extending this type of project along the coastline what support do you think would be needed from the Scottish Government Marine Scotland or others? Well there's a couple of things really I mean firstly you know this sort of marine sort of habitat restoration is a very new thing the science is very new and though that there isn't really the infrastructure to support us at the moment in terms of the the licensing is problematic and you know we have to apply for up to four licenses it's very site specific as to what you're doing once you've established there's an ecological restoration opportunity and there's a community that can deliver it because we want to do it at community level we then have to go through the licensing process when we started doing this three years ago this was immensely complex we were basically treated like a salmon farm however it is getting easier marine scotland and nature scotland understand now what we're doing and there are specific individuals we can now talk to and who are receptive to what we're doing so it's becoming a more enabling environment but if you're really scaling up we're talking about funding and funding is hard I mean we're a small charity I spend all my time fundraising we've been very fortunate in getting a national lottery grant which enabled us to do the native voices at scale over a five-year period nature scotland has been wonderful and has given us a large grant to do this proof of concept seagrass restoration project which we're close to finalising part of that is a lot of science and that's very important to show sort of carbon sequestration environmental DNA to look at biodiversity change over time all these sort of things but these are these are decadal research projects and one of the issues we have at the moment is our funding comes to an end in March next year we've started all these different research projects but the funding now comes to an end so it's now incumbent upon us as a small charity to go out to all the respective sort of philanthropic donors and and try and get more funding we're confident we'll do that but the the the SMEF the the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund will not we think come into play so we understand and towards latter half of next year it's too late for the second phase of our seagrass project so we don't want to drop the ball now that we're running with it but so funding is an important thing so it's it's it's getting these sort of ducks and the lines so we can actually roll these out at community level and at scale and when I say at community level I mean it's not just that there's a hunger to restore by diversity for all the economic reasons and all the sort of welfare reasons and wildlife reasons but we also really think that there are there are green jobs in this there's a real opportunity here in Scotland to restore what's been lost and Alasdair anyone wants to come in on the back of that thank you very much the the question I think comes back to two two aspects one we need to understand the need of where we can actually do more and then we need to make sure the funding is actually allied to that to ensure that that then works more effectively and then trickles across and into different sectors so I entirely agree with what Danny has just said I would say though in the coming years I think there will be more and we're already doing that the Scottish Government as you may all be aware announced the large funding package multi-year package 50 million 50 million pounds for a nature restoration fund just last week this year's allocation has been announced has been announced and within that £80,000 will be going to the st Andrews links trust the st Andrews links trust of the folk who run the world famous golf courses but they also look after the dunes and they've been doing Scotland's largest coastal nature based solutions project there repairing the sand dunes or sorry making them more resilient doing that whilst conserving nature as we look forward for the challenge that comes down the track with climate change and the nature emergency we'll need to be doing this for two reasons we'll be needing to do it for resilience and we'll meet and making sure that we don't get impacted by events but we also they need to be doing it as far as the biodiversity and for reasons of nature so the funding is is coming or some of the funding is coming and Danny's alluded to a few of those more will have to come and will as the evidence improves and our ability to say we need to do something here or we have a risk here or we have an opportunity here we then need to make sure that we're then able to go and enact that change and get in and do it based upon the best available evidence so this is about multi-year and joined up and and dynamic approaches the solutions to today's problems will be slightly different from the solutions in 10 years time and in 50 years time and we need a dynamic adaptive approach to this to make sure that we're getting the twin challenges best managed today with our communities for the local circumstances and the local nature and looking forward and how that changes through time thank you Rachel has indicated she'd like to contribute Yes thank you in terms of the benefits that that can be brought to communities when the Scottish Parliament allowed to have a regulating order it meant that the local fishery could be managed by the local community and in through that they brought in a number of measures they restricted the number of scallop dredges that could be put on each boat and that meant that instead of having a few big boats it meant that we have a larger number of vessels so that helped to maintain and increase employment the fleet was able to implement a range of conservation measures which allowed them to gain MSc accreditation so the Shatland scallop fleet the only was the first in the world to get a dredge fishery in the world to get accreditation and that's helped to maintain a market advantage to give it in power and communities for local control fishery communities across scotland have declined fishing employment has declined but it's helped to local control can help to prevent that loss of jobs it's not just about job creation better management can prevent us from losing jobs a conversy we don't really have control of our whitefish waters and one of the reasons that although I personally voted to remain in the EU that a lot of fish communities didn't is that they were told they'd have better management and that management could have been greener and one of the bug bears of the local community here is the international vessels putting long lines out and which are lost and cause marine litter they cause the large numbers of entanglement of harbour porpoises and so it's disincentivising for increased conservation measures via scotish fleet if the international community from their perspective aren't adhering to those those aspirations but also it's a lost opportunity for jobs if scotland took control of its quota more in a way that was promised but was probably never achieved a ball all of that fish stock that's being caught by international boats could be creating local employment in a more sustainable way than it is at the moment and I believe that the SSM on their inshore regulating order demonstrates how communities can employment could be sustained and in biodiversity targets being reached by local by maintaining a fishery which is different hasn't been achieved in our offshore waters and which is causing a range of impacts thank you Rachel for that I'm just going to come back to Danny and pick up on two couple of things one is you in terms of funding for your project what kind of amounts of funding are we talking about just so we understand you know for a coastal community to be doing a local restoration project that's one bit and the other bit is that I was actually in your area during my summer recess I was on Loch Malfort and I was talking to some folks who are running a restoration project on the other side I think of Loch Malfort and I think they mentioned your work and one of the things that they talked about was the difficulty of the planning process for bringing about their native oyster restoration and I'd like to understand from you if that is a common issue that the planning process is onerous and what we need to be doing about that to support local planning authorities to be able to support these restoration projects yeah thank you just deal with your last point firstly about the planning and the licensing and if there are particular projects you need to get a planning permission you then need an aquaculture licence you may we look like we've lost Danny for the time being we've the other witnesses are still available so I'm going to move on to any need depending on where you are cranes state license you may then need a marine construction license and making it easier for communities can you still hear me I'm sorry yes we can Danny I don't know whether you can hear us I'm telling what we're going to do my phone we're going to move on to another witness at the moment to see if we can get your connection a little bit more stable I'm going to move on to questions from Beatrice thanks convener actually Rachel has answered many of the questions I was going to put to her about the about the SSMO order and she's already Rachel you've already touched on obviously how important devolving down to local communities has been in terms of the the regulating order you've also answered the questions that I was going to ask about Gilnetters and marine litter so I just wonder in general terms we know that the whole regulating order is underpinned with scientific evidence and ongoing evidence and I know of the work that goes on at the NAFC or the marine centre at Scalloway I wonder if you could indicate what the impacts have that have been over the last few years on the marine environment and in terms of the climate emergency in terms of the climate emergency I would just the main benefit I would see is the closed areas because those habitats are carbon sequestrating habitats and I guess the benefit of having a strong inshore fleet is that it's a local fleet so we're accessing local grounds from very close and some of our fishing methods like the pelagic fleet they're very low carbon food production methods fishing is one of the lowest carbon food production methods that we have it's much lower than on land and particularly the pelagic trawl approach because it doesn't touch on the seabed it's a very low fuel approach so as we as a nation go further down that journey and look at how we can further reduce the carbon impact fishing does have to be part of our food security low carbon food security production methods if I could ask a bit more about crowded seas in terms of renewables offshore wind farms and fishing and how we can ensure that all sectors can work together I wonder if you could say a bit more about that I mean one of the things to ensure that impacts are minimised is ensuring that we've got adequate evidence of where the fishing grounds occur and at the moment we it's often based on DMS pigs but they position the boats every two hours so the boat can whilst it's kind of presumed that the boats travel in a straight line between those two hourly point that's not necessarily the case there is stronger evidence of where which it wears being utilised at the moment can help reduce impacts but as we move towards a targets of 100% energy from renewables it will be difficult to avoid all impacts on the our conflict between the two sectors because inevitably they will take place in some of the fishing grounds and the challenge for fishermen there is a perception that they fish everywhere but they do fish in very specific places so where it's possible to avoid those very specific places obviously that's the most desirable outcome but it isn't like there it's been estimated they fish around 40% of the sea so if we inadvertently place new technologies in that 40% that they fish along with the creation that necessary creation of re-protected areas suddenly the amount they can fish in is getting squeezed and squeezed which is inevitably going to have impacts on our local fleets but data and knowledge of where fishing boats fish is key to ensuring unnecessary conflict between emerging sectors and their existing uses and also ensuring that sectors are involved in the in the discussions that going on you know communities feeling that things are being done to them rather than with them and bringing people along thank you i've got some supplementaries from Karen Ed from Rachel followed by Karen Jenny and then Mercedes Rachel Michael Kaiser the chief scientist at what university said it was time to find places where dredging scallops does the least damage to the environment and i wondered how sort of simple that statement was when we're talking about protecting jobs and livelihoods there Rachel i think this i think this definitely the opportunity for that i mean much of our seas are very dynamic so you can find areas of the seabed where sand beds this sand is moving i could raise and fall the sea floor could raise and fall by a couple of litres each year so there are certainly opportunities locate there are locations where the impact of dredging will be minimal versus the natural dynamic nature of the marine environment where i live in shetland and marine environment is very dynamic so certainly the many of the places that the fishing the scallop filets are fishing would be very naturally disturbed i realize that's not necessarily the case for the whole of the Scottish coastline which some of which is much less dynamic than shetland so i can only speak for the area in which i live and so in terms of answering a question around michael kaiser's statement i certainly think this is the opportunity to folk to try and achieve what mike kaiser has suggested that there are better places for different activities to occur and more localised management might help identify where those are in shetland we don't have a you have fishing fleets which are local and you have fishing fleets which are more that more that roam we don't because of the regulating order we don't have roaming vessels that come here who might inadvertently damage habitats that they are unaware of which is is a different situation to the rest of scotland because of the regulating order thank you thank you convener how can i ask how does the panel feel in light of their own experiences that we can improve on bringing together the private public and third sector organisations really from across the globe to increase our knowledge of blue carbon and identify how to move from research to actual action and are there any barriers that exist in terms of research and development that we should be aware of thank you thank you can we have a doctor alster erenity kick that one off please specifically to do with blue carbon and private finance i think from a coastal perspective we are making good inroads on that i think there's further opportunities to come the the work of smith which was previously alluded to by danny it's a project run by nature scott the scottish marine environmental enhancement fund attempts to do this to bring together public and private finance together the challenges that we face not only are related to biodiversity loss or improvements to do with biodiversity but also the sequestration but i would i would echo the thoughts of our previous cabinet secretary rizanae comingham when she talked about we need we need joint approaches we can't have a single approaches to only problems of mitigation and problems of adaptation together we need to find those those wonderful places within our marine and our coastal and terrestrial areas where we have both mitigation and adaptation benefits so sequestering carbon better within our coastal systems provides provides those benefits from a from a from a mitigation perspective but also from an adaptation perspective because our challenge is both going forward so there's new there's new work coming a new funding coming but we'll need more of it as time goes on and danny um yes um specifically about blue carbon but my understanding is that 90 99% of the organic carbon in the sea is is locked into the sediments and uh look at our our our sea lock here um which is still dredged and dredge has come in as i've said before as far as they can um a lot of it is borrowed mud um they're dredging for scallops they might be dredging for prawns um and that is has been up to date a very very efficient carbon sink but every time you disturb it it's potentially becomes a carbon source so and there's huge amount of research to be done on this and and if you know we're dredging you know up most of the social sea logs ripping through those ecosystems then you know then it's not just a need a biodiversity problem but it's also a carbon source problem um i mean just you know just you know what i would say generally is that we need a whole ecosystem approach we said there's a priority priority marine review that has been promised since 2019 that that was the result of dredging of the flame shell reef in Loch Arran that then became an mpa uh that was announced by the Scottish Government it still hasn't happened um and that's just looking at priority marine features and looking at ways of of protecting them but most of um lots of the priority marine features in these inshore areas have now gone because they've been because they've been destroyed the seabed has been destroyed so if we want to bring back biodiversity really we have to look at what's happening in land lash bay and look at no take zones and see that the seabed can recover very quickly to the to the benefit of many to the benefit of fishermen um if they said if they fish sustainably in the future so i think we have to look at the whole ecosystem and not just look at you know individual things and it needs to be a joined up joined up approach between all the agencies thank you and dead questions from jenny thank you thank you convener and thank you panel it's been really informative um i'm kind of going back to the question that my colleague Rachel Hamilton asked we got some evidence um from academics two weeks ago and there was a suggestion there that and it kind of goes on from what Rachel was saying into some extent Danny as well that we can't keep oceans in one particular state nature will take over and then also that um we need to look at the overall protection of the ocean areas as opposed to focusing in on one area so i'd be interested to hear a bit of an expansion on on these two thoughts from your perspective um and dr Alistair any i believe part of the st andrews links trust is collecting old christmas trees and using them to to stabilise the the sand dunes at st andrews so anyway sorry just as an aside i'd be interested to hear your thoughts on looking at the ocean as a whole dr any thank you but i think st andrews provides an interesting case study in how and this is the this is the same across the almarine environment there's a virtuous circle that's managed to have been created within the sin andrews area whereby we have successful businesses that care about their environment are investing in nature and nature based solutions and they're also bringing their community with them and and all of those parties are also appreciative of the natural environment which they have inherited um so a nice example of that is five council collecting christmas trees that are then stockpiled and made available and instead of being shredded and put off to compost they're taken and some of them are used to to help stabilise some of the low parts of the sand dunes um and the sand is used from areas of the beach that have accreted over the previous years um so so that's a nice example but i but i would um across all of the panel there are other areas where we need to foster that collaborative environment whereby science is being used in a in a tailored way to the local circumstances and supporting more resilient businesses that care more about their environment and help nature but also keep us on the right track as far as managing those growing problems of increasing pressures from climate change be they along the coastal edge or a little lower down in the marine environment thank you and danny i wonder if you could comment on my original statement about not being able to keep oceans in one state nature will take over if you've got any thoughts on that well yes absolutely i mean the best i mean as i mentioned before that we know that the one no take zone that exists in scotland is absolutely tiny is proven that biodiversity returned very very quickly to the to the benefit of everybody and and and basically that that's that's what we need to do we need to think about um we need to think about a just transition we need to work with with with fishermen um who who where where their activities are problematic um and we need hopefully to bring everybody together to say our long term goal is to sequester carbon in the long term is to restore biodiversity in the inshore waters and then work together to maintain that for the economic benefit of everybody um and you know that's the way forward it makes sense i mean sweden is now trialling um um 12 mile limit on on bottom trawling off their coastline other countries are doing it we should be doing it we used to be one of the richest fisheries in in the world and now you know up the west coast we're just fishing at the bottom of the food chain it's completely unsustainable and it is reversible and we should be doing it and uh i'm with one tier Mercedes thank you i've got one question for Rachel and then a question for Danny if there's time um so Rachel the the shetland spatial plan is held as an example of good practice um and i know that one aspect of it is that scallop dredges are all fitted with tracking devices so my question's got three parts i was wondering um do you think that this tracking of scallop dredges is a good thing and do you think it ought to be rolled out to the rest of scotland's inshore fisheries and then finally do you think the Scottish Government should be considering delegating powers to locally manage other inshore fisheries um to answer your second question about the tracking the one thing that tracking enables vessels to do is prove if they're adhering to the conservation measures they're benefiting from and it also helps to provide an evidence base when it comes to things like marine renewables so there's benefits to the fleet for for doing it and also when boats are accused of not adhering to the measures they can actually prove that the word adhering for instance so there's benefits of that as well um in terms of rolling out i think it would be the Scottish Government with my understanding did have the aspiration of rolling out a system and for a range of reasons that has been delayed so i believe the Scottish Government does still intend for that to happen and obviously the therefore the cost and burden of that would be taken on by the Scottish Government which i believe the SSMO has a preference for and including the enforcement elements of it so that would make a level playing field for the whole of scotland so and in terms of i guess the other areas in scotland if they i can see that would be benefits for the IFGs to have more powers to replicate the successful model that they've had in shetland with the SSMO i guess one of the challenging of that in these increasingly difficult financial times is always going to be the resourcing at a national level because we had things had become more financially challenging anyway and now we've had Covid so i imagine spreading our relatively limited taxpayers money is always going to be a difficult political decision and i'm sorry i can't remember what your first question was the first question was just whether you think the the tracking is is a good thing it sounds like you do yeah i think it was better than yours terms of proving that the fishermen were adhering which they did do and then we proved that they were doing it which was um yeah it helped with the with the evidence base perfect thank you very much and then i just wanted to fit in one question for danny if i can now that we've got him back um so a couple of weeks ago the committee heard about the lack of commercially viable white fish stocks um on the west coast um and it's great that seawilding's doing work to recover ensure ecosystems um to provide better nursery grounds for for fish species but obviously this that's um restricted to the the project at the specific lock um so i was wondering what seawilding believers needed to recover cod and herring stocks on the wider west coast if you have a view on that yeah i mean i mean one of the problems about about the marine world is there's a lack of baseline surveys um and so you know the mel excuse me the mel beds the seagrass beds the um although all those all those rich habitats that used to be the spawning grounds for herring for cod and things like that we we have an idea of where they were but most a lot of them have now been destroyed so firstly we need to understand where they still exist and then give them a proper protection and you know my personal views we need to give the whole insure protection because that is traditionally where where the nursery grounds and the fish spawning grounds are and and i and the fact that you know there's the the white fish stocks are commercially extinct on the west coast is you know we we have to look at the data and and there is a real correlation between the lifting of the 1984 insure limit and then all the dredging is allowed right in and then a collapse of fish stocks within about 10 years i personally remember aged about six going fishing for halibut and whiting and all these things off tyree about a mile off tyree it was called the skarnished bank it was a community resource it's where everybody went to get their white fish and then within a matter of years it was destroyed by dredges so it's it's um we need to understand where it was and we need to understand how we can bring it back and then to protect we need to have meaningful marine protected areas to do that. Thank you. I think you're certainly you're suggesting about baselining information. I think it's again it's a very general and broad statement to suggest that dredging has solely been the responsibility of destroying our insured nurseries and that's why the importance of baseline information to inform our decisions is so important. On that just before we move away from Shetland we see how Shetland has done a huge amount to address the crowded sea argument to remove unnecessary conflict and whatever and there is other areas in Scotland where the fixed fisheries and the trolling the mobile gear fisheries work well together so for example in the Salwy Firth but Rachel do you believe that we need legislation and additional funding to ensure that those successful partnerships are in place right across Scotland? Yes, I imagine so because for the Shetland marine planning partnership is funded by the Scottish Government so at the moment there's Shetland and the Clyde and Oakley which are currently in the process of developing plans and data are I guess leading on from the data collection and mapping has been a really large part of that but at the moment there is a huge I think it would be a bad idea for the Scottish Government to have started all of the marine planning partnerships at once so they didn't so that was an opportunity for lessons learned but also that's the cost of having them all run at the same time I think has also been a barrier there was originally a budget proposed to run all the marine planning partnerships at once and that hasn't happened it is my understanding that cost is an element of that decision making. Okay thank you very much and we're finally going to move on to questions from Alasdair Allan. Thank you convener. Questions for Dr Rennie I was interested in what some of our written evidence that we received has said and what evidence that's been discussed today has said about rising sea levels and about the need to prepare for that in terms of infrastructure so I'm just keen to hear a bit more about what you anticipated around the cost you've mentioned or I think we have a figure of £1.2 billion between now and 2050 as a potential cost around infrastructure can you tell me a bit more about what that means? Yes very happy to thank you very much Dr Allan the the £1.2 billion figure is the headline number that came from the dynamic coasts national coastal erosion risk assessment under that we took a precautionary baseline which assumed that we continued on our high emissions climate emissions trajectory that we are currently on for the rest of the century and we also assumed that we didn't maintain any of the coastal defences that were in place at the moment when we plotted the future erosion under that situation and then intersected or laid it on top of the extent of our road railways and residential properties and those three items together came to the value of £1.2 billion so under a higher emissions scenario that's the potential exposure on roads railways and residential property the three things we could cost readily but on a lower emissions future if we achieve net zero quickly that falls to £800 million so the project demonstrates that there is a cost saving in direct avoided damage costs of around £400 million from net zero which in and of itself is actually quite a helpful thing to know more generally however and I I'd encourage you looking away or the broader picture is more important if I may in the fact that the evidence base is now available for different organisations to then make better judgments and better decisions on the back of it so the data is being used by nature scott being used by seaper it's being used by transport scotland it's being used by scottish water it's being used by different local authorities to start to explore and plan ahead now not all of these risks will be presenting themselves tomorrow morning they'll be increasing into the future through time so the monitoring and the risk assessments and the strategies that are then needed can and are being sort of worked forward as we as we plan ahead so would it be fair to say given that you've you've looked at a limited range of things roads railways houses and that there may be other costs that local authorities should anticipate I'm thinking I know I always quote this but the example from my own constituency where a school had to be moved because as a direct result of of rising sea levels so what kind of other areas can you anticipate another not part maybe of that study but what kind of other areas can you anticipate and could they be costed yes is the short answer so the 1.2 billion came simply from the fact that we had the cost of a length the replacement of a length of a road a railway and residential properties are easily priced what isn't easily priced is commercial property what isn't easily priced is a you know a length of water pipe we have these data sets we just don't have the costings associated with their replacements so within the dynamic coast project and with our partners we've received data from different organisations and they and on the back of that we can do that risk assessment so we have the numbers at least and that's a step change as far as our understanding going forward and that's essential to then build up each of these organisations have their own responsibilities of course so it's it's for local authorities to take forward that understanding and plan ahead and that's what they're now able to do so so you feel they're now able to do that I mean again I'm not sure if this form part of your remit but do you see evidence that as yet organisations have been brought together to think about these questions in a in a strategic way that would look as far ahead as you were looking to 2050 or? The very presence of the dynamic coast project confirms that that is the case we our remit is to improve the evidence base and to support others in the in the delivery of their of their statutory obligations so in the same way that SEPA have flood maps and they're relied upon in local planning and for flood risk management planning and development planning the same is also the case for coastal erosion mapping increasingly as was alluded to that is expected within NPF4 and other policies so we are getting there the challenge is increasing and increasingly we will have to step up over the last handful of years there certainly has been an increased awareness and interest from local authorities they've got responsibilities under the Coastal Protection Act and they're certainly more interested and and sort of active in this area in the coming years Scottish Government have secured funding and noted that within the programme for government to undertake coastal change adaptation funding and plans and that work is on going and other policy colleagues will be able to answer further questions on that but that work's coming in the in the next few years to move this further forward and finally I'm interested to know whether you have a view on whether I suppose your comments are really mainly talking about adapting to this new reality rather than hard engineering solutions but where do hard engineering solutions in coastal communities or communities by rivers indeed where do they fit into into this plan and these costs so the the challenges that we face are a mosaic yeah climate change is a is a risk multiplier and it will reflect different parts of our country in different ways we've looked specifically at the open erodible coast because that's the thing we can model most readily with the science that we have available to us at the moment but there are other risks as you've alluded to so rainfall intensity for example river flooding these other pressures and other risks are also changing through time and the responsibility the organisation's local authorities have got to manage that that broader responsibility as we so I think I think we're moving in the right direction and I think there is there is certainly more that can be done we obviously some parts of our coastal system have benefited from coastal defences over the years for example scarabray we wouldn't have scarabray up in Orkney a world heritage site if we didn't have a sea wall and I think we're all richer as a result of that if we the problem would see walls is they actually tend to reflect wave energy and scour the beach in front of them and cause erosion to appear on adjacent areas so they need to be used proportionately and carefully in the appropriate places increasingly adaptive approaches there's a term called greening the grey where we try to use softer nature based solutions alongside traditional engineering methods it is an important thing and we've realised that through our collaboration with international researchers so there'll be a composite approach depending upon the local circumstances in some places we may need higher sea walls with bigger foundations but we would need to use that sparingly in other places it's going to be more effective for us to adapt and avoid and to pick our fights and in some places we can buy some time by investing in nature and making our natural systems more resilient absorb wave energy further away stop flooding from penetrating quite so far into our areas these buy time but arguably when we think about sustainability in the future we want to be inherently sustainable inherently resilient and understanding how the landscape and our use of the landscape changes with time that's the key to that we don't want large repair bills going forward and and nature based solutions are one tool in flexibly responding to that as we learn and do adapt to our future climate thank you thank you just very finally i'm aware that some local authorities as the responsible authority for the development of shoreline management plan and so on my local authority in Dumfries and Galloway set out in a consultation in march to look at the challenges and to set out a list of policy options going forward is that something that you're involved in and is there a national framework if you like for for policy options and funding of you know pinch points critical interventions that are required yeah thank you to me this so i think what you're relating to is the shoreline management plan which Dumfries and Galloway were developing and consulting on shoreline management plans take the coastal change information which we have developed and we've done the first part for them in essence which saves everyone a little bit of money which is good and they're then basically developed local policy aspirations for different stretches of the coast we have something important here we need to hold on to it we can't adapt we'll maintain a sea wall in other locations we'll have a a non-intervention approach for example so shoreline management plans have been used in different parts of Scotland we don't have full coverage and that's a a policy gap however there are improvements that are being realised through discussions and cross-organisational discussions at the moment about how we can improve that going forward and again i'd note the funding the £12 million worth of funding from the Scottish Government which is setting out exploring how we can do that most appropriately it's a really important part of our resilience plan going forward is how to get this how to get the evidence forward and then really take on board the local circumstances in the communities on how to keep and how to maintain that resilience that protection from flooding that protection from erosion by being smarter by picking our funds thank you very much and that brings us to the end of this session and can i once again thank you all for for setting time aside in your diaries given the delay last week it's very much appreciated and we appreciate your your your very useful evidence thank you very much we'll now suspend briefly until 10 40 to allow for a change over in witnesses thank you welcome back everyone and i welcome to our meeting our second panel who will discuss the role of the scottish public agencies on nature and environment and i welcome to the meeting terrio hern the chief executive of the scottish environment protection agency grant moir the chief executive officer for the cairngorms national park authority graham melville the area manager for northern aisles and north highland nature scott david sigornu the chief executive of scottish forestry and andy wells investment and sales program director for crown estate scotland and i invite terrio hern to make a brief opening statement followed by grant graham and drs sigornu and then finally andy wells and thanks convener and thanks also for noting i have to leave early for an nhs appointment apologies to the committee for that because the most important thing from seeper's point of view in our contribution is a fundamental change in the way we're regulating so if you think of what EPAs around the world have done in their first 20 or 30 years it's the right thing which is what i would call a mass transaction approach so we go to lots of factories and other businesses and get them to improve their environmental performance get them to reduce phosphorus discharges to a river or a lock for example that is still a fair bit of what we'll do but if you think of how we can play a role in the next phase to improve the environment in general in scotland but in particular in terms of rural sectors and communities it's to take a more systems approach so if i just give an example to explain that we regulate the whisky sector we regulate the barley growers now in the first phase we would do that pretty separately we would just go to a distillery and make sure it met its license obligations and we have general requirements for barley growers and we do some farm inspections etc actually rural communities face the challenges of climate change so for example water scarcity which is becoming a more regular and prominent prominent challenge for rural communities and those sectors in particular that are water dependent how do we take a more systemic approach to sit down with the whisky industry the barley growers etc and say how can we help you in your value chain and supply chain reduce water use because that will both help protect the environment and help reduce their risk economic risk from water scarcity so we've taken a new approach in having sector plans for 34 sectors we regulate where we can actually say what's the challenge in this part of scotland or what's the challenge for this sector and rather than just simply taking an individual side-by-side approach saying there are systemic challenges in this rural part of Scotland we regulate let's say eight of the sectors here how do we take an approach to help them come up with systemic solutions to systemic problems if I just give one other quick example convener we also have a sustainable growth agreement which is our sort of blue chip voluntary agreement with Nestle down in the borders area and what that does is Nestle want to reduce environmental impact in their supply chain so they're working with dairy farmers for example in that area just to help them reduce their environmental impact so you're getting the benefit of rather than you know in the worst case a regulator well beating people up and we need to do that people are really doing the wrong thing and refuse help but actually what you've got is the regulator sitting down with the big company that the farmers sell their produce to saying how do we work together with the local authority with other environmental experts help these farms remain viable and reduce climate change risk and other types of environmental risks so those two examples are trying to illustrate that in rural communities if we can take a more systemic approach and a more partnership approach yes we will still regulate if people will still will the stick if people need the stick but if we can make the bulk of our effort helping people in rural communities work out what the systemic challenges are and work in partnership on systemic solutions we think we can make a stronger contribution thank you very much terry and i'll move on to grant morning everyone and yes so just to follow from terry so the work of climate and nature really at the core of the work that the national park authority does within the park we have a new national park partnership plan that's out for consultation at the moment which covers nature people in place and that closes on the 17 of december and that sets out long-term targets for the park and going out towards 2045 in terms of the underpinning for that there are two things we're doing at the moment i think will help us to do that so one is we've undertaken a carbon audit for the whole the national park which will give us a benchmark as to where we are and where the key things are first to focus on around emissions and the other thing is the caring arms nature index work which we're doing which will give us ecosystem health in the caring arms and will give us a good benchmark as well and that's important because we need to know where we are and we need to know where we have to focus on the key things going forward to deal with these things within the national park and then around that is a whole programme of work that allows us to actually do work on the ground to deliver so things like peatland restoration, woodland expansion, river restoration and all the things that we do around that within the caring arms nature partnership which i think in partnership is one of the key things around this which is working with a lot of different partners to try and make these things happen on the ground whether it's things like these caring arms moorland partnership whether it's caring arms connect whether it's projects like rare invertebrates in the caring arms or rare plants or the capper project these are all delivering on that bigger wider caring arms nature partnership behind that and one of the key things for us over the next few years is we've recently been successful in getting the heritage horizons funding from national luxury heritage fund which is for caring arms 2030 and that's a 40 million pound programme over the next seven years which is looking at how we do the work around climate and nature and also things like public health and how we take people with us on that and how the climate impacts on communities and such like so there's a whole focus on people and ultimately we've got to take people with us in this journey and it's we know that we've got to do things at a bigger scale and at a faster pace but we've also got you know we've got to take people who live within the park so there's 18 000 people live within the park but also we know we get 2.1 million visitors each year so how do we how do we involve those as well how do they get to the park how do they transport around the park all these sorts of things as well are key for us so i think there's lots of opportunities within the park to try new things and that's some of the some of the work we're doing on things like the regional land use partnerships and how we actually make that work heritage horizons side of things i think again is about trying new things and then taking that forward on things like private finance and i think that the whole opportunity for us is to use the park and the park plan to really generate involvement by people in delivering on both nature and climate which is at the heart of all the all the work that we do across all our work and we'll now move to Graham Neville good morning convener and thank you for the invitation to give evidence can check you can hear me okay yep thank you um as i said i'm Graham Neville the area manager for Northern Ireland and North Highlands in nature scot and i must pass on the apologies of Francesca Bezosca our chief exec who is unable to join today because the board was meeting with our minister and the slater is wanting so apologies for that our duty as a public body of non-departmental public body is to advise government and deliver the benefits of nature protection and restoration we recognise that Scotland's nature is in a highly damaged state with critical losses still being experienced over relatively short timescales and we recognise that this continued degradation is a significant challenge to achieving climate stability so we think that the link between the nature crisis and the climate emergency is so strong it makes no sense to tackle both separately we know that if we restore the natural world it can contribute as much as 30 percent of the carbon emissions reductions required to help us hit net zero by 2045 excuse me transformation of our use of land and sea is one of the most significant ways we can address nature and climate emergency and rural scotland and the islands including a marine and coastal habitats as we heard earlier in the panel have a particularly important role to play but for our rural communities our farmers crofters fishers investment in nature also means opportunities for green jobs new businesses this includes the tree planting restoring peatlands natural flood defence projects and greening settlements these sorts of nature-based solutions reduce our emissions and restore nature but they do provide significant employment opportunities currently there's about 200 000 jobs in the nature-based sector that's about equivalency numbers employed in the oil and gas sector most of these are in rural and island communities the anticipated growth in jobs required in order to implement nature-based solutions to the climate emergency will provide a strong basis for green recovery and spread across scotland's remote and rural communities can really help us meet the needs of a just transition we do realise that one of the drivers of bad diversity loss is an overall approach to the economy we see nature as something outside of the economy but as in reality our economic well-being sits within nature Scotland will only be a prosperous nation if it's sustainable in the widest sense the bias year underpinning economy in society has referenced in the recent treasury report on the economics of biodiversity by professor of tascuta achieving such true sustainability will help us navigate a just transition to net zero nation one which helps us limit global heating to 1.5 degrees and allows us to adapt to the impacts of this level of warming which are already built into the system making us more resilient to those changes that are now unavoidable when nature scot we are working on our priorities for what we can do in the most impactful way over the next corporate plan page for nature scot but towards the 2030 horizon to restore biodiversity building climate resilience and one of the ways we directly do that is by working with the rural sectors and economies spread across rural scotlands in the islands thank you thank you very much and we'll now move on to dr David Suniorini please thanks very much convener and thanks for the opportunity to be here today to talk about the climate and nature emergencies and what Scottish forestry is doing to tackle them I should explain that since it was fully devolved and created in 2019 Scottish forestry has been an executive agency of the Scottish government with close working relationships to key policy areas such as biodiversity agriculture and climate change and and these relationships are really helping us to coordinate and prioritise our own work as as coq 26 highlighted protecting restoring and expanding forests is is absolutely vital to tackling the twin crises and that actually needs to take place both globally for example through the Glasgow declaration on forests and locally here in Scotland as the committee know we have very ambitious woodland creation targets rising over the next few years to 18 000 hectares per year and we also have a statutory commitment in the 2018 act to promote sustainable forest management based upon internationally recognised principles and applying to all forests of woodlands old and new Scotland's forestry strategy is a 10-year framework setting out how we will achieve that and ensuring that all of our forests the existing ones and the new ones we're creating right now deliver environmental economic and social benefits our forests of woodlands cover nearly a fifth of Scotland's land they're home to some of our most iconic animal and plant species and they contain within them internationally important habitats such as the Atlantic rainforest the sequester over six million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and they support around 25 000 jobs across scotland many of them in in rural communities and last but absolutely not least they provide fantastic green spaces for people to visit and explore where they can enjoy nature meet friends and look after their physical and mental health so it's Scottish forestry we're working to create more forests to create better forests and to get more value of all kinds from those forests that's what we're doing to help tackle the climate and nature emergencies and I look forward to talking more about that over the next hour or so thank you thank you and finally Andy Wells thank you convener and good morning committee thank you for this opportunity to again share with you the role of Crown Estates Scotland in tackling these twin emergencies. Crown Estates Scotland as many of you know our core purpose is investing in property and natural resources and people to generate lasting value for Scotland. As an organisation Crown Estates Scotland manages the Scottish Crown estate which includes a range of different assets events in Britain to Scotland including obviously management of the seabed out to 12 nautical miles, fish farming agreements, cables and pipeline agreements etc, the foreshore as well as included in that with agreements for moorings and activities in ports and harbours, the rights offshore energy which is obviously a key area in this whole approach to Scotland's ambitions towards net zero of course we play a major role in in all of that and carbon storage potentially out to 200 nautical miles. Also the rural estate is quite key in relation to our activities in relation to rural land management forestry and other activities agricultural tenancies are a key part of our management including rights to wild salmon fishing and trout as well. A key element of our roles in relation to the management of the Scottish Crown estate are as our investor and enabler and an asset manager and a co-ordinator and this is quite key because we don't manage land directly and we're certainly looking at how we can use those roles more effectively in our activities and our business relationships with our tenants and how we can invest, how we can enable change within our tenants businesses and how we can manage our agreements with those tenants in order to facilitate change. Within our corporate plan we have key strategic objectives to promote new sustainable ways of using natural resources and this has a particular emphasis on the climate and nature emergency but also how to involve people particularly communities in how land, coastline and seabed are managed. It is about those enabling roles that we have particularly when it comes to working with our tenants and as Grant mentioned partnerships are key to the work that we do as well, working with other public agencies working with our tenants particularly but also communities and third sector bodies and this is where we're really focusing our activity in relation to how we address these two key issues. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're now going to move on to questions from members and we've got approximately 80 minutes for that. I'm going to kick off. Can I ask you how your role has changed as awareness of climate and nature emergency issues has increased and what changes have you seen to your organisations in recent years to enhance your responses to those challenges and are there any barriers to making those changes and can I start with Terri Ahern please? The two main changes I've seen are a significant increase in general understanding of the climate and nature crisis. Five years ago if we would have talked to any business or any community of course there would be a level of understanding but it's massively increased and people see it as a core issue. It's no longer a sideline issue, it's a mainstream issue. That's the first thing. What that means is I think for an organisation like SIPA we have to adjust because again I keep talking about these two phases of an EPA's history. In the first phase we would mainly deal with environmental managers at a business. In the second phase if you're talking about corporate entities, we're in boardrooms, executive rooms, if you're talking about farming communities, the NFUS will have serious discussions about those types of issues so we have to adjust as an organisation who as I said earlier being systemic in our approach. No one can decarbonise or tackle the nature crisis on their own so if you think of decarbonising any community whether it's rural or urban can do a certain amount I mean you can just use less energy in your home or in your on your farm or in your business but unless you've got people providing renewable energy you'll only make a certain difference unless a regulator is prepared to say okay you're trying to innovate that's what we're increasingly finding that people in communities are trying to innovate to tackle the combined climate and nature crises. We have to adjust because what a regulator tends to do is stay here are the rules, stick to them and mitigate risk while the biggest risk is not having a go at big change and innovation so if we go to any community and say these crises are huge these combined crises you get it now you want to innovate and try something different on a farm or in a local town and we say oh no no that's too risky that might not work well that's not going to help people in Scotland so what we need to do is not be cavalier when you know there are laws that people need to stick to but we need to I guess have more of a risk appetite in saying let's get communities and businesses together and say right what are the innovations that will turn around the decline of species and habitat that will help us decarbonise and work our ways to support that innovation with the right you know safety net mitigation around it I think that's moving from the changes we're seeing to I wouldn't describe it necessarily as a barrier oh we will become a barrier unless we can rise to that challenge and Graham Nelville please like Terry we have also really seen a huge increase in the awareness and understanding of of the issue but particularly from our perspective the role of nature in being a solution to a climate emergency in the run-up to and of course during post during COP26 the focus on nature-based solutions and just the the hits in terms of our awareness of the role of nature in providing a solution to carbon mitigation to sequestration and also providing those biodiversity benefits has really really increased and these conversations that we are having across Scotland and internationally to look at how we can provide a significant part of the answer to Scotland's journey to net zero is very encouraging I think there are some issues around the scope of collaboration as Terry was saying you know we must have larger bigger projects with more communities and more stakeholders through multi-stakeholder partnerships at a landscape scale for example being a really key way of actually achieving significant increase from the 3% climate emissions reductions that we've managed to achieve in the more traditional route to date to the 9% that we're going to need moving forward and I think that that does reflect the change in the scale of work that we need to be looking at. Thank you and finally on this Dr David Cinerine please. Yes I think I would make two points on that question convener I think that the increasing public awareness of the of the crises in the emergencies that has clearly led to an increase in interest in tree planting I think what we're seeing is trying to take that conversation and that those good intentions further and say tree planting is is a positive thing but it really needs to be about woodland creation and the right tree in the right place for the right reasons so there's a huge public support and public awareness of the benefits of tree planting and I think we're trying to take that forward into into woodland creation and the longer term development and management of those developments. The second point I would make is that one of the big changes I see in the forestry is other structural changes from the completion of devolution of forestry and the creation of Scottish Forestry and Agency and Forest and Land Scotland and the 2018 act giving the Scottish Parliament a chance to influence how forestry is regulated and managed in Scotland and to integrate that more closely with the other regulatory agencies like Taper and Nature Scotland. Okay thank you I'm just I'm going to move on to a question from Mercedes just before we do where how do you get the balance because when we're looking at most people except that increase in forestation is going to help us get to net zero but where do we find the balance between potentially a monoculture of sick spruce and the right tree in the right place what works being done to ensure that actually is just not a phrase that people like to throw about that we are actually seeing the best tree for carbon sequestration we're seeing the best tree for biodiversity and we're not just looking at commercial arguments for planting as many sick spruce as possible. Can I first go to David and then to I'm sorry I can't read the names Graham please. Yes I think I'm I'm can you Yes go ahead. Yeah I mean I would I would say that that characterisation is is perhaps is how forestry was and how the how forestry was done in the 80s and 90s for at least the last 10 years we've had the UK forestry standard in place and that sets out the requirements for woodland creation. Productive forests will have a majority of productive species like sick spruce but they are limited to a maximum of 75% of one species they are required to take into account a whole range of other outcomes such as biodiversity, public access, climate change. So the modern forests that are being designed and planted now should be they are not they are not monocultures and I think they may be primarily for productive timber they may be for more native more native planting for greater levels of biodiversity but you're absolutely right we are constantly thinking about the balance between the economic environmental and the social outcomes of all the applications that come to us. Thank you and Graham just commenting on that do you think the balance is right with the UK forestry plan and Scottish forestry ambitions? Do they conflict with your main objective to protect biodiversity? Are they getting it right? I don't think there's a conflict at the policy level and there are very very few issues where we've had site issues. They are not normally resolvable through dialogue between Scottish forestry and ourselves at the local level and I think the outcome is always about the the best vision for a landscape or for a particular forest. The irony of me giving evidence is that I've spent much of the last couple of years of my career removing trees from the full country in order to enhance peatland restoration so perhaps not the best weapon to comment but there are absolutely good examples where we've moved from that monoculture you know sicker plantation to native woodland riparian planting which has biodiversity benefit has economic benefit and provides native based solutions for example even for for fishery industries for for trout fishing so I think that at the national scale you know the correct policies are in place and you know we do work closely with our Scottish forestry colleagues to to help implement them. Thank you now move on to questions from Mercedes. Thank you good morning to the panel on the theme of the role of public bodies in the climate tackling the climate and nature emergencies. I had a question for Terry so a coalition of wildlife campaigners previously highlighted there was a 40% reduction in funding for Scotland's public environmental bodies including CEPA from 2010 to 2019 so I was wondering how these cuts have impacted on CEPA's ability to respond to the climate and nature emergencies and what's been the impact of the cuts in terms of staffing and CEPA's ability to undertake investigations and enforcement of action. I've seen that submission and it's about overall funding to the public body should talk about in terms of CEPA I mean the funding we get is the funding we get the key thing we focused on is the business model change so this I'll keep coming back to operating in a phase one way to a phase two way so for example rather than doing lots of inspections of small operators if you do a number of inspections get enforcement results and publicize them widely through the sector you're likely to get a more significant increase in compliance than you might with the previous approach so I guess what we're doing in the way we're operating is we are setting out to use a different way of working which for whatever resources we get we're able to do our job in terms of compliance and enforcement now for the first time ever we've set up a dedicated enforcement team so what we've previously had was I guess jacks of all trade so people would write a licence people would do the inspections people would do the enforcement now that still exists to some extent but even with fewer resources you can get better returns if you have dedicated specialists so what would happen would be for example someone might write a prosecution brief once in a three or four or five year period because that's our highest level of enforcement we now have a and they you know it would take them longer they might and get it right copfus might reject it because it's not quite good enough and that's to be expected when you have that sort of model now with the dedicated team as we saw last week with a very successful prosecution for waste transfers we actually with the resources we got we think we can be more effective on enforcement so the approach we're taking is with and I will always say whatever resources we get we will deploy for maximum benefit with the resources we've got we're confident we can do not just the same job we used to do but an even stronger and better job across the areas you're talking about everything from supporting innovation through to taking enforcement when we need to and we think that that that's a natural point in time it's not about resources we would make this change anyway so the focus of this is when you didn't have people thinking about the environment much when the only influence on them was what the regulator did then you had a certain approach and this phase one approach was the right approach for the time Scotland's environment is better than it would have been without that approach as are all other places that have had an EPA the right approach now when you're facing more systemic challenges and banks are requiring environmental conditions in loans to businesses we regulate etc is to say you don't just keep using the old approach which was high resource and effective for the time you say how do you redirect your resources in a way that suits the environment from one of a better word in which you're operating I'm going to move on to look at priorities and ongoing work programme and kick off with questions from arianne thank you convener and a good morning panel it's good to have you here giving evidence in the last panel witnesses made the point that there needs to be a joined up approach across all agencies to tackle climate mitigation adaptation and biodiversity simultaneously and terry you've been talking about how sepa is taking a more systems based approach but I'd like to ask the panel whether your organisations are endeavoring to work together in a joined up approach and if you are could you provide some examples and I'd also like to hear from you what the Parliament could do to help you support rural sectors to respond to the climate and nature emergencies so um maybe we'll start with um spoiled for choice here maybe start with grant because we haven't heard from you yet um yeah no thanks for that and I suppose the partnership working is at the core of what the kingdom's national party authority does so I mean I can give you a couple examples of we're working with organisations that are there on the call so for instance um we're working with crown estate Scotland um looking at the the future of the glen live at estate um which is crown estate land within the county of national park we're working with Murray council and Highlands and Islands enterprise uh county estate and ourselves at local community and other to start looking at um future long term um management of that estate um and how that works in terms of both climate nature economy planning the whole thing together so that's one example um a second example might be working with um we're very close with scotch forestry on woodland um creation in the national park and it sort of links back to some of the things that dave was just saying you know we've got a target in the draft park plan for 35 000 hectares of new woodland in the park by 2045 in the draft plan and that would take us from about 17 percent of tree covered about 23 percent of tree covered in the national park and at the moment we're doing about a thousand hectares of woodland um per annum within the park and we work very closely with um the team from scotch forestry to do that and we've got a woodland challenge fund scheme that we run which helps people to do some of the prep work and then obviously the the scotch forestry come in and and have their grants for we're taking forward the work on the ground so there's lots of examples i think of where the organizations are working together and the main thing for me within the park is that the park plan binds that all together so it binds together all the different aspects of trying to deal with with these issues from transport to planning to housing to public health through to some of the more nature-based solutions that we've been hearing about previously so it's that whole system approach and the park plan and having a document that actually sets out where we're going and how that all links together works very well and obviously all public bodies within the national park have to have regard to that plan so it's a key instrument for making sure that all that does fit and i think there's some really good examples of how those partnerships work within the park and for the future in terms of delivering as I said a greater pace and a greater scale in the future thank you for that that's really interesting is is there anyone else who'd like to talk about joined up approach across organizations um Andy Wells hello yes i can from kind of state's point of view i think i mentioned at the beginning partnership working is absolutely key to what we do as a range of examples we've also gradually building up our capacity within our team for partnership working we have partnership manager and recently employed new engagement managers working in highlands and islands but also in the Murray area Grant mentioned the work we're doing with the national park in relation to Glen Livitt in that particular location we've also got a number of other projects that we've worked on knowledge exchange partnerships with the modern research institute looking at particularly how we can build up understanding and awareness in our farming community and agricultural tenants in relation to livestock management disease control carbon mitigation etc which is again working directly with with private sector and linking research institutes we've done work previously on trialling the natural capital protocol in partnership with SIPA and NatureScot looking at how that protocol can be adapted to work at an estate and farm level and those trials are you know again informing how that whole approach to mitigating and adapting to the twin crises can be tackled at a business level within farm businesses in dairy and in livestock and in an arable farm we've trialled all three we've done work in relation to our new challenge funds which we are a capital investment funds again and we are an investment role looking particularly where we can make investment and working in partnership with projects around Scotland the the boat based tourism one that was launched earlier this year we've also launched a partnership fund which particularly is deliberately targeted at working directly with communities our tenants and other other bodies and then in the new year we'll be launching the innovation with natural resources capital funds so we have a lot of examples of where we're working directly in partnership with bodies around this table third sector bodies and communities thank you for that um does anyone else want to come in maybe in the interest of time kind of like highlights terry and then david is probably our best partnerships over in the leave and catchment where there are 16 signatories to a sustainable growth agreement public bodies nature scott scottish water scottish enterprise five council as well as private businesses angios et cetera your question about what could the parliament do to help and support that's our most promising partnership money's flowing in people are investing in regenerating that part of Scotland it's a harder way to work like it's riskier it's more challenging it's more difficult but therefore it's more rewarding for the community and i think if the parliament could support agencies in taking those risks to genuinely work in partnership not just have bits of paper that say we are but genuinely work in partnership with communities third sector businesses and each other that would be a big help thank you for that terry and david yes thanks i mean i would i would agree with whatever it is it's not possible for us to to work in isolation and it's absolutely essential that we work in partnership some examples i mean at a at a project level when there are new applications for a forestation or large-scale fellings then we do have a statutory there's a set of statutory consultees including nature scott scott environment scottland and seaper um so we we consult very formally on that and a kind of at a case level but we also convene a regular group at the as as grain described at the national policy level to talk about how not just the individual cases but how are we working in partnership more more generally um grant already talked about our work with the park um the one other example i would give is that is the Clyde climate forest which is the eight local authorities in the Glasgow city region and that's that's their initiative to um increase levels of recover in the urban environment and um forest cover more generally um and that's that's perhaps a slightly less traditional form of of collaboration but that that again is is another example of partnership working thank you for that it's good to hear that innovation is happening did the other person want to come in or okay um we have got another question you've got another question so thanks for that um so just um this is actually for um i think it's for terries for seep terries seeper yes uh so this is we'll just find it so this is um yeah so echoing the findings of the last session of the rural economy and connectivity committee and the eclair committee the government shared policy program states that the status quo of aquaculture regulation is not an option and includes a commitment to reform the regulatory and planning framework that starts with this independent review from professor griggs that we're waiting for the the first piece of that from him since seepers responsibilities include managing the environmental impact from fish farms i'd appreciate hearing about your engagement with the review whether you believe that it will catalyze the regulatory reform that is desperately needed and what else is or should be being done to minimize the impact on the environment from fish pollution and reduce the considerable animal welfare harms across the industry so over the last three or four years we've made a number of changes to the way we regulate the salmon industry so we've tightened clients requirements we've changed and increased monitoring requirements on the businesses themselves and modernised those they were best practice at the time but we're out of date we've changed the way we monitor and inspect so we've started an increase in unannounced inspections for example it's been challenging with Covid because making our boats over secure is even more difficult than making an office Covid secure but we've found ways to try and do that and we've done other things such as you know i keep talking about the change in the way we operate each fish farm will have what each fish company will fish farm company will have a number of fish farms and we still have individual site licenses but we've assigned a person to coordinate all our interactions with company by company that means if the companies want to say we want to close these three sites because they're in more sensitive waters and have one bigger site over here under our change arrangements we've got a i guess a more nimble way of working out how to facilitate that and see if it actually can be allowed we've also for the first time ever created multi stakeholder advisory committee i from what i understand is this hasn't happened in Scotland before so it's just on our responsibilities but we have the coastal communities network environment link the trade association for the fish farmers a couple of their companies the local authorities nature scott and others around a table i wouldn't say it's the easiest meeting i chair every quarter because the views are so disparate and polarized but it's actually trying to you know what the committee saw in its hearings was the very strong views of our fish farming from many parties so as a regulator we're saying well we regulate a couple of key things which you referred to in your question we will get these people around a table to give us advice on how we should be regulating our particular responsibility so trying to say to them instead of having a fight fish farm by fish farm come in talk to us have a lively discussion we'll try and work out what to do so coming out of that are things like can we with marine scottland and others develop a map for the west coast which says don't even think about fish farms here and here in these circumstances a fish farms more viable or a fish farms viable with this sort of technology etc and try and get everyone's input so you can get a more systemic approach i've met with professor griggs as part of his inquiry we are putting in a written submission i'm sorry had put in a written submission and we await to see what his outcome will be so obviously i don't you know i i met with him put my views about what we're doing what we thought could help and we've put in some written thoughts so i don't know what his report will find very much thank you convener thank you just before we move on just on that same talk about enforcement and whatever you know there's a suggestion that seep has gone a bit soft that you've lost your teeth we had issues with flaring at grain's mouth there there's you know there is an argument for carrot and stick but when we hear that the the leakage of sewage from scottland's water system has risen by 40 percent are you losing your stick and and and there's too much trying to work with companies and not enough enforcement as could that be a claim validly laid at your door terry for the first time ever we've got a dedicated enforcement unit we saw the value of that with a major prosecution result we stopped a company sending a polling waste to china we made the ships turn around and come back and we prosecuted them in court we are prosecuted we have referred axon mobile for prosecution we've required them spend 140 million pounds to stop the flaring they've already put in new elevated tips by the end of next year they will put in ground flare tips so for me the way you regulate properly is if people do the right thing want to innovate and improve the environment and their profitability and the value that they provide to the community the regulator should be supportive and helpful if people don't want to do the wrong thing then we should kick them and we should kick them hard and i want to kick them harder than we have in the past thank you that that's quite clear and we want questions from rachel and then caron thank you convener and it was on that point actually in a report to board members in febru mr hern you made the comment that there may be a risk of not protecting the scotland environment especially from key threats so i wondered what might be your revised overspend and timescale required to deal with the impact of the cyber attack particularly with regard to the environment so we are confident that what we've done since the cyber attack is to the highest priority work so it's been incredibly difficult i don't think you can understand what a cyber attacks like until you've been through one so incredibly challenging for our staff i would give them great credit as well as great credit to a number of organisations that have helped us including a lot of businesses we regulate who have been very good in helping us work at how to get them to comply so if you think about what we've done over this year we have never once failed to get a flood warning and alert out so that's quite critical because that's actually in the worst cases life and death we haven't failed in any case get the flood warnings and alerts out we've made over 5000 authorisation decisions for businesses now that's been difficult but actually it's improving the way we do that work because we found new and better ways to do it we identified not just from the cyber attack but during the pandemic obviously during the pandemic like most organisations we have to restrict people going out in the field now we don't have much restriction on fieldwork now as the evidence has come in that outdoor transmission of the the virus is not that high but what we did was we identified the highest priority uh risk sites to the environment or sorry the highest risk sites to the environment and prioritised attending those sites so i won't go into all the stats we've got on what we've done during this year but we're confident that we have addressed the highest priority environmental risks my aim is that by the end of the next financial year not only will we we be fully back up and running but actually we will be much more advanced we had about a four or five year reform programme so by the end of next financial year we will have fast-tracked that and put all the key elements in place now as we do that we are also delivering so i'm confident that there aren't risks out there to the environment now that we can't deal with we're still using some workarounds because we decided not to rebuild our old IT systems because we wanted to replace them anyway we didn't want the opportunity provided by cyber criminals to have to do it under this sort of pressure but we're building a completely new system and for example three of our mass transaction authorisations have now been made digital so instead of a whole lot of paper going back and forward there are three types of transactions which are at the leading edge of digital service provision what that does is we mean all those decisions get made quicker what are we doing with the same the safe staff time we can get out and deal with where we think the environmental risks are so we will for our business plan for next year we will lay out that progress that we'll make but again i want to assure the committee we're confident that the highest environmental risks we've found ways to deal with and we will continue to find improved ways of dealing with as we build to that new future can i just clarify you can receive verify and determine applications for many industrial pollution permits and and waste management yeah so initially that was difficult but there is um there's only one small category where we're still finding it a little bit challenging but we're just working with the operators um to do that on a case by case basis so yes for a number of months now we've been able to determine any application that comes in panel um are you confident that rural communities have a voice and are clear about the objectives and targets particularly in relation to climate change set by the Scottish government and delivered by yourselves as public agencies and what do you do to engage and consult with rural communities shall i start with uh dr sinuri yes thank you um i mean on the on the subject of consultation with rural communities when we do have uh applications for um for new forest to be created through the forestry grant scheme then one of the requirements of the of the UK forest and UK forestry standard is that the applicants have have done some community engagement in advance of that application coming through so there is there is a requirement and we will expect to see evidence of engagement with the the local community with the neighbouring landowners when the application comes in we have a a public register and the the application will be put on that public register for at least 28 days so that again the the local community and the interested stakeholders will have another chance to to feed in their their comments on on the particular application so it's it's almost a two-stage process for us there's a sort of less formal process of consultation through the UK forestry standard and then there is the the second formal aspect to it and i think that does give the the local communities an input and a voice on the individual schemes is it just to be clear is it about is it a bit like a planning process that local communities can feed back into you said there's a public register so i mean do you keep track of how many complaints there are so you know just scanning um the the feeling about forestry plantations at the moment i i noted that uh there was a resident from Loch Mabon had said that world life is being decimated because of commercial planting forestry is destroying upland ground you know there's quite a strong public feeling out there and i was wondering whether you were content with the engagement considering that there were headlines like that and i think there are there are examples of good public engagement and there are examples of of less good public engagement and we are we are always encouraging and reminding applicants of the of the benefits of of goods community engagement because in the in the pre-application phase when the when the new forests are being designed community engagement and and local conversations can really help improve the design as i said one of the one of the aspects of the of the standard is is based around public community and public access and we have examples of of schemes where during the design phase the local community has been involved and the less productive elements of the woodland have been essentially used as a as a to create a new community resource so i think i yes i think i come back to my point there are there are some good examples and there are some examples where perhaps the community engagement hasn't been as as good as it could be could i go to the crown estate now please andy wells please and you hear me now yes yes we can hear you okay um yes again uh collaboration and consultation with communities is key to a lot of our work and as i mentioned it's a key part of our corporate plan to engage communities and our tenants in decision making in relation to our activities. Just some examples um our corporate plan as he was still a relatively new body established in 2017 and that's Scottish Crown Estate Act when he came into force in 2019 so but our consultation on our first corporate plan was extensively consulted on included a lot of response from communities around around scotland who we deal with we directly engage with our agricultural tenants through a working group a representative group with elected representatives from those estates on from all our four rural estates we meet with them regularly and have a range of topics with which we discuss with them in relation to what's going on in terms of the rural estate management you may be aware some of you that we've piloted local management pilots with around scotland in advance of the implementation of the part of the act around transfer and delegation to look at local community and local authority involvement in management of Scottish Crown Estate and we've got a pilot agreement in place with a number of borders including Auckland Islands Council and the force district salmon fishery board we also have again to the regular consultation events when looking at things like long-term forest plans at Glendivit and the master planning project that Grant and I have mentioned will again involve a key element of community consultation looking at sort of ecological land use and built development master plan for the Glendivit estate so it's something that we you know are very focused on and certainly when it comes to things like our investment role and for the challenge funds we're looking at working closely in partnership with those communities that come forward with projects development trusts etc within that funding stream Steve Graham and Grant would like to come in in the back of that thank you very much I think the members question is a very good one because it cuts to the heart of the just transition and and the community involvement and engagement is absolutely key to that I think that NatureScot and predecessor organisations have a long history of transactional engagement and consultation particularly in our relationship to our statutory roles on designated sites protect areas through our species and habitat management schemes and joint delivery of the agri environment and climate scheme but what I think is quite an exciting opportunity and you know something that is we are seeing increasingly happen is that we must move into this sort of more co-creation of a vision for a landscape scale what does a landscape look like what does a net zero landscape look like what does a nature rich landscape look like how do we get towards that and we can only do that in full and true co-creation with stakeholders of communities you know in a true joined up fashion and it's interesting that these will not necessarily be the same groups or the same solutions in the same place there'll be spatial differences and that's already being borne out by some of the landscape scale pilots I mentioned the full country earlier there's the tweed forum there's there's a whole range of pilots and indeed Camber of Connect where you're a larger group of stakeholders can come together and set that vision and I think what's really important here is that the rural sector are absolutely key to that you know our farmers our crofters are the solution to the nature crisis and the climate crisis and so we can only achieve true sustainability and net zero by working with them co-creating and bringing with us thank you and Graham a big apparent grant sorry yeah I mean I was just gonna just add to that which I think there's something about consultation versus as well as dialogue type things that are happening I think that's probably that there is always going to be the formal consultation side of things so for instance we've got the national park planning for consultation at the moment and there's been over 700 responses to that so far which is great to see him and you know this past week I've been on online events with farmers in the park with businesses in the park with communities in the park we have regular residence meetings on visit management stuff within the park and actually one of the things that the pandemic's done strangely is because a lot of these things have gone online we're getting more people and more representation more easily than the old format of physical meetings and come to our village hall and and that's anything so actually there's quite a bit of increase in dialogue I think around that but I think the bit behind that is within the park we've been working with community development trusts across the park for the past 15 years they've all got community action plans we then work with them to try and make those things happen and we also support community development officers in the park through things like voluntary action banach stress pay or the tomtongl and livid development trust so there's not just I suppose the the dialogue is absolutely necessary but you then also need to have the infrastructure around it to actually make the things that people want to see happen start to happen there's no point talking to people and consulting people and then ignoring what they say so I think it's that it's that listening side of things it's about dialogue and it's more than just the sort of traditional consultation and if we're going to tackle some of these big issues that we have in front of us and we know we've got to do it quite quickly that whole thing about how do we take people with us is going to be absolutely critical and that means having lots and lots of conversations and dialogue to try and find the right way forward that means that we can we can do that together that's finished there Rachel thank you we'll now move on to Karen a few questions and I feel like a lot of them have been answered so I suppose I'd like to ask something a bit topical if I may and you know front and centre of my mind at the moment which is really affecting my constituency is Storm Arwin and really we've spoken quite a bit about collaborative working you know there's many issues affecting us here in Scotland and particularly in my constituency due to climate change and that is you know we have migrating cod I have our urban gulls issues and now we have this devastating storm that's happened and you know we're hearing that this kind of extreme weather will be happening more and more you know I as I was driving down here I saw the bear trees and a lot were on the roads and it was quite perilous actually and I was just wondering what had happened to all the birds you know along with all the devastating consequences for local residents so we have heard about collaborative working but where do you see yourselves having a role to play in this when we talk about resilience preparation and support you know across privates third sector and private businesses for example I mean what could that look like a good one for Graham to kick off thank you I think it's a very pertinent question given the the events of of the weekend but there's really a couple of things in that one is that yes absolutely we will unfortunately see more of these high magnitude storm events and therefore we need to be more resilient to that so the the sort of nature-based answer is that we need to build our ecosystems into more resilient places by doing that by restoring these ecosystems so that they can withstand and be more resilient to those high magnitude events but you're absolutely right that the human impact that comes along to and part of that is through adaptation planning we're seeing a number of of spatial adaptation plans coming through in Scotland now Glasgow Clyde River Valley it was the first adaptation plan we're aware of we're involved rather in starting to think of those in the headbodies we're doing the same in Orkney we're going to have to find a way that we can both be resilient to and mitigate those physical impacts of climate change but also adapt to them and I think one of the the outcomes from COP26 is encouraging in that you know the understanding about the nature-based solutions the fact that we have to do software engineering natural flood risk management so peatland restoration on the uplands more rai carion planting which slows down these big fast spating flood events and these all need need to be implemented I think the second challenge of that is actually how we fund it it's not going to be deliverable just through the existing nature scot budget what we must do is move to a model of blended public private finance to deliver nature-based solutions at scale and we've got a few pilot projects in some landscapes where you know we're looking and we're talking to investors around quite significant elements of your peatland restoration or your natural flood risk management and I think that's a key role that nature scot can play in the way of different landscapes and it does have to be driven by a risk assessment of what's actually going to be the impact that we can predict on each individual particular area and I think David would want to come in with a particularly the forestry aspect yes thank you yeah I mean it's a really important question because it it goes to something that we're thinking about very carefully in forestry which is a lot of the expansion and the drive towards more forestry is driven by climate change but we need to absolutely need to remember that the climate is changing and we need to think about what that means for Scotland's forests so yeah we're still assessing the full impact of the storm obviously the focus at the moment is on on people and property but it will have had an impact on on forests in in the northeast and in the borders and on other places and it's part of a broader conversation that we are leading and promoting within the forestry sector which is we're building we're designing and planting these new forests but we need to make sure that they're as resilient as they can be so what happens when it's drier than it has been in the past or it's wetter than it has been in the past or it's the climatic conditions are different so we're we're leading on behalf of the UK the a review of the UK forestry standard and one of the aspects of that is building in a greater consideration of forest resilience and what can we do at the design stage and the planning stage to to mitigate some of these risks thank you we will now move on to to questions from Jim sorry i thought other members of the panel were coming in there i want to just touch on the farming community and this will probably be to all four years actually um you will absolutely be aware of the the tensions that there are between forestry and farming because it's a constant that i get coming back to me is that it's either forestry or farming as opposed to forestry and farming so a lot of the questions that i'm that are put to me are the science behind carbon storage of forestry as opposed to naturally grazed land the buying power of the forestry is pushing up the price of hill land beyond its current levels which makes it absolutely unbiable for somebody who wants to buy a land to buy a land to farm it what work has been done to demonstrate by the forestry industry to really get to grips with that integration between farming and forestry so that the two things can work and cohabit is it true that forestry Scotland are enabling greenwashing in Scotland so we talk about private investors are they coming in and then we lose that natural capital in Scotland or the value of that natural capital and dave this is probably one just for you are you able to actually help farmers who want to plant things like orchards i know that it's out with the scope of the current forestry plan but is there a way of you being able to bring orchards in so that they're still growing trees but they still get a crop out of it and potentially graze it as well i know there's a lot in there but this is a constant theme that comes back to me in the farming community in which i live can i start with yourself david yeah absolutely i mean it's a constant conversation for me too and i have i was i was in a meeting with the nf us just yesterday talking about exactly this issue and i think what what we what we always stress is that farming and forestry absolutely can can work together we are doing a lot of pretty well received work with the farming community with rural communities about integrating trees on the land and you know that the the idea of shelter belts riparian woodland we have we have a growing demonstration network of farms that have converted perhaps some of their less productive land to forestry for benefits to livestock benefits to flood management benefits to the the longer term financial prospects of the of the business so the more than half the applications we receive for for woodland creation through the forestry grants scheme are from offer less than 20 hectares and they are predominantly smaller parts of existing farms and land based enterprises so we're doing a lot of i think we're doing it we're doing quite well to integrate farming and forestry the the issue about larger holdings and larger estate transfers that then become that then come forward for for a forestrysion that that is a that is a constant constant thing we're trying to quantify just how how larger the scale of that issue so the the Scottish Land Commission are doing some research which hopefully we're reporting in the new year about just the the volume of of those transactions because there are there tend to be a few quite high profiles to tell me ones but i just want to get a handle on the scale of of that of that transfer again i'll go back to our our our statistics about what the forestry grant scheme is actually doing three quarters of the land that has been a forested in the in the lifetime of the scheme over the last six seven years is according to the James Hutton classification it's it's 5.2 or worse so it's very much the rough grazing land and it's the poor equality upland grazing one of the one of the issues we're discussing with with the NFUS is how can we offer farmers who are maybe when they get to the point where they sell the full the whole the thinking about selling the whole enterprise can we offer them other options so that perhaps some of the land becomes a forested but the the better quality land remains remains in farming so i think we're looking at how we can just again it's an extension of that integrating trees on farms work is how can we give existing land managers and farmers more options or diversification more opportunities to benefit from from woodland creation themselves i think that before you come in there we've got the two witnesses that want to come in the back of that can i just pick up something david you talk about poor quality grazing and poor quality uplands is that in terms of agricultural production or is it in terms of carbon sequestration whatever because you quoted someone from the james hutten institute and and rob brooker at one of the evidence sessions we had before said there's a need for more online systems to gather data to find out all these things to better help farmers and i'm sure that will apply to foresters as well so when you talk about low quality is that just in terms of agricultural output or actually do you consider going forward now given the climate emergency the the best use of land in terms of carbon sequestration in the long term i mean i think the answer to that is very complicated and very long so the there is a i mean the science about carbon sequestration on different kinds of land and different uses of that land is it's constantly changing and improving i think i think what i think what my point was i'm just the james hutten classification is a broad classification of land across the whole of scotland and we can overlay that on on our forestry grant scheme to get an idea of of the kind of land but obviously on any particular scheme the these kind of broad classifications don't don't really answer the questions that you need to to answer and that's why we we do take things on a case by case basis thank you i'm going to bring grant in now to answer those questions and then bring Jim back in yeah no thanks i mean just a couple of things to add to that and i think it's one of the things that needs to be looked at is the the work around carbon around things like grassland management woodland management peatland restoration etc is changing and there's there's good there's good stuff coming through but there's always more we can learn about that but the one thing i'd say about the woodland side of things is is that integration between woodland and farming that we're not as good at in this country as i think we could be and there are good examples and if you look at europe there's lots of places where farming in woodland are very much integrated and places are much higher woodland cover than scotland has and i think one of the one of the things we've got to look at is also is we can't look at trees just from a carbon point of view and so if we're looking at woodlands it's got to be from there's a carbon element to that but there's also we heard earlier about flood management we heard earlier about some of the biodiversity benefits but we also shouldn't be looking at trying to plant up polyure's in by land so there's there's a there's a balance between these things and i think that some of the things we've got to look at is trying to get as good evidence out there as possible and to work out not not just say as was the right tree in the right place but actually make that happen around around how we do that and hopefully there'll be some of the stuff that we're doing that Ciaran Gormas can help the point towards that but the other bit to that is i think some of the changes in how we're doing rural payments in the future we need to think about how we get that integration between agriculture and woodland and more set out within those rural payments to make it easier for people to do that on on their land. Jim. Grant, I'd very much echo what I've just heard you saying there, it's got to be a far more integrated in the farming community have to be taken along with this project because there is there is undoubtedly real tensions at the moment and i keep getting articles sent to me about grazed land will sequestrate as much carbon as forestry trees will do more damage and it takes you 25 years to get that back etc etc but you're right there's far more to it than just the the carbon sequestration side of things but in terms of what you both of you have said gives me some comfort that you're actually going to start looking at this in a much more holistic way so that the farming community are part of this process as opposed to being forestry against farming but David I'm going to come back to you I asked you the question about are you able to allow farmers to plant things like orchards in their farms which are far more open and I know it doesn't isn't workable in the system that you have at the moment do you have the power to be able to integrate that type of planting on farms if we talk about regenerative farming one of the things that we're supposed to be doing is making sure we've got good woodland but you can't just put it aside and it's done if there's the opportunity to be able to graze in between it and get another crop off it surely that's got to be beneficial for a regenerative farming system yes yeah no sorry I forgot about the the question about orchards in what I said previously I mean you're right at the moment the we it's almost the what you describe as the the division between forestry and farming is is it's manifested in the forestry grant scheme and the agricultural support schemes and yes orchards fall into the middle of that traditional foresters will tell you that orchards are not forests and traditional farmers to tell you that orchards are not farms and I think that that's sort of back to where we started which is the there are opportunities around the the redesign and the kind of re re-biggeration of agricultural subsidies and the work that's going on to do that in we are we are part of that that broader policy development and that conversation though absolutely we have we are looking for opportunities and ways that the kind of it's it's less dense than a forest but it's still got trees on on the farmland those kind of those particular kinds of agroforestry looking how we can can support that so that so again there's this this integration and it's not seen as a a binary choice for landowners okay and one very last sorry David I'm giving you a grilling here how do you answer the the accusation that Scottish forestry is allowing private investors to greenwash their business when they're not actually changing their businesses that they run I think I think Scottish forestry is it's not it's not facilitating the the sale of of land for for a station we are we are offering support for people that want to increase forest cover on the land the we do also have the we are responsible for the woodland carbon code which is a a scheme that allows people to generate and then benefit from accredited carbon credits that's that's quite a regulated scheme it has a whole set of conditions and it has a whole set of regulatory activities associated with it we are we are consistent with the the Scottish Government's position which is offsetting and the use of carbon credits should only be part of a clear plan and a clear journey towards net zero so absolutely the carbon credits can be used but only as part of an overall decarbonisation plan thank you convener we are we'll be looking at funding in whatever a next week session so that some of these topics will certainly come up again. Graham Neville would like to come in and then Andy Wells thanks convener I was really just going to come back on the on the point of the agro forestry discussion point just to highlight the work that we've been doing in our natural capital pilot programme which is to test some of the solutions around you exactly as as Dave was saying you how you get farms to have some more woodlands, hedgerow expansion, silver arable systems, silver pastoral systems which allow you know there's new native woodland expansion but also it's a natural woodland creation so we're part of the as I think or Scottish Forestry the national test programme to be launched next year which I'll actually try and help farmers meet those choices on a farm by farm basis and with the with an understanding of the natural capital and the potential on their land what they can then do to improve the bad diversity outcomes on single farm single farm areas so I think there's a lot of hope for progress in that area it does involve gathering a lot better evidence which we're trying to do at the moment and delivering that knowledge to farmers and I think on the point around the carbon markets I think this is something that's you'll also be seeing in peatland areas but I think it's quite a fast-paced and quite a newly-merging area I think there is something in here around just ensuring that communities can continue to retain some of the benefits from that I think that's quite an important point you mentioned hedgerows there sorry again can I just quickly ask you you mentioned hedgerows there are you including hedgerows now as well in your your carbon audit of a farm and what the baseline of what a farm's carbon audit is that's included in what we're piloting outcomes based approach so this is a your farm based audit so I think hedgerows are included but I can confirm that with the committee in follow-up there okay thank you so of that and Alan Wells when you Andy Wells when you come in could you also cover your obviously crown estate has forestry and estates so you're a land manager can you pick up on some of Jim's points with that as well but in your contribution could you also touch on the foreshore we've heard about blue carbon and a lot of our evidence sessions in the last session we had the expert on foreshores and carbons blue carbon from wetlands and whatever didn't really think there was a role for crown estate can you comment on that please yes thank you thank you convener on the forestry just a couple of points to add to that discussion yeah I mean it's a very live issue and certainly as was being pointed out it's something that has come up very much in discussion with our tenant group particularly and I was going to focus particularly on the tenant sector in this respect and we have tenants coming forward with you know looking at extensive planting schemes we're looking at to diversify their activities but also on the other hand other tenants within the group that sort of again you know are concerned about the scale of change we already have very highly integrated forestry and farming landscapes particularly at Glenlivet because of the history there but there are all these issues that are you know certainly being played out but as an organisation in Crown Estate Scotland is keen to work with our tenants to facilitate new planting at different scales that could be small-scale hydros but also potentially larger scales but that has raised a number of issues particularly in relation to the how that can be done within the agricultural tendency and the sort of the legislative framework around that we've been working with a number of other bodies including STFA Woodland Trust Scottish Land Commission our lawyers and and you know to try and look at some of the barriers which are impacting on tenants wanting to plant trees we've got you know some solutions but you know there are difficulties associated with how that's treated within the agricultural lease particularly if it's a large-scale woodland and we haven't got all the answers to that yet but it's something that certainly we're working on and I'm looking particularly at collaborating with the Scottish Land Commission on one solution is potentially taking the land out of the lease and coming up with a separate contract with the tenant to allow them to plant woodlands which gets around some of the difficulties associated with how rent is calculated how liabilities for managing the woodland and how carbon payments maybe are accommodated and any way going valuations which is another issue within the lease which creates issues so there are a number of things there that are still sort of acting as a barrier to farmers who want to plant trees but also that whole question around the consultation and the engagement with others in relation to the scale of woodlands in particular locations. On the foreshore element I'm probably not the best person in the organisation to comment on that I mean I think I go back to our key role as an abler and an investor, an asset manager, the investment side of things, certainly we're making capital funds available for investment in land and property and activities which might facilitate carbon sequestration on the foreshore. The whole thing around seaweed again I'm not best to comment on that but there are others in the organisation and we can provide details about our approach to that element of carbon sequestration. We recognise obviously there's a lot of opportunity within the marine environment for sequestration and again other revenue funding that's going to support early stage projects or facilitation of research or whatever that Crown of States Scotland's provided in this space but I'm probably not the best person to answer that question and we refer to other colleagues and we can come back to committee on that point, that particular point. Thank you, that would be very much appreciated. We're now going to move on to the theme of data collection and monitoring questions from Jenny. Thank you convener and thank you panel. Two weeks ago we took evidence from some scientists about the climate and nature emergency and they raised a number of points in relation to gaps in data collection and suggested that perhaps land managers, farmers, crofters and fishers could provide this information and so I'd be interested to know what your bodies do with regards to I suppose local wisdom and evidence captured by people within the communities and also kind of moving on from a point that you made Graham about the blended public and private finance funding. Two of the scientists, Dr Tara Marshall for example, talked about when industries are decommissioning or changing things they capture a lot of data which perhaps could be used more widely and I just wonder if you have any thoughts on whether there is actually a need for this data to be accessed more widely to ensure that we all move forward with regards to the climate emergency and nature emergency. Two sides to the question, one about local gathering of data but also what happens by corporations. Grant, will I start with you? Yes, thanks for that. Data is going to be ever more crucial as we go forward with the next 10 years and it's certainly something that we're looking to try to make sure we've got the right baseline if you like to then be measuring things from where we are. I think that I mentioned earlier we're doing, we've just done the baseline on the carbon audit for the whole national park which will give us some really good where we are at the moment on that side but the one that's on a slightly longer timescale but we're kicking on with is the Keringorms nature index which I think could be really interesting. It's based on the Norwegian nature index and we've been working closely with people in Norway and it's in effect to give you an ecosystem health index for the national parks so things like looking at river systems or looking at woodland systems and saying well how healthy are these systems within the park what is it that we can then do to try and then increase their health and that means doing all the work that we need to do on the climate and the nature crisis side of things and then the other bit to that is that we have a lot of citizen science in the park and there's a lot of encouragement of citizen science in the Keringorms nature partnership and making sure that we get a lot of the data because a lot of the data that is collected on the park is done by volunteers a huge amount of that is done by volunteers and it's then entered into all the different data management things at a national level whether that be the national biodiversity network or things like the northeast biological recordings kind of things and then we know also that there's information that's collected by land managers et cetera and we use that in good conversations with them around some of the work we do on Moorland and things like that within the national park as well so I think that data is absolutely crucial to that. I'm probably less well placed to talk about the corporation side of things and I'll probably leave that to somebody else but all I would say is that we're becoming more and more data rich as in we know more and more and more but we also need to do more with that data to look at it and actually understand it and I think that's probably where we need to spend more of our time and to work collectively across the public sector because I suspect none of us are big enough to do it individually and actually how we all work together collectively to look at that data and then to work out what it's telling us to then actually make the right decisions is one of the key things that we need to do as a partnership of public bodies and wider into the NGOs and other sets of things. Thanks Grant, interestingly you mentioned Norway and I would automatically ask as well what are you learning from the national parks in America as well because I think you met them with them at COP26. Yeah I mean it was actually a really interesting discussion with the American national parks around they were really interesting the carbon audit work we're doing so we're following that up to have a conversation around the carbon side of things because while you know national parks are different in different parts of the world it's incredible how many are the similar issues that we're facing whether that be extreme weather conditions, droughts or whether that be lack of snow and used to be so and yes we're doing some follow-up work with the American national parks and we'll hope that that will will bear fruit but I should say that that carbon audit work that we're doing in the Cairn Gorms is also part of carbon audit work that we're doing with all 15 UK national parks so all the national parks in UK are following that forward so Lake District already done it we've just got ours Lachlomand I think we'll be getting their one done early next year so I believe it's surely all the national parks so we'll be able to look across the national park family in the UK as well. Great thank you David do you want to could you answer my initial questions? Yes absolutely I mean I think I would say that the use of data and data in forestry is I mean it has great potential we have we have a certain amount of what you might call aggregate data about the volume the areas the volume of timber that's harvested but there's I think there's a lot of untapped information and I was interested in the the background paper about how how that can be used. I mean I think from a local perspective again when a new afforestation scheme comes through then there will quite often be habitat surveys breeding bird surveys ecological surveys archaeological surveys now they tend to exist in terms of kind of hard copy reports or electronic copy reports but I feel there's a lot of data in there so there's there's potential to exploit that a bit more. I mean on the citizen science that Grant has just mentioned tree health and pest and diseases are one of the issues one of our kind of key risks we have our own surveillance programme but we also have a publicly available system called tree alert so if people see something that they think is a pest or a disease or some kind of damage to trees they can they can use that and then we can we can follow it up at the at the very opposite end of the scale to the local data we have we have satellite information one of the things we're doing this week is is we have we're using satellite data to detect pelling on a kind of six monthly basis because you can see the height differential when the satellite goes over we're just exploring what we can do this weekend next week to see if we can use that to quantify the damage because that's obviously a lot that's a lot quicker and it's to be honest a lot safer than sending people out into into the forest right now but yeah again there's a lot of potential and it's just it's finding the the best projects to take forward great thank you David Graham if you could comment if you can about accessing data from other organisations and businesses yes thank you it's an important question i think in nature scot we have usually with exception of rare evolvable species we've made our data available through a variety of sources and one of the key ones is the scotland environment web which is a publicly available land and data source we've got data sharing agreements with obviously scotland government for their rural payments and services system and farm data systems we've got other data sharing agreements so i think we're coming at it for a position of you're being able to and being quite proactive in sharing our data i think the point is an important one though around that sort of the decommissioning or the or the data that's that's collected during the course of a project and i think we would agree that the default position should be that the data should be made available you know we could do that through a condition on any project that or license that that is approved but there is a lot of data collected by private or academic sources that is not in public domain so i think yes there probably is some work to be done to try to improve that data knowledge but you know equally as colleagues have said we are quite data rich as it is and we are quite good at collecting that local level data as well as the the higher scale even through citizen science as as davis had just mentioned you know there's a huge amount of data collected by volunteers smartphone apps are brilliant these days for you know you go out on a walk with the kids and the dog and you see something you can record it spatially you know immediately and that's that's actually a very powerful tool for gathering that but we mustn't also forget the you know the sectors of businesses the people that are working in their own environment do have a considerable amount of that not local knowledge is it necessarily in our data set how do we access it i think that's a question as well that we need to address a bit more depth that that was really helpful graham and i think certainly i recognise that in my own community there's someone that we know that feeds in information about dead dead dolphins or porpoises on our beaches but it's knowing the person to go to so it's how you get that information captured andi have you got anything to add from the crown estate's perspective yes indeed obviously data is absolutely key to our asset management function and having the details of what we manage the agreements but also all the other data that we can gather that can help inform decision making is quite key to us we currently make data on our assets available on the crown estate's scotland website on a spatial basis it can be downloaded we contribute data on a regular basis to seepers aquaculture portal we've been supporting the dynamic coast project which we heard about earlier this morning to provide strategic evidence based on the on the coast of erosion again in relation to spatial data and we've almost completed work on an open data portal on our assets which can use technology to make sharing data much more streamlined so that's something that we're about to sort of launch and we make we benefit from free access to data from snh and marine scotland at a local level again an example of where we've worked within the community that glennivitt particularly you know we we partnered with made the park again and other organisations in the glennivitt landscape partnership and to that there was a you know data gathering exercise and a lot of local information held on wildlife data etc and you know we've run a project there for many years working with the local community to gather biodiversity data through a local wildlife recording group so it's something that again we're very keen to continue to work on and develop thank you very much thank you and finally we're going to move on to questions from arianne on the national planning framework for thank you convener yes so i'm very keen on the national planning framework for and i imagine that all of you have engaged with it being that your public bodies it's a crucial tool for achieving net zero in scotland and making sure we've got flourishing biodiversity we've heard about the land use pressures from your responses to jim and some of you have mentioned master plans land use plans and spatial mapping and given that the amount of land we have in scotland is finite there are great demands on it for housing forestry agriculture carbon sequestration renewables infrastructure and more and it seems that there's probably a need for an overarching land use plan for the whole of scotland which would enable us to use the land we have most efficiently and equitably so i'm wondering if there's any work like that taking place and if not do you think it would be a useful approach and if so how much more data and research would be required to develop something like this kind of coming back to the joined up approach that we talked about at the beginning so if anyone wanted to pick that up i'd appreciate it what are we quite like to do if you could all we'll give you all the opportunity but if you could keep your comments as brief as possible that would be really useful if we start with grant yeah i mean just very briefly i'd say that's what a national partnership plan is for the current government it tries to set out what the priorities are across a range of things to do with land communities transport etc it's also we're developing the regional land use framework as well within the park and obviously there's other people doing pilots on those at the moment as well so i'd point at that document and the draft that's out at the moment how to look at that in terms of that integration of all those things that obviously links very closely into the national planning framework because it's also the regional spatial strategy for the national park as well so i think there's actually some really good examples in the national parks of how spatial planning can be done and then how we can do that how we can do that on the ground but i'll leave it at that because time is tight thank you and Graham thank you i think there's a number of areas that we very much welcome in the npf and around the ambition and tent around the integration i think we would actually welcome a little bit more of a directive approach in the npf4 to ensure that the regional land use pilots and other regional spatial strategies are kind of more integrated and we can get a bit more direction for developers where they where it's appropriate to to develop a where where nature restoration would be the opportunity to best target it i think there's a number of landscape partnership pilots underway as i mentioned earlier that kind of bring all that in a more granular spatial way suitable to that landscape and i think that's where we would see the most return on investment to actually develop those and the vision for those areas that are quite a detailed way thank you and andy i'll try and be brief in fact i'm happy to be brief on this subject it's not something that i know great deal about in relation to our work but i mean obviously we've mentioned glenlyfit master planning that's key at a local level and and we hope that will be very much a you know a test for the regional land use partnership approach place making is key to crown estate scotland's approach in terms of built development we're working with around scotland the number of local authorities angus counseling development of the montrose area that we acquired we've got a arrangements with north ayrshire council to look at placemaking investment in that area and of course there's the national marine planner which we are a key player in relation to the whole offshore energy infrastructure development so it's a you know certainly something that our policy team are very closely involved in thank you very much and finally david thank you i'll be brief welcome npf4 i think it it helpfully sets out the protections and strengthens the protections on on woodlands the climate change targets are clear we have to increase woodland creation we have to have more woodlands two questions that therefore flow from that what kind of woodlands we have how do we balance timber biodiversity carbon and the second question is where do they go which we're we're about in the landscape and that has to be a broader conversation than the Scottish forestry can can have it has to be through the parks through the regional land use partnerships and through the local communities thank you very much and that brings this session to end can i just thank you all for for taking part today and providing us with some most valuable information i'm looking forward to catching up with you again over the session so thank you now move on to agenda item two UK subordinate legislation we today we're considering two notifications from the Scottish minister for consent to the following instruments the sea fisheries amendments etc number two regulations 2021 and the wine amendment regulations 2021 and i refer members to paper three and four and page 17 onwards in our paper pack under the protocol between the Scottish parliament and the Scottish government these consent notifications have been categorised as type one meaning the Scottish parliament's agreement is sought before the Scottish government gets consent to the UK government making secondary legislation and devolved competence considering the two notifications separately in relation to the sea fisheries SI notification do any members have any comments on the consent notification mercy days i had a couple of questions about it i don't know if it's something we can write to the minister about or how it works just that it said about the proposal increases the amount of seabass that can be landed as bycatch and i was just looking for a bit of clarification about why that would be expanded and then also about revoking a closed season for fishing sand eels i was had some questions about that if i refer you to paragraph 7 and 10 on page 22 there are some questions there that i was going to write to the the government seeking some clarification and i'll ensure those topics are are included in that letter for further further information is the committee content that the provision set out in the notification should be included in the proposed UK SI and that i write to the Scottish government for clarification on some information on paragraph 7 to 10 okay thank you in relation to the wine SI notification i wrote to the cabinet secretary asking for an amended notification as i felt the level of information included was not sufficient to inform the committee's consideration a response was received yesterday and members were sent a supplementary paper i am now content the information provided by the Scottish government is sufficient to inform parliamentary scrutiny does any member have any comments on the consent notification for the wine SI no is the committee content that the provision set out notification should be included in the proposed UK SI thank you i just want to put on record that um in the letter received from the cabinet secretary uh we understand that the the cabinet secretary has apologized that the full 28 days for parliamentary scrutiny scrutiny has not been provided and that the reason was confusion at official level about whether this SI met the criteria for a type 2 notification it's my intention to to write to the Scottish government to ask for a some level of guarantee that this sort of confusion won't happen again and that the committee won't be left with a little time to properly scrutinise any of these instruments that come forward in the future finally is the committee content to delegate authority to me to sign off a letter to the Scottish government informing it of our decisions today thank you very much and that concludes our business for today at next week's meeting we will take evidence as part of our climate and emergency nature emergencies session and consider subordinate to legislation thank you all and i'll close this meeting