 Good morning and welcome to the fifth meeting of 2016 of the environment climate change and land reform committee. The first item of business on the committee's agenda this morning is to consider—sorry, I should say we have apologies from our colleague Finlay Carson in the first instance. The first item of business on the committee's agenda this morning is to consider whether to take items 7, 8, 9 and 10 in private. Are we all agreed on that? We are all agreed on that. We now move to agenda item 2, Scotland's greenhouse gas emissions target. We will be taking evidence on the greenhouse gas emissions targets. We have been joined this morning by a panel of stakeholders and academics. Welcome everyone. We have Andy Kerr, the executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, University of Edinburgh. Robin Parker, Public Affairs Manager at WWF Scotland. Susan Rolf, Professor of the School of the Built Environment at Herriot-Watt University. Richard Dixon, the director of Friends of the Earth Scotland. Robin Matthews, Natural Assets Theme Leader and Climate Change Exchange Coordinator, James Hutton Institute. Tom Rye, director of TRI and Professor of Transport Policy, Transport Research Institute, Napier University. I want to encourage short, sharp questions this morning. If I could say to the panel, you don't have to answer every question or provide a response if you don't feel that you have something to contribute. That way we should make considerable progress on what is a very, very important subject. Kicking off for us this morning with the questions is Kate Forbes. Thanks for being here. This is a question, a more general question, which I would like to direct to each of you. Last week at the committee we heard evidence from Lord Debyn, chair of the Climate Change Committee, that Scotland is doing better than the rest of the UK. I would like to know what your views are on the role that specifically domestic policies have played in reducing Scotland's emissions compared to other factors such as warmer winters or a reduced share in EU ETS emissions. I think that the news that we are meeting our targets at least in 2014 is very good news. I think that there are a few caveats that I'll talk mostly about the agricultural land use sector rather than the other ones, as that's my immediate experience. I think that it's a question as to whether the policies have really had an effect as such. I think that there's been a small effect, but largely the contribution to the reduction from agricultural land use is due to factors that were happening anyway, mostly due to the reduction in livestock numbers over the last couple of decades or so and also reduction in fertiliser applications too. I think that those things were happening anyway, so one can argue that the policies really haven't had too much effect in that respect. However, I think that it's certainly good news. Those two things are things that we can focus on in the future and try to use them in such a way to carry on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the land use sector. Lord Dieben, in the report from the UK Committee on Climate Change, acknowledged that there had been some impact from domestic action. That's certainly true. The big drop that happened from 2013 to 2014 was clearly mostly to do with the European emissions trading scheme, which is how we account for the energy sector, so not really our energy sector but what's happening in Europe and what's happening in that trading scheme. There's some quite artificial things happening in that and also because of some warmer winters, which mean that people burn less fuel to keep their homes warm. The emissions trading scheme has some variable things going on at the moment. Some permits have been held back, which means that our figures look better. They may be released again in the future years, so actually the 2015 numbers, we might see an increase in Scotland's emissions actually because of things that are happening in the European emissions trading scheme and not really anything to do with anything that we've done. That's why most people are very supportive of the idea that in the new climate bill we'll have a new accounting system, which gives us full credit for actually the very good things that we've done in our energy sector because that is a sector that is very successful in terms of moving towards low carbon, in terms of the growth of renewables, good progress on increasing energy efficiency. Of course, we've closed both of our coal-fired power stations. Closing longanets will give us a reduction in real terms of about 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and in the current accounting system we won't actually see that in our figures, even though that's a very big step that Scotland has made. In the new system, if that's where we go, we'll see that coming through properly. In the energy sector, in the waste sector, those are both praised by the UK Committee on Climate Change as areas where Scotland really is doing useful things, but they point out agriculture buildings and transport as places where we need to do much more, particularly to meet future targets. I might finally say that in terms of the effort that I see going on in Scotland—I've been tracking climate targets in Scotland for more than 20 years, since Labour-Lib Dem Government first said that we might have a climate target right through to the current very detailed process that we have in the Climate Act. There is probably not another country in Europe where so many civil servants get together and clutch their heads about how they're going to reduce carbon. There is not such an engaging process of stakeholders, at least in previous years, and probably not such a comprehensive thing as the RPP reports. We are not delivering enough, but we have a good process that potentially does lead to good delivery. I think that there's cause for optimism that in this third RPP, which is going to be called the Climate Change Plan, we will see a credible plan to actually deliver on targets. The domestic sector is responsible for about 30 per cent of all the emissions from Scotland, I believe. Of those emissions, about 66 per cent goes in space heating, 16 per cent in water, 3 per cent in cooking and 15 per cent in lighting and appliances. Homes to Scotland are incredibly important because the citizens are important to their legislators. We have around about an average of 30 per cent fuel poverty in the households across Scotland. In some deprived areas, for instance, of Dundee, I should think in rural Lochaber too, the percentages are higher. Homes really matter. In terms of, I think, all the move to renewables from another 30 per cent more renewables in the last five, six years, has masked a significant problem in the domestic sector. We are controlled by legislation via Europe, and if you look at the legislation we have at hand to manage the domestic sector, you've got the European Building Directive, which is concentrated on certification to improve the stock incrementally. Every time a building is sold, you have to improve its performance and so on. We have the Energy Efficiency Directive, which is a framework of measures promoting energy efficiency, which technically has a connotation of machine performance. We have the Eco Design Directive, which mandates for the performance of things such as heat pumps and air conditioning to try to get incremental improvements in the efficiency. Then we have the Ozone Depletion Directive. Unfortunately, year on year, our buildings and our houses, even the modern ones, are becoming more challenging. The traditional Scottish house was fairly robust. It might have been very leaky, it might have been fairly solid and with cold bridges and so on, but the roofs didn't blow off. In terms of the domestic development of efficiency, in the last couple of decades, in the 1990s, we went to, if you've heard of passive house, you put more insulation around the building. It's rather simplistic. Insulation around a building, you stop the airflow through the windows and doors, so you stop the draughts, you get rid of cold bridging in the structures, you put in double glazing or better windows and then you put in a machine in the centre of it, and it's got all these stringent targets. That was, I think, 1990s thinking. Then we got more and more interested in the noughties in sustainability, so you got this move to better comfort, better indoor air quality and so on. Now we're beginning to realise that the next generation of housing, we've created problems because, for instance, in modern lightweight, cheap to build, timber, highly insulated, with very little air movement, you're getting very bad indoor air quality problems and big windows that you can't actually open bits of. The solution is a small machine. We're getting chronic problems now of overheating in Scotland and Tim Sharp at Glasgow has done a lot of work on that, which means that eventually we'll be moving more and more to air conditioning Scottish homes at a cost, but we know already that many people in Scotland can't afford to heat their homes in winter and won't be able to afford to cool their homes in summer. We have a real problem and I think we have to, when we have this thing about engaging process of stakeholders, when we develop our action plans after Sullivan, we engage stakeholders, who do we engage? Houses, Homes for Scotland, the Scottish Property Federation, Construction Scotland and, down the line, the building standards division. We engage those people who make profits by building lighter, cheaper housing for citizens with much higher profits. I think that if you really genuinely want to create a resilient and robust future for the domestic sector with actual genuine large emission reductions, you have to start naturally ventilating them again, opening the window, getting rid of those machines and you have to start running them on solar energy. We could reduce with a bit of storage and solar heart water, solar PV plus storage. We could reduce from that 30% of emissions. We could reduce them by 15% tomorrow. We could make significant reductions, but we're not going to do it by tinkering as the lobbyist-driven vested interests of Europe and elsewhere through the legislation process tinkering about getting one or two percent improvement in the heat pumps we put in buildings. There are two points that I want to make in answer to Kate Forbes' question. The first one is about what the CCC said about sectors. I think that it's a really important guide in terms of answering your question. As Richard said, the sectors in which we've done well are electricity and waste. Electricity is a sector that I'm more familiar with and you can trace quite directly what were the policies that have driven the excellent progress that Scotland has made in terms of deploying renewable electricity. Obviously, the decisions about the market and the support for the renewables industry has set the UK level, so there's the UK Government role there, but I think that everyone involved in the renewable electricity industry really recognises that the leadership that the Scottish Government showed in setting the 100% target set out a long term direction out to 2020 in terms of what was going to happen in the renewable electricity industry and that drove a lot of progress. That is why Scotland has done more on renewable electricity than other parts of the UK. On the flip side, if you look at the sectors where the CCC were very clear that we haven't done so well, they've talked about transport, heat, homes and the land use sectors. If you look to the transport sector, for example, if you look to the last climate action plan, there are no domestic policies in there. All the policies that are driving our transport emission changes were EU policies or policies at the UK level. There wasn't any Scottish level policy, so that goes some way to answering your question. The other thing that I wanted to highlight is that, if you look at how good our last climate action plan was, known formally as the RPP2, one of the criticisms that was strongly made of the RPP2 was that it was insufficiently transparent and insufficient in terms of what the monitoring and evaluation process was going to be. Unless you know a particular area very well, it's very hard to go back to the last climate action plan and work out what happened, did the things that the Government said were going to deliver emissions, did those things happen, did they deliver the emissions reductions that had been envisaged? I think that that's hugely important in terms of looking ahead to the new climate action plan that's going to come through. There are two clear things where we need to see an RPP deliver much better to the climate action plan, deliver much better, first of all, that transparency, that monitorability, if that's a word, and also then very clear steer from the climate change committee that we need to step up our actions in those sectors where we've done less well. To end on a good news note, and this is particularly important for all the politicians around the table, is that we had a survey out today that showed that increased action on climate change is something that's very popular with the public. There's only 10 per cent of the Scottish public in our survey saying that we shouldn't increase investment in tackling climate change. We should do more, but the good news is that it will be both popular but also bring lots of benefits in terms of improvements to the economy and the society. Very briefly from me, all sectors have some level of competency at the EU level, at the UK level and at the Scottish level, so it's often very difficult to tease out and say what is the bit that is only Scotland because some of it is enabling to support other parts of legislation that is coming through from the UK or EU level. I think that the point that was made last week by the committee on climate change that even with temporary adjustment and back loading we would still have met our target and to echo both Robin and Richard's point that we ought to congratulate ourselves when we have met targets. Clearly it's focused on two sectors and then the challenge I think for this committee going forward is how do we start to really focus on those other sectors where more can be done locally, transport, agriculture, domestic housing, as Sue has said, and energy efficiency more generally. Those are the issues, if you like, which is the forward look that the committee needs to focus on. I'll limit myself to transport. I'll concur with pretty much everything that's been said so far about transport. I don't think that Scotland is doing well in terms of transport and climate change. Two specific points, the Government's own carbon account, shows that the large new transport infrastructure investments that the Government is engaged or Transport Scotland are engaged with increase the amount of car travel and therefore increase distances and therefore increase climate emissions. I would also point to land use planning. The bulk of our land use planning decisions are leading to the creation of car dependent communities, which are also relatively far from where people want to go. That increases distances and increases the use of cars and therefore makes it more difficult to hit our climate change targets. I think that we can have more detailed discussions about that if members have other questions, but those are my two main points. Okay, that's great. That's going to set the scene. We want to move on and begin to focus on a specific area. Let's start with the energy sector, Claudia Beamish. There's already been this morning some focus on energy and Scotland's progress in cutting emissions from the energy sector to date. If there are further comments about that, those would be welcomed from any of the panel and also suggestions of areas or policies that could be prioritised to build on the progress in this sector. I'm happy to come in on that first. I think that the first thing to say is that it's only really in the electricity sector where we've made lots of progress and electricity only counts for about a quarter of our energy usage. Heat is half of our energy use and transport is a quarter of our energy use again. Even just within the energy sector, it's only quite a small part of our emissions where we've made good progress. I think that, again, echoing my earlier points, I think that we can learn a lot from what we did in electricity. We can transfer that leadership, that direction that we had in those sectors into the other sectors. Again, the target setting is important. That's driven a lot of the progress, a lot of the benefits that we've seen from the electricity sector. So, WWF is keen on the idea that the Scottish Government and their forthcoming energy strategy, which is producing alongside the climate action plan, that we set a target for our renewables usage in 2030. We think that the target for that that is consistent with our climate act is that we need to have half of all of our energy usage across all three of those areas, across electricity, heat and transport, and half of all that energy usage needs to come from renewables. Just if it's not putting people on overload, could I just ask a couple of supplementary questions that you might feel it's appropriate to answer at this stage, but we could come back to because they do fit into the whole picture of energy? Particularly in relation to the practicality of achieving the significant increase in the insulation rate of renewable energy schemes that is required to meet the 2020 renewables targets and also views on how progress can be made in district renewable heating. Lord Debb and last week said that, as we all know, this has been slow and that it wasn't necessarily the Scottish culture to be collective. He didn't put it quite like that, but I think that there is an issue around that perhaps. So, if within your remarks you feel able to address those issues as well, that would be helpful. I would just add only one more point on your question around the district heating and renewable heat side of things. There's a report from an expert group that looked at the role of regulation in district heating. It was an expert group set out by the Scottish Government to advise on them. WIF thinks that the next step in taking that forward is through the warm homes bill that's within the programme for government. We like to see that warm homes bill deliver the regulatory framework that's really very much needed to deliver the extra scale-up that's required in terms of the scale of the district heating schemes and renewable heat that we need in Scotland. We think that we need to get to about 40 per cent renewable heat by 2030 to be meeting our climate change targets. That's a very long way to go. Before I let Andy Kerr in, Jenny Gilruthmouth wants to come in now. Just as I supplemented what Claudia Beamish has mentioned, there is a debate, obviously, as to how best that will be achieved in terms of increasing how we deliver renewable heat. As Claudia Beamish said, the CC report notes the uptake has been slow and we're looking at how that can be developed in terms of stronger implementation. Does the panel have a view on how we increase that renewable heat in terms of, does it come from central government, local authorities, private industry? Is there a collective view on how best we achieve that? I know on my own constituency, for example, we've got the RWE plant in Markinch, the biomass plant, which was supported by £8 million of Scottish Government funding, but we also have the council involved in that process and a private company. I wonder if there's a collective view on how best that could be achieved. Andy Kerr. Okay, just to start, Claudia, with your question, what we have seen over the last probably 18 months or so since we've seen the renewable electricity subsidies come offline has been a genuine attempt to try and move away from just sowing turbines across the landscape and actually say how can we deliver affordable energy, clean energy at local scale within Scotland because we actually already are moving away from the old style of electricity system with big power stations and so on and so forth. There has been a lot of stakeholder engagement and a lot of exploring. One of the challenges that we have is that we've seen radical changes in technology costs, we've seen radical changes in energy markets and governance and also big changes in how people understand how people use energy within their homes and businesses. It is actually quite a challenging space to be operating in and obviously a Government doesn't want to be in a position to try and choose winners. So what we are seeing is an awful lot of demonstration projects at local energy, at local community level, local energy challenge fund, the Scottish energy efficiency programme pathfinder funds and so on and so forth and some of the cares funding which are about actually just trying things out and exploring what works and what doesn't. So I think that actually a lot of the knowledge behind that will start to come out in the consultation around the climate change plan, RPP3 and I think this is a really good way for Scotland to go because it actually sets us up to focus far more on people's needs rather than simply how many turbines we have but actually are we delivering affordable clean energy across the piece. It also actually provides an enormous export opportunity because lots of countries are trying and grappling with this problem and we actually have the skill sets in the private sector, the public sector, the academics to help deliver on that. So I think there is a real opportunity there. In terms of the heat thing specifically, we've already picked up the warm homes bill. I think the other one is the government committed to consulting on the minimum standards of energy performance of private sector housing is a really important element of that. And also I think more widely having the energy efficiency as a national infrastructure priority is absolutely key going forward because we ought to be committing public money but actually as a means to leverage private money to come back to your question, public sector governments cannot pay for this. This is going to be a huge programme of investment across the piece in every building in the country and that cannot be done by the public sector alone. That has to be how do we use smart ways of levering in, leveraging in private money and you might do that by helping to underwrite risks. You might do that by offering interest-free loans. You might do that and essentially crowd funding in private sector funds. There are actually some really interesting business models coming through which the Scottish Futures Trust and others have been developing to actually bring in private money into those spaces. I think that that is really where the focus of the attention needs to be going forward. On Claudia's two questions, on installation, as Andy has mentioned, it is great news that this is now a national infrastructure priority which focuses minds on long-term investment and a bigger scale of investment. My view is that we know what to do and we have been doing it for some years. We have some very good examples of schemes that really work to the right kind of measures at the right kind of scale in communities but we need to roll that out on a much bigger scale across Scotland. We know what to do and we just need to find the ways, as Andy suggests, to get private money in as well so that we can do it at the right scale. On district heating, there are some really interesting conversations going on. I was part of a conversation about district heating networks in central Glasgow, where we have universities talking to the council, talking to health providers about the heat that they produce and how they might be able to join that up. If you question them in detail, the answer is always, well, we might be building something with lots of heat but we cannot guarantee that customer will still be there at some point in the future. The problem is that there is no regulation in electricity of the heat market. That is an urgent priority to create a regulatory framework, which means that if you are a supplier of heat, you are able to guarantee that you will be able to sell that somehow and not rely on some company next door not going bust next week. That is so important that perhaps we should be thinking of putting that in the climate bill because that is one of our first opportunities to put in place a system that would make that work. That would really open the doors to delivering on all those interesting conversations. On Jenny's question about renewable heating, the Committee on Climate Change is keen on the idea of air-sauce heat pumps for people's domestic properties. There are a number of ways that you might encourage that. For new build, we could simply rewrite planning building regulations to mean that new build has to go in that direction in almost all cases. We have, of course, had boiler scrapages schemes in the past where people with a very old boiler are able to get a bit of a grant to replace it with something much more efficient. That was gas boilers, but we could be doing the same if you are replacing a gas boiler. We could be encouraging people with a bit of money to replace that with something that is renewable heat. There are regulatory routes and also incentive routes that would encourage and accelerate the transition to renewable heat from simply having a gas boiler. Of course, electric heating, as renewables build up and electricity is lower and lower, carbon content—electric heating—makes more and more sense as well. All those options need to be put together in the right kind of bundle to take us in that direction. Mark Ruskell will comment on that. On the back of that, I was interested to hear what Tom was saying earlier about the planning system and ensuring that we are designing low-carbon places. Does that feed in to the discussions around district heating as well, particularly if we are looking at providing certainty for private sector and public sector to meet opportunities going forward? How would you envisage that working within a warm homes bill? I will start off with Robin McHumann as well. One of the things that depresses me that I see is big developments going in, so you have got an empty site, big development goes in, they have got a boiler in to make their heat, they may even have a CHP to make some of their electricity, but it is not connected anywhere. That is the stage when you have got an empty site, that is the stage when you can link things up, when you have got a new housing estate being built, that is the cheap time to put pipes in to have district heating. If you want to do it as a retrofit, you have got major disturbance of people's lives, you are digging up roads that have been carefully laid and so that is much harder and much more expensive. It is almost a crime that we continue to build housing estates that do not have district heating built in from the start, because that is the cheap and easy time to do it. The planning system building regulations are absolutely key in helping us to do much more sensible things like that. Okay, sewer off and then Andy Kerr. I think that the theory in the practice here diverges, because if you take somebody who is building a new big housing scheme, for instance, out in the border somewhere, they cannot guarantee, and this is like remote transport communities, that they are going to put in 800 houses because they know they are going to make shed loads of money out of it. They cannot guarantee that once they have built the first 100, the second 100 will come and the third 100. Do you front-end load the cost of these schemes on those first 100 houses? No, they do not, because they could not sell the houses. In theory, it is a nice idea, but who is going to pay for it and how they are going to pay for it? Putting the actual systems at the cost of the Scottish voter, I do not necessarily think that it is a very good use of Scottish money. The other thing about technology tie-ins, air-source heat pumps, well, they technically work well with 1.4, 1.3 COPs. In practice, they can be terrible, and we have got lots and lots of failed heat pump systems, so to mandate that everybody has to have an air-source heat pump in, I think is possibly not doing many people a great deal of favour, but the other thing is that people, including myself, can actually build houses or design houses that do not need much heat anymore. That is the solution, and one of the ways of doing that is to incorporate within the buildings themselves, as we always used to say in the cavity wall, is actual thermal storage within the house itself. You put in a lining of concrete block walls, and that absorbs the heat during the day so that you can reuse it. With lightweight, highly insulated buildings, as soon as the door is open and the sun has gone down, there is no renewable heat left in the system, and yet we are 87, 88 per cent lightweight timber-framed buildings with no thermal storage within them. I think that you would be doing the actual citizens of Scotland more of a favour if you actually mandated for some thermal storage to provide some resilient heat over time than trying to force them to put in extremely expensive and often inefficient and expensive to run heat pump systems. However, my last point is that there is only one way of taking an individual person out of fuel poverty—this is across the board—and that is to put the solar panels on their own roof. That is why I think that the best thing that you can do is to do a huge surge towards installation of solar energy—10,000 solar panels that they were going to do in Glasgow housing sites. It is to take households at the same time as you are investing in distributed energy capacity, you are taking every one of those individual homes out of fuel poverty forever, and surely, if we can do both of those, we are meeting two targets that are difficult to achieve anyway. Do not we have to have a cultural change in the housing sector in terms of the developers who will always find a reason not to do things? That is the mindset, is not it? We need to get to the point where they understand the responsibilities here and contribute to what we are all trying to achieve. We need little, nudgey regulations, such as that all houses must have adequate natural ventilation opportunities because the lights will increasingly go out. We know that we live in an unstable energy system. They must have enough thermal mass capacity to stabilise internal temperatures, and they should avoid overheating due to simply the orientation that you have faced in your house west. In the past two weeks, I do not know how many of you have been severely uncomfortable in your own homes, simply by just correct orientation, so simple planning laws saying that they are optimising the solar benefits and negating the solar disbenefits of construction. It does not cost anything to change the orientation of a house. That is interesting. Andy Kerr. To mark in terms of what you might put in the warm homes bill, one of the key things to remember, of course, is that heat is inherently local. What works off-gas grid in the rural environment for 15 per cent of the homes and businesses across the country where they are often going to be using either oil or electricity for heating is going to be a very different solution to a suburban settlement or very different from the tenements in the centre of our cities. One or two of them might suit district heating. Suburban settlements do not, because the sheer capital cost of putting the pipes in does not pay back any time soon. It is making sure that there is very clear zoning that comes back to the planning system about where it is appropriate for heat regulations that Richard mentioned, heat laws, which say that if you are in this type of space then it is appropriate to do this, but also to be very aware that it is not a one-size-fits-all. I think that it is worth also just flagging. The big challenge for heat is that heat energy demand is something like four times as much heat energy demand in December as it is in June, so it is a much, much more variable seasonally and daily than electricity is. The issue is always if you are going to meet the maximum heat demand, you are going to have a lot of redundancy in the system because for a lot of the year it is not on. Again, in terms of affordability for businesses and for homes, a lot of the issue is not just can we generate more but can we actually make them more efficient in the first place so that you do not have this peaking demand, which then you can do it through business models, you can do it through national grid, you can do it through lots of different ways to try and get off this peaking demand level, but that is the big challenge that we face in heat. At UK level, there was a narrative for many years which said that all we need to do is electrify the whole system. They have come away from that fortunately now. The next big one that is coming through is, well, we will just stick hydrogen in the gas pipes. That might work, but understanding the costs behind it and the reason for doing that is that we have already got the pipes in the ground, so you do not then need to build a huge amount of infrastructure for houses. We do not really know what the costs of that are, but you will hear more and more people pushing that as the silver bullet and we just need to be aware that that is one option, but we have to be careful of understanding the wider costs and benefits. Okay, thank you. I have a lot of members who want to make a contribution and witnesses. Can I remind people that we have a lot of ground in the cover so that we keep the contributions short and sharp? Claudia Beamish. I would also like to seek the panel's views on whether they see that there is a role for fracking in Scotland as a bridging fuel and the compatibility of fracking with Scotland's greenhouse gas targets and whether there are any wider comments on the challenges of the energy shift from fossil fuels. Before we respond to that, can I also raise the issue of carbon capture and storage? Last week, Lord Daven made the point that the UK CCC had told the UK Parliament that CCS must be addressed urgently, so I would welcome your views on how pivotal CCS is. Who wants to go? Richard Dixon. On fracking, the UK Committee on Climate Change has done a report on the UK picture on the compatibility of fracking with climate targets. The industry said that it is okay as long as you regulate it nicely. The committee said that there are some very tough regulatory tests to meet, and then it might be okay. There are different views on the same report. The same committee is doing a report for Scotland on what it would mean for our climate targets, and our climate targets are much tighter, of course. If they said very cautiously, it might perhaps be okay for the UK, then it's quite hard to see how they're going to say it's going to be at all okay for Scotland, because every climate change emission that you produced from fracked gas, you would have to compensate for somewhere else in the Scottish economy, and that's pretty hard to do. Fracking itself, it's not clear that there's really ever going to be a viable industry, despite the claims of Ineos, who are terribly bullish, but Cordrilla, who's been doing this for a lot longer and who are accessing a much bigger potential resource in the north of England, have said that it would take them five years and 40 boreholes just to work out if there's a viable industry that's worth economically tapping into at all. If there's any, there may not be much, and it may be quite a long way away. At the same time in Scotland, we're rapidly becoming more energy-efficient and moving towards renewables. In terms of our electricity supply, we've closed down our coal-fired station, so the only fossil fuel station left is the Peterhead gas station, which is running on reduced capacity. We're doing very well at moving away from fossil fuels in the electricity sector, and that's the trend that we should continue, rather than go backwards and introduce some fracked gas, which we then have to build a new power station to burn. In terms of CCS, a few years ago, that looked like perhaps an attractive option. These days, again in the Scottish context, why would we want it because we would only need it if we were building new fossil fuel stations instead of continuing on the track for renewables? It might be an important technology in some other places, but even if you look at the places that we used to think it was going to be important, like China, China does burn lots of coal, but they're looking at how to reduce that. They're pulling down coal-fired power stations around Beijing. They're the biggest installer of solar and wind in the world, so they are moving away from the need for CCS. Although Scotland has lots of engineering expertise and access to the North Sea, which would be useful if CCS was a thing worth doing, it doesn't seem that it should be a thing worth doing. If we're going to spend research money on something in Scotland, we should be making wave power work, we should be floating offshore work for wind power, we shouldn't be spending it on CCS. Two quick points. First, on fracking, I think that the global message is very clear that we need to start leaving fossil fuels in the ground if we're going to tackle climate change. Scotland has always played a leadership role, and he's a way in which, building on all the points that Richard said, he's a way that we can play that leadership role. On CCS, WWF has always supported it, no harm in researching it. Our concern has often been that we're planning for it. Our current Scotland's current electricity generation policy statement assumes that we will have some new gas power plant fitted with CCS. Partly that's no longer a reflection of the kind of commercial realities. Partly it will result in the unfortunate decision to reduce, to remove that financial support for the research element, but always it was kind of why, when this may or may not come through to commercialisation, are we planning that this will be here. The good news on that is that WWF commissioned a piece of research a little while ago called Pathways to Power that looked at what kind of electricity system we could have in Scotland in 2030, and that showed that we could have an almost entirely renewable electricity system, it's like almost entirely kind of thing, and that would provide us both with safe and secure energy electricity system, but it would also maintain our exporting position, so we would continue to export to England and other parts of the Great Britain grid. I always find Richard Robbins' answers on fracking slightly disingenuous. 80 per cent of our homes use gas for heating and will do for the next 10, 20, 25 years. This week, the first big tank load of fracked gas is going to arrive in Scotland for INEOS. We are using it already, so the question is not should we use it or should we frack it, the question is will it still allow us to meet our climate targets, and they're kind of fuel neutral, they don't care what you do as long as you meet those carbon targets. So I'm actually pretty ambivalent about fracking as long as it is done in an environmentally sensitive way, and it's not clear, it can be, but if it can be then that's fine. The issue is more, can we ensure that we are delivering on the quality of the housing, the demand reduction from housing, can we improve the housing stock, et cetera, et cetera, so that actually gas is irrelevant whether it's fracked or not fracked in 25 years time? That's actually the heart of what we're trying to do on the climate target. It's always a slightly odd debate to say should you frack because of climate change, we're using gas already, the question is the gas is either going to come from Russia or it's going to be fracked gas from the US, which we're using in Scotland. Does it matter whether we've fracked it ourselves or not really, I don't think? I think the point is where can we have a technological advantage, and the place is where we can at, there's a company over near Glasgow who produce heat pumps, there's a place in Norway where they've got a heat pump running a district heating scheme, so I think we should kind of back out winners. As an industrial strategy absolutely agree, we've got far more expensive gas than the US have, and that's fine, but to say let's then stop businesses trying it seems slightly odd to me, it's like well if they want to put money into that that's fine, as long as they are clear that they won't be using gas in homes in 20 years, 25 years time. Just on the CCS thing, absolutely agree that CCS is irrelevant in Scotland on the power sector where it's not is in some of the industry, so if you're talking about Grangemouth, if you're talking about some of the big industrial sites, having small CCS on those is potentially a sensible way of doing it, and again it's a question of should you shut it down, no, it's not the same big deal as it is in the UK, but it doesn't mean it's absolutely irrelevant in Scotland. Okay, thank you, Sue Rof. Thank you very much, I mean the problem of energy is twofold, is one is how much is there, is it enough to meet our needs, and the second is what's the personality of the relationship between its demand and supply, so it's the peakiness of the demand in relation to the supply. I don't know how many of you have looked out of your window and see what I call the great eye of Sauron over the last weeks, that huge gas flame throbbing on the horizon, can you see that one, it's the sort of, they're flaring off, and they have been for 10 days millions and millions of tonnes of gas, you know it really does look like Mordor over there, but which raises the issue of storage, you know, surely storage is pertinent to this entire debate, and if we're to, because we are using, we can use with judicious management less and less energy each year, so why would we want to introduce new and potentially environmentally expensive technologies when we don't need them, we can meet them with our growing renewable capacity, but this issue of storage is critical, and I think that off-river double pumped systems, hydro storage, battery storage, et cetera, et cetera, really has to be introduced into this debate at this point, but the issue that Andy's raised, which is one is not the third element of the energy thing, is the quality of energy. It's what they call low exigy energy systems, so for some functions you need really strong high quality energy like the industrial sector, where you need for instance maybe a currently gas turbines and or coal fired turbines, in which case the idea of a lower exigy system is you actually use, you provide the types of energy you need in the different energies, different energy qualities you need, so where you've got Grangemouth and a big industrial complex, it may be that for the next 10, 20 years you need that coal fired capacity to actually get the quality of energy that you need for industry, in which case CCS has got to be a no-brainer on that one, but I'm just to raise that point about storage. Okay, thank you. We're going to move on to transport now, Dave. Can I move on to the transport debate that convener has mentioned? Panelists will know that 28 per cent of our emissions are because of transport, and I think that Tom highlighted some issues about transport earlier on. What are the panel's views on and how satisfied are the panel about Scotland's attempts to reduce emissions from transport? Tom, could you start with me? Thank you. I alluded to my views earlier on that at the Scottish level the policies that have been implemented, or perhaps not implemented, are leading to increases in climate change emissions from transport, not to reverse. I'm concerned about the investments in new infrastructure, which because they reduce the time cost of travel by car and they make car travel effectively cheaper, and if you make something cheaper then people consume more of it, so they'll travel longer distances, which generates more emissions. The question is what could Scotland do, because so many of the aspects of transport policy that are related to climate change are devolved. Something that comes up frequently is where we should invest more in public transport and bring about modal shift to public transport. I'm absolutely not averse to that, but I would caution the amount of change that can be brought about, especially in the short to medium term, through investment in public transport. If we think that there's around about 15 million trips a day made in Scotland by everybody living in Scotland, around about three per day per person, nine to ten million trips of those by car, one and a half million by public transport at the moment, so if you were to double the number made by public transport you would only make a relatively modest dent in the amount of travel by car, but also how would you actually bring about a doubling of the number of people using public transport, particularly if you were trying to get them all to be people who came previously from car. It would need immense investment in public transport, and that's something that, as we know, looking at the schemes that are on the way at the moment doesn't happen quickly nor cheaply, although I have done quite a lot of research that suggests that it can be delivered more cheaply in other European countries, and I think maybe that would be something that could be looked at with regard to district heating costs as well, but that aside, also don't expect that if you do invest in public transport that everybody who uses, all the new users of public transport will automatically come from car, of course not. If you want to bring about mode shift from car you need improvements to the alternative to car as well as some disincentives to the use of car. Road pricing, I know it's not politically very acceptable, road pricing and parking charging for example. The cities that have brought about mode shift from car to public transport have implemented those types of measures. We mustn't also forget the contribution of vans and HGVs to climate change emissions, and there are perhaps steps that Scotland could take to change the characteristics of the technologies that are used for vans and HGVs. Should I continue? If I may, just to make the point, your contribution perhaps doesn't touch upon the issue of the wrong type of vehicles on the roads and that electric vehicles, for example, would have a contribution to make. Interestingly, there's a stat out today that says that only 1 per cent of the vehicles that were purchased in Scotland in the last month were electric vehicles, compared to Norway where it was 33 per cent. We could have better vehicles on the road, but we seem to be reluctant to buy them. Clearly, if in the short to medium term a high percentage of trips that continue to be made by vehicles on the road, then we need to address the technology of those vehicles, the engine technology. How can we do that? My understanding of the Norwegian situation, which does have a very, well, the highest in the world share of electric vehicles, is that both in terms of charging points and fast charging points, but more importantly the price of those vehicles, so incentives and disincentives to encourage people to buy electric vehicles. That's making electric vehicles cheaper, but also through taxation making highly polluting vehicles much more expensive. It was evidence presented in the CCC report in the Netherlands, that their vehicle excise duty structure has led to a much faster adoption of lower emitting vehicles than we see in the UK. Of course, vehicle excise duty is currently a reserved matter. The other thing that I might draw the committee's attention to in terms of what you could do to encourage the further uptake of low emission vehicles. That is something that is within local authority powers in Scotland under the 2001 Transport Act. If we look at where low emission vehicles have been bought in Britain, if we control for socio-economic factors, income and so on, leave that out of the equation, we find that people who live in a London borrower are sometimes something like eight times more likely to own a low emission vehicle than people elsewhere in Britain. We can only conclude that a main contributory factor there is the fact that they live close to a road user charging scheme in central London and that they get a discount or free entry. You can say that. It appears to me that you are saying that modal shift is a combination of carrot and stick but also a bit of psychology. I was saying to the chair of the climate change committee last week when I stayed in London when congestion charge came in. Overnight, I could see a difference—I was in a very urban area—in the difference in road flow, because people then were penalised for taking the car in. On the other side of the coin laws, there was a huge investment from that prosecution into new buses and new tubes, so there was a greater capacity, greater ability to travel by public transport. Is your point then that we need to look at carrot stick but also look at the psychology of making that jump? Absolutely, yes, although in the case of the London congestion charging scheme, it is interesting that people in and out of London boroughs have also acquired a low-emission vehicle at a faster rate than the population in Britain as a whole, even though one would expect that they probably do not drive into central London very often at all, but that still had an impact on their purchase choice. A combination of carrot and stick but bearing in mind in the London congestion charging scheme, there was not actually great investment at the time of the implementation of the scheme in new rail on new underground. That was something that was just kind of on-going, and that reflects the length of delivery time. There was an improvement in the bus service. I was just when we were talking about electric vehicles at a hark back to the last Parliament. Can I ask panel members, when you are answering these questions, to think at another angle on this, the UK CCC has identified the possibility of reducing the upper speed limit from 70 to 60 miles an hour, and it talks about an 8 per cent drop in emissions as a result. That is quite a substantial contribution, but I wonder how popular that would be with the public. Can we explore that as a possible option along with what Dave has developed? Just to dig off the other side of the coin, convener, you will know that in the A9 in Maidie and the Highlands and Islands that there is a Government trial to increase HGV speed, which I had a small contribution from 40 to 50. That may seem counterintuitive to be increasing speed, but the Holyge Association tells me that if you are driving at 50 in tuck gear, you are actually less emitting than 40 in a lower gear. As you will know, England and Wales have already introduced 50-mile-an-hour speed for single-carjouay, so we have the irony that if you are going from England to Scotland in a single-carjouay in the HGV, you have to drop speed from 50 to 40. I would welcome the panel's view on both issues, which are dropping speed limits for general transport and increasing from 40 to 50 for HGVs in Scotland. I want to make a few points. The first one is in answer to Dave Stewart's first question about our overall progress in transport. So far, I think that the statistics speak for themselves. We are more or less barely shifted from our 1990 levels in terms of climate change emissions from the transport sector. It is one of the ones where we really need to find solutions. As I mentioned earlier, there are not solutions in the existing climate plan. I really hope that the Government is listening to this conversation, because the one thing that is so apparent from this discussion is that there are any number of answers, there are any number of solutions that exist. We just need to go out there, take these solutions and decide which ones are the right ones for Scotland and which ones to implement. You can draw so many from elsewhere in the world. In Norway, in addition to things that Tom Rice mentioned, there are plenty of things that the Government has done in terms of priority measures for electric vehicles. I grew up in London. You go back the scale of cycling that is now there in comparison, and infrastructure has been a big part of driving that. The other point that I wanted to make was around behaviour changes. Behaviour changes do not happen in a vacuum. It happens in response to all those different carats and sticks or nudges and different things that Governments can do, at all levels, that make and drive those behaviour changes. The last thing that I want to say is that there are a huge number of benefits that come from the changes that we can make in the transport sector as well, such as the things to do with air quality, the things to do with health, the things to do with just the livability and desirability of our cities. Another example that we could look to is Nottingham. It has put in place a work-based parking levy. One of the changes that it has brought about is that it has made it a much more good place for business to do business. It has brought new companies into that, because it has really good public transport systems and makes it a much more livable city. The last thing on speed limits is that that is an area where powers are coming to this Parliament. We should look through future legislation how we can use those powers. The other one to mention is very much about 20mph as the standard speed limit in cities. That really changes the livability and makes it much easier for local authorities to implement that, because that is the standard. You decide where you need a higher speed limit rather than the other way around and that reduces signage costs and so on. I think that there is some hope for optimism about the next climate change plan and the amount of action that we might have proposed on transport. Different from the previous two, that plan will be based on the output of a big computer model of the Scottish economy, the times model, which I am sure you will hear lots about in the future. There are good and bad things about that. A good thing is that it looks across all sectors and says that this one should do this much. It will produce a number for transport and say that transport needs to do a lot, because it has done very little so far, as Robin was saying. There will be much more of a numerical challenge to the people in transport and the transport minister to do more to come up with policies that do more. That will be much stronger than the previous two exercises. That is very helpful. I think that there is a concern about the times model. The times model is a very sensible thing to apply, but it looks at very direct costs and carbon savings. We know from previous work in transport that, if you look, for instance, at investment in cycle infrastructure, that looks expensive for the amount of carbon that you save. If you look more widely at the fact that more people will cycle and they will be healthier, and they will have less days off sick at work, so the economy will be better, and you will have less bills in the NHS because they are less sick, because they are fitter, then, even just in economic terms, that carbon saving looks much better. We need to understand whether times is taking into account those very important secondary benefits that are both good for the economy and also good for the people of Scotland. We have already seen that, in the long roads where we have average speed cameras, that the fact that people are now obeying the speed limit is saving us some carbon because people are driving at the speed limit instead of five or 10 miles over it on average. That has been very helpful. I think that there is an important lesson there that, when average speed cameras first started to appear, there was a lot of very negative reaction and negative publicity. Now, their routine on some of our major roads and in lots of roadworks, there are average speed cameras. People understand them, they know how to operate with them, and they understand that they are about preventing accidents and saving lives. They are also about saving carbon. There is a big lesson in thinking that, if you do something challenging in transport, there will be a huge negative reaction, and politically it will be far too dangerous. The lesson of both the average speed cameras and the 20-mile-an-hour zones in Edinburgh, where there is a lot of nervousness in introducing them, public actually like those things. They understand the rationale. It is about saving lives, it is about saving money, it is about saving carbon, and people are actually mature enough to get that. There is a small bit of the roads lobby that will go off the deep end about it, but the public will see that that is a good idea. Proposing a 60-mile top speed limit, for instance, is certainly something that we should be considering. Just to add to what Tom has talked about, one is that we are in the midst of an emerging revolution in transport services with data analytics and connectivity. It is what you might call the Uber effect, in the sense that a lot of transport providers of goods and services and moving people around are being radically disrupted by incoming technologies. With all disruptive technologies, you are never quite sure which way it is going to go, whether it supports what we are doing or does not, but there are ways in which, again, the Parliament can shift things to make sure that, as that revolution takes place in Scotland, we start to see some real benefits. If you listen to some of the companies that are coming in with those services, how do we ensure that, when they are doing individual mobility, they are doing it in a way that is low-carbon, in other words, providing fleets of electric vehicles to make that sort of thing happen? There are lots of things that we are seeing that you will pick up over the next year or two, which will be just worth being aware of. The second quick point about speed limits. We did a review of speed limits, not on the higher ones but from 30 to 20. The answer was, as Robin said, that there are loads of livability benefits of bringing speed limits down to 20. It is very marginal as to whether there is much carbon benefit, because it all depends on how much start-stop traffic there is and so on and so forth, but overall, for each town and city, it is a benefit to bring it down at the 30 to 20. I think that the heavy goods vehicle folk are quite right that having more stable speeds at 50 is not unreasonable on a carbon basis rather than slowing traffic down. I have a lot of people who want to come in on this and we need to wrap this up. Tom, on you, can you come back on this, Sue? Mark and Emma, I want to make a contribution and then Dave can finish up. I concur very much with what has been said about the politics of implementing what might be perceived to be unpopular measures in transport. Moving on and linking to that, the question of how might you introduce reduced speed limits on higher speed roads? One thing that you might start with is ensuring that the existing speed limit is enforced rather than simply trying to reduce the current speed limit. Some assessment of that was carried out in RPP 1, so keeping motorway speeds to 70 miles an hour rather than being above 70 miles an hour at the other moment. That was predicted to save around 25 kilotons of carbon a year in Scotland. How might you sell the reduction from the current speed limit to a lower speed limit? I think that, obviously, the accident benefits that we see, for example, on the A9 but also the congestion reduction benefits, because when there is heavy traffic on congested motorways, for example the M8 at peak time between Edinburgh and Glasgow, running at lower speeds can increase the capacity of the motorway and therefore the reliability of the journey time, which is extremely important, so I benefit to users. Finally, I would say that it's very, very, very important to do all the sort of mode shift stuff, the cycling investment, the walking investment for all the health and the availability reasons that we've heard. However, we mustn't forget that for cars, the bulk of our CO2 emissions come from medium-distance journeys. As travellers, we make a lot of very short journeys. They don't produce much carbon. The carbon is coming from our less frequent medium-distance journeys, by which I mean between 20 and 50 miles, if you look at the data that's demonstrated. We have to think about what you do to address those trips that are producing so much of our carbon. The things to shift people to cycling and walking and certainly bus-based public transport, because those tend to be shorter trips, then they're not necessarily going to have a huge benefit in carbon terms, although they're going to have massive benefits in health terms, in livability terms, in road safety terms and local air quality terms. They're very important. What do you maybe do about that? I'll go back to a point that I made right at the beginning. What about land use? What about ensuring that we locate our new developments in areas that are easy to walk and cycle and take public transport to and from and not stick them right on some form of sprawl on the edge of town or into completely isolated new settlements where the only viable choice is car and they're a long way away from where people need to go. Norway produces 140% of its electricity from clean renewable hydro, therefore it's a no-brainer for electric cars. Singapore has recently irked Elon Musk by refusing to allow Teslas into their market, because they don't have any renewable energy and a Tesla is a really big car, so it uses a lot of energy to get from A to B, whether it's electric or not. So this simple message about the size of vehicles must be critical too, but also making sure that if we're running vehicles, electric vehicles, that they are run on renewable energy, which means pricing tariffs for electricity. I've got an electric bike, I've got a PV roof and a battery, and you can see exactly when you're charging. And it would seem to me that most electric vehicle charging would be at night, so it's a considerable effort if we want to grow the electric vehicle fleets has to be put into that relationship between energy supply charging and making the vehicles work for us in that larger system. Mark Roskell. Yeah, thanks, convener. I think there's a really interesting comments there about the wider secondary benefits of some of this action, and also in terms of how to create communities that have strong wellbeing and are genuinely sustainable. I'm interested in how we capture that within RPP, and we'll come on to talk about RPP a wee bit later on, but if, for example, we introduce default 20mph areas for residential areas in Scotland, it's clearly a benefit in terms of health, in terms of public safety as well, so how does that then read across into the remit of Cabinet Secretary for Health and how does it also read across then into planning as well, because it's important that we capture those sustainability benefits. I just wanted to ask before we leave transport a question about air passenger duty as well. Lord Debb and last week talked about the trade-offs in terms of policy. Clearly, there's an economic policy that the Government's got to reduce air passenger duty, but do you see any alternatives to that that would still meet the Government's overall economic objectives, but we'd perhaps reflect the true environmental cost of frequent flights? Happy to say that. It should be a point of principle on air passenger duty that we've got new powers coming to the Parliament. We should be using those powers that are consistent with our climate change act. The first and foremost thing that the Scottish Government should be doing is trying to find a way that we do use those powers to reduce our climate change emissions, and it's frustrating that the Government knows exactly how much they've done the analysis of what cutting air passenger duty in half will do to our climate change emissions. Why haven't we looked at other types of models and modelled what they would do in terms of our climate change emissions? The other point that I would make on the economic benefits is that it's not a very good policy in terms of trying to achieve what I understand Government to be trying to achieve here, which is that they say that they want to increase Scotland's direct connections, but, again, their own modelling that they've done of this points to half of the passenger increase coming from people flying domestically within the UK, and given that we don't—APDs aren't charged on flights to the islands and stuff—that's basically flights from the central belt to London. It's not a good policy in terms of trying to achieve what Government is trying to achieve, so it's definitely a place where we should look again and do something different. You touched on consistency of approach there. You guys are members of stock climate chaos. One of your member organisations has taken legal action to block offshore renewable production, which completely undermines the direction of travel that we are on. There's a lack of consistency of approach there as well, isn't there? I can't speak for other organisations who, on the panel, WF Scotland has always been supportive of renewables being in the right places but also very supportive of the huge opportunity that Scotland has in terms of all forms of offshore renewables. We couldn't get a quarter of Europe's offshore renewable potential in Scotland. Scotland should be the kind of heart of this industry, and there's been a huge amount of positive change that's come about and progress with the developments in Orkney and Shetland with marine renewables. Marine renewables is a place where Scotland has a good story to tell and we can lead the way on it. With regard to air passenger duty, I, too, am rather curious about how this is intended to benefit the Scottish economy. If we look at UK passenger statistics as a whole at airports, we find that only around about 20 per cent of passengers have come in from other countries, so 80 per cent of passengers are British. That implies that they may be going elsewhere, so taking their money elsewhere. When we look at the mean income of leisure travellers, there's around about £53,000 household income for the average leisure traveller from a UK airport. That would indicate that the air passenger duty reduction is perhaps regressive in terms of it's going to be a subsidy to wealthier people. On those two counts, I find it slightly problematic. Also, we have to look in carbon terms at the immense impact of international air travel. About 32 million tonnes of carbon are calculated to be produced by UK residents travelling internationally by air. That compares with about 100 million tonnes from surface to surface transport. It's a very significant proportion. What could we do about it? I think that the bulk of air travel is being carried out by people who travel frequently by air, such as myself, I have to say. I wouldn't mind paying more for additional journeys. Some form of duty of that nature might be difficult to actually produce or implement and enforce, but, if you could get over those barriers, I think that that would have an impact on air travel. Andy Kerr, you might be able to answer that question as well. Is it not the case that the projected increase in emissions from APDB in half is equivalent to 0.01 per cent of Scotland's overall emissions? Is that right? You're putting me on the spot. Sorry. I would need to go and check that, but it's not huge. I think that there are two things to say, one of which is that airline emissions are capped within the European system, so we need to keep that in mind. They won't grow exponentially, as they have done in the past. Again, I'll come back to a point that Richard Mac made about the times modelling. Within the Scottish Government, what they've tried to do is create an analytical framework to allow them to ask or call questions of ministers. That will say that if you're prepared to cut the APD, and therefore there will be a rise in emissions over here, what are you going to do over there to compensate for it? As long as the total territorial emissions are within the carbon target, it doesn't really matter, then it's a trade-off between economic policy and others. I think that we need to be clear that the question to the minister is, okay, you want to go and do that, what is the thing that you're going to compensate for that particular emissions? What additional thing over and above what you already have? I think that that's the looking at in the system in the round that is the important point. Okay, thank you. That's the best way to do it, an alternative to APD, which reflects the costs. I think that there are different ways. What is interesting is a number of the European countries that have taken it away and sought to try and put in different systems, and I suppose what you could say is why don't we actually look very closely at which ones have worked to deliver both the economic benefits as Thomas flagged, as well as the environmental benefits, and I don't know the answer to that. If you have access to that information, if you do, it would be useful if you could share it with the committee perhaps right to us and we could have a look at that. Thank you, Andy. Emma Harper. Just a couple of quick points. I was at a bike shop on Friday and his electric bikes are going out the door really, really fast. I'm assuming that that's a good thing, because we want people on their electric bikes so that they can make their five to ten mile short journeys, but just to be clear that the charging of the bikes overnight that Sue said isn't going to overcome that, we need people to be riding their electric bikes rather than their cars. I think that there's a complete mind shift that has to go on so that is there any reason why when you get to work in your hospital or your school or something, you haven't got solar all over the roof and you can charge it there, or else again this tariff thing, you know, you might get a tariff whereby we've got excess wind at night, and you just sort of the tariff, the electric bike charging tariff can reflect where we can harvest free energy out of the system. So, but I think it's a huge growth area, actually. It's a surprising one that's come through, but I think that that has to be given a bit of thought now. Okay, and Dave, do you want to wrap this up? It's a very quick final question, because time's against us. Can I just ask the panel about best practice? Last session I went to Holland, where I was shown around the consolidation centre, which panel members may know are where they take. HDVs arrive with massive stock for cities and smaller electric vehicles take stock from the consolidation centres into the cities, so they're not polluting within city zones. I think that in Stirling it has been looked at by our transport companies. Can I just very quickly start with Tomas, the panel's view on this best practice idea? Sorry, very quickly. I think that there's value in understanding what certain cities elsewhere in Europe have achieved in terms of their changes in their transport system, particularly those that have brought about a mode shift away from car and a mode shift away from truck-based freight through consolidation centres, for example. What I would caution against—I do work a lot on European projects that share best practice—what I think is absolutely fundamental to understand, if one is going to view best practices, what are the processes and what are the underlying legislative frameworks and regulatory frameworks that support and enable that best practice? One can often find that, yes, that seems like an amazingly good example of best practice. However, the regulatory, financial and organisational framework in one's own country is so different that it's not possible to implement that example of best practice in the same way, unfortunately. I lived and worked in Sweden. I directed a public transport research centre there. A great deal is achieved in public transport in Sweden in terms of, for example, alternatively fuelled buses. However, their regulatory framework is so different that it would make it extremely difficult to replicate that very easily here. That's my caution about best practice. It's great to learn from best practice but understand how that was done and what the regulatory and organisational framework was that enabled it and see whether or not that framework exists in your own country. Just a very brief point on Emma Harper's question, which is, I think, just to reinforce what Sue's been saying, that our energy system is fundamentally changing. We're going from a place where it was basically like our electricity system ran on a system that was like had a big thing somewhere and we'll burn more stuff in that big thing when we need more energy. Similarly, in lots of our transport, it's based on burning stuff to drive around. On this topic, there's a really nice, it's an advert for Nissan LEAF cars where they imagine a world where everything was just run by burning stuff from your radio to your kettle to your hairdryer. Our energy system is fundamentally changing. One of the really good things that the Government is doing is looking at an energy strategy, which brings together transport, electricity and heat because there are really neat interplays between those things. The role of electrification and electrifying vehicles, whether that's bicycles or cars, can play a really neat balancing role in terms of smoothing out the demand through the day if people are charging up during the night and so on. Those things can work really nicely together. I want to move on to emissions from agriculture in the land use sector. Emma Harper is going to lead on that. Robin Matthews said that the agricultural industry has reduced emissions from fertilisers and animals. One of the things that I learned at the quality meet Scotland last week was that they said that if their cattle were healthy and their beasts were healthy, then emissions would be reduced, but they were referring to bovine viral diarrhea and eradication of that. However, we need to establish baselines of how we measure emissions from agriculture. Do you have any further thoughts or information about that? It might be Andy or Robin who answers that. The whole question of baselines is very important in agriculture. There is a tremendous variation in estimates of a lot of the emissions from that. Perhaps not so much with the livestock but certainly with other land uses, for example peatland restoration and that kind of thing. That is an area that needs to be focused on, to improve the methodology of baselines. On the point of the livestock, I guess that a major focus within the industry is to improve the efficiency, and part of that is to improve the health of animals. The logic being that if you are able to maintain the health of animals, then productivity per unit GHD-admitted is improved. One thing that we have to be careful of there is that efficiency is one thing, but it is actually the total figure, the total emissions that is the important thing that we are trying to reduce. If the net effect of increasing the efficiency also increases the total amount through perhaps an increase in numbers again, even though the efficiency has improved, then the overall emission figures are not being helped. We need to be careful about distinguishing between the efficiency drive and the total emissions that we are interested in trying to reduce. Does that answer your question at the moment? We also had a conversation with Andy earlier about fertilisers and proper usage of them, not just nitrogen everywhere, but do you have any further thoughts on that? I suppose that the two things very quickly to say, one of which is if we look around, not just in Scotland but elsewhere, there are three obvious areas where there are interventions that can change things. One is around soils and ensuring maintenance of organic soils, peatlands and so on. One is around the nitrogen issue, which is fertiliser and making sure that what you have got is precision agriculture. You are ensuring that you are only using sufficient to deliver the needs of the soils because we see a huge wastage in some farming systems. The third one is around food waste. How do you reduce food waste right the way through the whole cycle, which is not just an on-farm issue, but a wider food industry issue? We held a workshop last week on those and we have not yet got the results back, but those are the things that will feed into the consultation with the Government. I know that the Government has been looking very hard at precision farming and farming issues with different stakeholders in the farming community about what are the appropriate methods that they can use. One of the big challenges that we flagged in our earlier conversation was what you tend to see are leader farms that are very good at doing things outstandingly well. The big challenge is how do you get some of the best practice from there integrated right the way across the industry? That is a genuine challenge for all industries, but I think that farming in particular. Other than that, I would echo Robin's point. In fact, the point that was made by Lord Devin last week about the need for better baselines to understand what the interventions actually mean and what happens. In terms of baselines, are we not completely missing a trick on peat ones because we do not seem to measure upland peat ones. We do not measure the impact of rewetting peat ones, and yet we talk about how important peat ones are. There is a huge amount of work in fact that James Hutman Institute is leading on, which is about understanding better the carbon flow through peatlands and then trying to put it into measurement frameworks that are acceptable at a national level. There is a huge amount of underlying work, to the extent to which they are robust or not, I think that I would leave to Robin to comment on. I think that the big problem with the peatlands has certainly got a huge potential. I think that the IPP2 estimates something like 8 per cent through peatlands restoration could contribute to 8 per cent reduction in the total emissions for Scotland, so it is not an insignificant amount. The big problem, I think, was a couple of problems. One is the huge spatial variability in this across the country. It is not like a sort of agricultural field where, if you do something to one part of it, then it is going to have a similar effect elsewhere on the same field. That is one problem that I think is trying to estimate the benefit of peatland restoration is being able to extrapolate from small plot areas where measurements are going on to a wide area such as a flow country in the north. The other issue is the question of rewetting on methane emissions. By rewetting, of course, introducing anaerobic conditions back into it again on that term rather than producing CO2, which is a greenhouse gas clearly, but it switches to producing methane, which is another more powerful greenhouse gas. There is a balance there to be struck in terms of the amount of restoration or the impact that restoration will have. The current thinking on that is that it is really just a pulse of methane. It has perhaps lasted for two or three years or so. In the long term, it is a benefit to restore peatland. Some of my colleagues, as Andy mentioned, have done calculations on that, and some of those are actually in the RPP-2 and will be in the RPP-3 as well, hopefully, where a modest area of 21,000 hectares per year of restoration can contribute, as I said before, about 8 per cent towards the national level. It is not insignificant. I suppose that, in terms of missing a trick, the problem at the moment is that it is not incorporated into the national inventories, so it is not possible just yet to estimate how much it will have, or at least to have it any peatland restoration encountered for within the national inventories. There are discussions at the moment to do that, but a large part of the problem relating to incorporation is, again, the uncertainty in the baselines and the emission reductions that come to the equestration rates that are going on through restoration. Kate Forbes. It is quite a simple question. Why are not we planting enough trees, and how can we sort that? Well, if I have a go at answering maybe Andy has got some more questions than the others, there are more answers. We have fallen short. I think the target is 10,000 hectares per year, and if I remember rightly, it is something in the order of about 7,000 or 8,000 at the moment per year that we are planting. Part of the problem, I guess, is the resistance that a lot of farmers and land managers have towards planting trees. I think part of this is the identity of farmers as a farmer, and he or she is there to produce food. Essentially, it is what they see themselves as as food producers, tenders of the land, I guess. Trees do not figure in that quite so much. I think that there is a natural and borne resistance to planting trees. They would rather see productive land being used for producing rather than planting trees. A number of European countries, of course, are different, and it is a culture change that probably needs to take place, perhaps through education or persuasion in some way. Economic or at least financial inducement might be another way, but somehow we need to find ways of changing the culture of land managers to see value in planting trees more. Alexander Burnett Thank you. I should first make reference to my agricultural holdings in the register of interests. Question really for Andy. I'm glad that you mentioned food waste. With food never having been cheaper and production probably never more undervalued, do you think Brexit offers some opportunities for changes in the subsidy system, which will actually have a positive impact on the food waste issue? The blunt answer is that I genuinely don't know, and I'm not familiar enough with how the whole food system works to be able to offer a thought on that. I do know that it was one of the big discussion points at our meeting 10 days ago, and certainly I'm very happy to feed back some of the conversations that came out of that once they become—they'll be made available in the next week or so—but I'm comfortably outside my territory on that one. Mark Ruskell I think that we'll move on and look at—we've covered the housing sector quite extensively, but I think that Mark wants to come in with a couple of small questions. Mark Ruskell I'm just one full-out question. We've spoken a bit this morning about the energy efficiency national infrastructure priority. Obviously, we've got the existing homes alliance pushing for every existing home in Scotland to be category C. That's a big job, and I'm just wondering beyond the issue of budget, what else needs to be in place? Do we actually know how to do that? Have we got enough people trained up? Do we need more college places? What do we actually need to bring that into fruition? Or is it just simply a matter of setting a target, putting budget into it, and letting it happen? Mark Ruskell Okay. The big answer is no. The energy efficiency of every house in Scotland is not going to be made to happen within the next decade. Does it need to? That's another question. Obviously, people who have a vested interest in making profit out of massive roll-out of incentives, fiscal incentives to do that, are probably asking different questions from, say, you as MSPs, are, how do I improve the quality of life of the people in the houses in my constituency? Now, one thing I would promote for you is another idea, which is one that I've been working on with the New Zealand Government, which is basically what you're trying to look for. You're trying to look to keep people safe in their own homes, aren't you? If you take somewhere like New Zealand, where they have a rapidly ageing population, large poorly designed houses, poorly constructed houses, et cetera, we've started this, and a lot of the elderly people then ending up in hospital with pneumonia and stuff like that. We've started this programme for buy your ground a cosy corner for Christmas. It's basically the idea in increasingly extreme weather events, whether it's overheating or extreme cold when the lights go out, which they do increasingly, is that there is one room, a safe haven. You've got an energy-efficient sanctuary for a cosy corner for the winter, and in Australia I'm working in Adelaide and South Australia on buy your ground a cool corner for Christmas. These are sort of like safe havens. I think that just a new approach to this, by saying to people and to designers when you design a new building, where's your safe climate room for extreme cold? Where's your safe climate room for heat waves and stuff like that? Just start incrementally. Put in the insulation in the roof of that one room, the double glazing, get rid of the draffs, the nice warm carpet and so on. I think that the idea that we're going to make every building energy-efficient is just not going to happen. Do we want to make sure that every one of our citizens is climate safe in their own homes? Yes, so I think we have to think about it differently. Of course families crammed into one room could be a bit problematic. Can I ask Robin? The first thing on that one to say is that the health element to tackling energy efficiency is incredibly important. There's UK guidance, I've forgotten the name of the body, but it's a health advising NDPB and they've recommended that the minimum level we get housing to is an energy performance level C because when we get it to that level, that starts reducing the very real health risks and indeed increased mortality that happens in winter because of in part poor energy efficiency in our housing stock. I think what I want to say in answer to your question mark is that first of all this is in climate terms this is a no-brainer but I think it speaks to so many different priorities of government as well. It speaks to health, it speaks to the fuel poverty, social justice agenda. I think it's one of the reasons why there's so much support from different organisations for the vision that the existing homes alliance sets out. I think the designation of energy efficiency national infrastructure project is really important because I think it changes the mindset. It says this is a long-term thing that we're going to do as a country. What are the things, the steps that we need to put in place to get to that point? So I think it is a very relevant metaphor to say that we set out to say we're going to build a new railway line or something like that and you then decide what are the steps that we need to put in place? What's the work that we need to do with the business supply chain? What's the work we need to do with training? What are we going to do in terms of placing requirements in terms of apprenticeships or something like that and the skills side of things? To business, that's setting out the long-term agenda, saying that for 10 years we're going to put money into energy efficiency both public and private. That really transforms the business confidence and the perspective that comes from that side of things. The last thing I want to say is that there was really good alongside the programme for government. The Scottish Government said that they were going to put £20 million into energy efficiency measures as part of a stimulus package to reflect the economic uncertainty following the EU referendum. That was a really good signal of intent that this energy efficiency stacks up alongside any other kind of infrastructure project just from an economic point of view. The very last thing that I will say was that Andy made a point earlier about the things that go alongside it, the regulation side of things. The regulation can act as a way of leveraging in private money to go into this. I would really encourage the committee to have a strong focus on that regulation side of things. I'm conscious of time. We need to move on and deal with, first of all, the waste sector. Maurice Golden will lead on that, and then Claudia, I think, has a question around the public sector. Hi. Obviously, we've made considerable progress in the waste sector with respect to cutting emissions. I just wondered what your thoughts were on where we go next in that sector. Thank you. I think that there's huge potential zero waste Scotland produced a report a couple of years ago about the potential for moving to a circular economy, so using materials much more efficiently and reducing the energy going into producing raw materials and the carbon consequences of doing that. That suggested that we could save 11 per cent of current emissions by 2030. At 11 per cent, that's as big as closing a whole coal-fired power station. That's a huge opportunity. The potential delay in that is that, although the SNP has promised a circular economy and zero waste bill, there's no mention of that in the programme for government as anything coming soon. That could be several years away. Again, there might be one or two key measures that it would be worth looking at putting in the climate bill to get that ball rolling to get those emissions savings, because it might be disappointing to wait four years before we have a big bill that does much more on that. I don't know whether that will be as quick. Panel views on the public sector and the contribution that the public sector could make increasingly towards cutting our carbon emissions. The public sector is obviously facing incredibly challenging time in terms of its budgets. So, again, one of the challenges has been two things, one of which is losing the skillsets and the knowledge within the different parts of the public sector that will enable that type of change to take place, and B is having the capital to actually spend into that space. So, I think that what we need to see and what we are starting to see are very different models by which, for example, I'm thinking about Edinburgh or Glasgow, where they're bringing forth their essentially wholly-owned energy company to essentially act as a mechanism, a delivery mechanism to start making some of these major changes like massive deep public retrofits of public buildings. So, I think that we do need to start seeing some of that, because the idea that it will come out of recurrent funding with the skillsets in the local authorities, for example, or indeed in the NHS, it's just not going to happen. So, I think that there is a very strong need to see how we can use, as I said, these different models by which you can actually deliver changes and lever in other funding as well to make it happen. Just briefly, obviously, we are moving to a phase now where public bodies are going to have to report on what they've done under the public sector duty. I think that that will be very helpful because there have been some excellent examples since the Climate Act was passed, so NHS Scotland and a number of local authorities have done SEPA, have done really good work taking that duty seriously, and many others have done not very much. So, the fact that they will now have to report will concentrate the minds of chief executives on what are we going to say we've done, how can we say we've done something. I think that the broader problem is that the public sector duty is a duty for every public sector body to make a fair contribution to delivering on Scotland's climate targets, and that's quite vague. So, if you're enthusiastic, you can say, well, we'll do a lot because we are a local authority and we should do a lot, and if you're not enthusiastic, you can say, well, our fair contribution isn't really very much because it's quite difficult for us. So, a bit more direction from government and parliament on what's actually expected of local authorities in different sectors would be very helpful in getting the benefits that are there to be gained. Point, Robin Parker. Two very quick points. First of all, the public sector has a huge physical presence, so all the buildings and stuff it has, so the energy, improving the energy efficiency of that, there's support that's been done by some of the bodies for doing that, but that's an area we can go further. And then second, I was going to highlight, I think, there's a theme across the last few questions that's come out. So, I mentioned regulation of energy efficiency in the private sector, Reese Golden mentioned waste sector, and then in terms of the public sector, I think across all of those things, there's a theme that all of those things had in some way were powers within the last climate change bill, I think, so the public report and duty, things like plastic bag taxes in the last climate bill, I think the powers to do regulation and energy efficiency in the private sector, and across those examples, there's one of those that was taken forward and two of those that were taken forward, one of those which weren't. So, I think two, and then similarly, those things were all in previous RPPs and some of them have been taken forward, again regulation efficiency hasn't been taken forward. So, I think there's maybe a really useful job that just potentially just desk piece of work that the committee could do, which is go back through previous RPPs, go back through previous climate bills, identify which things were taken forward, which things Scottish Government said they would do, which haven't been taken forward, and that's that provide you things to push on to be in the next climate action plan. Okay, thank you. A question about the implications of the Paris agreement on the targets. Angus MacDonald. Okay, thanks, convener. Given the time constraints, I'll skip my preamble. So, can I ask the panel what your views are on the compatibility of Scotland's existing climate targets with the goals reflected in the Paris agreement, and what implications the Paris agreement has for the development of the climate change plan? So, the UK Committee on Climate Change said in their report to the Scottish Government in March looking at the cumulative budget that they have to advise on that pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, which is the phrase from the Paris agreement, would require a tighter cumulative emissions budget and therefore imply more ambitious targets in 2050. So, they're saying, and they're going to produce advice to the UK Government next month, and then advice for Scotland more specifically later, they're saying, yes, we need to have more ambitious targets to say that Scotland is doing its fair bit to help to deliver the more ambitious end of the Paris agreement. So, in the advice that they give us on new targets for the climate bill, they will no doubt be talking about 1.5 degrees and the Paris agreement and urging us to go more ambitious. I think that one of the difficulties is that the climate plan, the RPP, is being written right now under the existing bill, with the existing targets, with a bit of a nod to Paris in 1.5, but without really knowing how to put that into numbers. Whilst the civil servants think that the new climate plan is going to be very, very ambitious, it may actually be a little unambitious compared to what we need to do our bit under the Paris agreement. So, we'll be revisiting that when we're sitting here in six months' time talking about the new climate bill and the targets there, we'll be looking at how can we tighten the targets up and therefore what more action do we need, how do we tighten the climate plan up. There's no perfect order to do these things in, so we're doing them in the order that the current climate act says, but I think that as you discuss the climate plan as that comes in front of you, it's worth remembering that we need to revisit that quite soon to up its ambition so that it's delivering on tougher targets that we'll be agreeing through the climate bill process. Okay, Richard. Just to be clear, I think that you're talking your written evidence about hitting the 80 per cent target much sooner than 2050. In essence, are you saying that we need to target 80 per cent by 2030? I think that no one can really answer that question yet, so the times modelling, which will look at the energy sector and help inform the climate change plan will give us some information, but I think that the problem with any computer model is that it's quite good at telling you what you should do next year and in five years and it's okay in 10 years, but in 34 years' time when we get to 2050, it will have really no clue. So if I could just illustrate that, if we think backwards 34 years, this was 1982 and I'd got permission to get off school early to come and talk to you, we would be thinking about renewables. We'd be thinking about the 10 per cent that comes from hydro wind power. Well, there's some stuff happening in California, but that's not for us. We wouldn't have been thinking of offshore wind. We would have at that point have thought there would be lots more nuclear reactors in the UK because that was the Government's plan at the day. Electric vehicles, someone's doing something funny in California, but that's not for us. So 34 years ago, we would have had no idea about the solutions that we're going to put in today's climate change plan. So predicting exactly what we can achieve in 2050, which the times model will try to do, is a bit fictional. So for the couple of decades that come, the times model is a very good indicator of what we think we're going to do and therefore the level of emissions reduction we can achieve, further out it's going to be very inaccurate and it's better for us to be thinking what does climate science, what does the Paris agreement need us to do to get to the right emissions reductions, even though we can't spell out exactly the pathway because who knows who has any plan that will clearly exactly deliver in 34 years' time. But wouldn't the fair share approach require us to hit the 80 per cent by 2030? Again, I think there are very different numbers because thinking about fair shares and historical responsibility, there are different dates you can look at that responsibility from. So is it from the beginning of the industrial revolution? Is it from the 1830s? Is it from only 1990 when we started talking about this? It also requires an analysis of the ability of countries to make changes. So a poorer country probably has less financial capacity to make changes to reduce emissions whereas we, as a richer country, can invest in things in a bigger way, like our housing stock, to make more rapid reductions. All of that comes in and I'm sure we'll be talking about that as we develop the climate change targets. However, the number of yes-80 per cent should be achieved by 2030. That's probably in the right kind of ballpark, so that's the kind of ambition that we should be thinking about. Okay, that's good. Rowan Parker and Sue Roth. I wanted to... So what were the messages that came out of Paris? Clearly a very historic moment with the international agreement, but I think there's two almost kind of contradictory messages around action. One of them were all the stories that came to light as part of the build-up to the Paris agreement of different actions, different actions that different countries were putting in place. So, for example, the huge levels of investment in renewables that China was making, the financial commitments that the US government were putting in place, messages like that, and then secondly, but equally, the message that existing government contributions, commitments for emissions reductions were insufficient to even keep us in around about the three degree climate change level. So both of those say that action can be increased and that we must step up action even to get us down to kind of two degrees and then down to one and a half degrees. So what Scotland's role can be and what the climate action plan and the climate bill can do, I think, is we need to be able to go back to climate talks in future with even more stories of how we as Scotland are leading. At the minute, we can go to those talks and say we've done lots on renewable electricity, we have the 100 per cent target, we had a really good climate bill, but I would love to be able to go back in a few years and say that we've got an energy efficiency plan. There's a national programme helping to insulate every house in Scotland to get a C rating. That's something we could tell to other countries that are showing our leading role and that's really important in terms of their historical responsibility. The first consultation on the first climate change bill started off with the historical perspective of Scotland's leading role in bringing about the industrial revolution. Our next responsibility is to play a leading role in bringing about the zero carbon revolution. The last thing is that another key message that was coming out of Paris was the importance of setting a zero emissions target. The CCC has been on the receiving end of a lot of letters from the Scottish Government, but another letter that they should be receiving is what would a zero target for Scotland be the right date for a zero target. Lastly, for the UK Government, there is an important job of ratifying the Paris agreement, particularly reflecting the Brexit implications. Very quickly, I'd echo a lot of what we've just heard, but it's worth saying that almost all the countries that are signed up to Paris and are ratifying it have absolutely no idea how they're actually going to meet those targets in 20, 30 years' time, so there isn't some magical thing out there. As Scotland, we are one of the leader countries. We actually have the know-how in the private sector and public sector around the civic society. We need to be bold and challenge people to say that we can do it, but there are also economic benefits from selling that know-how abroad. That is something that, again, a lot of people are developing ideas around. I think that there is a real opportunity for Scotland to take a lead in this space. I think that we'll never meet these targets if we continue in our business-as-usual stance. Here we've got the promotion of regulations, we've got the promotion of new products into the markets. These regulations are written by people who make money from putting products into buildings. Scotland should lead the world in looking at new generations of approaches for solutions that don't require more and more machines and more and more products and more and more energy use. I think that if we looked simply at a future where we started to legislate and facilitate a world that was increasingly run on, house by house, building by building, local energy, by simply opening the window for as long as possible to maintain comfort, by just running local buildings on renewable energy, there is an argument to be made that you're not making the vast amounts of profits from larger systems approaches, but what you would do is you would be making every individual building not only self-sufficient in energy, more increasingly self-sufficient, but also you would be providing resilience at all levels throughout society and encouraging local business and economies. I think that we have to radically rethink what we're putting in the regulations and this dependence on machines for solutions. Two final questions around RPP3. They may well invite simple one-word answers, I hope they do anyway, given the time constraints. The CCC said that RPP3 should represent an improvement on RPP2 by including clear and miserable objectives, focusing on a core set of policies that will have the biggest impact and enable effective monitoring of progress. Do you agree with that? The second question is, realistically, can RPP3, given the timing, reflect the potential implications of weaving the European Union? I laid out some of my criticisms of the second RPP earlier, so I think that the new client action plan, as Richard said earlier, is off to a really good start with the basis of the energy model. That energy model should enable the Scottish Government to provide this policy that will deliver this much emissions, and we will get to this point by this time. The other thing that I suggest to the committee is that the RPP is a very big document, it's a strategy across the entire Government more or less, and you have quite a limited window in which to review that document and work out whether it stacks up well enough or not. In order to prepare for that, one of the things that the committee could do is work out a set of criteria or something similar, perhaps building on what the CCC have said. You've got that criteria, you get the RPP in January and you can say, right, does this RPP match up? You can judge it against the criteria that you've already set out and you've already shared with the Scottish Government. That wasn't a one-word answer, thank you. Andy Kerr. Okay, so the answer, the first question, is yes. The answer, the second question is, nobody seems to know what Brexit is, so until we do, we can't tell whether the climate change plan will reflect it. Richard Dixon. All right, thank you for that. So I agree with Andy, but also the key thing about the RPP3 is, as it says, measurable, is can we tell at budget time, is it being funded? So when you look at the financial budget for Scotland, can you tell, are we on track to deliver on the things that are in the new climate plan? And so far that's been very difficult every year, so the better it links to the budget process so that you can say yes, we're on track or no, what's happened to this policy, the better we will be off. Okay, thank you. Rowan Matthews. And the only other point that I would make about the RPP3, I think, is the level to which displacement of emissions might occur abroad, and particularly in the agricultural sector. I mean, as we mentioned before about the livestock, we've managed to reduce that okay, but we haven't actually reduced our consumption at all, and essentially what's happening is we're just exporting the emissions abroad, and so I think in terms of monitoring and accounting of that, we need to somehow find ways of taking that into account as well. Maybe consumption accounting, maybe way forward there, but it's a good start, and I think we need to build on it. Okay, thank you very much for your time this morning. It's been very useful for the committee. Thank you for attending. I'm not going to call a short five minute break to swap the witnesses and suspend them. The third item on the agenda is to take evidence on the draft public appointments and public bodies, et cetera. Scotland Act 2003, treatment of crownessate Scotland interim management, as specified, authority order 2016. Can I welcome Rosanna Cunningham, cabinet secretary, David Mallon, head of crownessate strategy unit, and Douglas Kerr, so as a Scottish Government legal directorate. Can I ask the minister to speak to the instrument? Thanks very much, convener, and the officials are here to answer the really complicated questions about some of the technicalities involved in all of this. Obviously, the draft order has been laid to ensure that appointments to the interim body, crownessate Scotland interim management, can be regulated by the commissioner for ethical standards in public life in Scotland. I wrote to the committee on 30 June setting out the actions that I was taking to prepare for Scotland taking early control of the management and revenue of the crownessate assets. In that letter of what I proposed was to set up an interim public body to undertake those functions, and that appointments to that body should be regulated by the commissioner for ethical standards in public life. It's my attention that the new interim body will be established and take up its full powers in April 2017, subject, of course, to the UK Government itself, completing the transfer and our Parliament approving the order in council to set up the interim body. In order to have the chair in place six months prior to the body taking on its full functions, and in line with the Audit Scotland recommendation on establishing and merging public bodies, I wish to appoint a chair as soon as possible. The chair will be in place to assist in the appointment process for the chief executive and board members prior to the body taking on its functions in April 2017. It's important that the appointment of the first chair and board, which will have full responsibility for setting the agenda for the new interim body, is fully transparent and subject to the high quality of external scrutiny that the commissioner can provide. Just as an explanation of what's going on, I'm going to read out the technicalities. It's going to sound a little bit chicken and egg, but there's really no way around that, I'm afraid. The addition of Crown Estate Scotland interim management to the relevant schedule to the Public Appointments and Public Bodies Scotland Act 2003 does follow recent precedent when new public bodies are set up. To regulate the appointments officially under the 2003 act, the new interim body will be added to the list of regulated bodies by the Order and Council that will, again, subject to the will of Parliament, establish the new interim body on its coming into force. Until then, that order will enable a representative from the commissioner's office to provide assistance during recruitment of the chair by having the new interim body treated as if it were listed in the relevant schedule of the 2003 act until such a time as the Order and Council is in force and the new interim body is fully regulated. I hope that you all grasped that because I had to read it about three times. It is one of the slightly chicken and egg scenarios that we get into because of the 2003 act. That's where we are at the moment. That's why we're doing this in the way we are at the moment. It's just to ensure that getting those people into place can be done under the auspices of what Parliament thinks is the most transparent way of making appointments. Right. I invite any members who have any questions for the cabinet secretary. Well, cabinet secretary, can I ask, perhaps getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, the time frames for the next order setting up the new body? Do we know how those are progressing? Because, agar, there are some difficulties with the UK Government around the progression of that. Obviously, we have to negotiate with the UK Government. The devolution of the crown estate has not taken place yet. We anticipate it taking place at some point before 1 April 2017, but we are dependent entirely on the UK Government then in order to progress that. If that doesn't happen, I'm not entirely quite sure how we'll manage, but that is the plan. There are current conversations taking place. As you might expect about some of the financials around that as well, because that's part and parcel of the process. I know that the negotiations of the Treasury haven't concluded. Is that really at the present the only substantive hold-up? Yes. We're awaiting a further draft of the transfer scheme from the UK Government. We're told that's going to arrive very soon. The other aspect of the process is the order to be tabled in the Scottish Parliament, which is the product of the consultation that was launched at the same time that this order was weighed in Parliament, which would provide the regulatory framework for the new interim body. We hope to weigh that order in the Scottish Parliament in October. Last week, we discussed this issue. We asked that the committee be kept updated on progress around the UK Government. Obviously, this is something that we're taking into consideration. We're happy to do that when we know you'll know, but at the moment, there are still some things that we don't know. We're operating on the basis that everything will go according to the intended timetable so that we will be in a position on 1 April to have in place that lending pad for the transfer scheme. At the same time, my officials are also getting ready to put the consultation out, which will be for the longer-term plans for the Crown Estate, because there is a commitment for us to be looking at communities and that for the devolution. There will be a consultation on that, because that will require primary legislation in this Parliament, but none of that can take place. That primary legislation cannot take place until after we've actually had the devolution. Okay. Nobody has any other questions at this stage. Okay, so we're going to move to the debate on the motion on agenda item 3. Can I invite the cabinet secretary to speak to and move the motion? I don't have a text for the motion. I'd like to simply move that the committee accept the order as laid. I have a text that the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee do recommend that the Public Appointments and Public Bodies, etc. Scotland Act 2003, treatment of Crown Estate Scotland interim management as specified authority, order 2016, draft be approved. Thank you, cabinet secretary. Can I invite any members wishing to speak on that? No? Can I then invite the cabinet secretary to wind up if she feels necessary? I put the question on the motion. The question is that motion S5M-01328, in the name of Rosanna Cunningham, be approved. Are we all agreed? The committee's report will confirm the outcome of the debate. Can I ask if members are content to delegate the signing off of the report to the convener? Can I thank the cabinet secretary and our officials for a brief and delayed appearance before the committee today? Thank you. We now will move to agenda item 5, which is further subordinate legislation. The fifth item on the agenda is for the committee to consider a negative instrument as listed on the agenda. That is the water environment, shellfish, water-protected areas designation Scotland, order 2016, SSI 2016-251. I refer members to the paper. Can I ask for any comments that members might have? Emma Harper. I welcome this marine protected area for Loch Ryan, which is in the area that I am looking after. However, I would like to note that I will seek some further clarification from the Government regarding the potential impact that the protected area designation might have on the current harbour regeneration at Stranraerys pier. Does anybody else have any comments to make? If that is the case, can I ask whether the committee has agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to that instrument? Agenda item 6 is the appointment of an EU reporter. Paragraph 4 of the paper outlines the role of the EU reporter and an addition paragraph 5 outlines the proposed expanded role for the reporter in relation to reporting to the committee on issues that arise from the Brexit vote that are relevant to the committee's remit. If there are no comments on the paper, will there be any nominations for someone to fill the role of the reporter? I would like to nominate David Stewart. We have a proposal on a second for David Stewart. Do we have any other nominations? Does David Stewart accept that appointment? Thank you, convener, and thank the committee for their faith. Excellent. That is good. I am sure that you have a very good job on that. We look forward to hearing from you on the subject. I move on to the future meeting details. At its next meeting on 27 September, the committee will take evidence from the committee on climate changes, subcommittee on adaptation. As agreed earlier, we will now move into private session. I ask that the public gallery, such as it is, be cleared as the public part of the meeting is closed.