 Good morning and welcome to the fourth meeting of 2018 of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. We have apologies from our colleagues Donald Cameron and Stuart Stevenson. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, I want to remind everyone present to switch off electronic devices as those may affect the broadcasting system. I will allow everyone some time to do that. The first item on the agenda is for the committee to consider whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The second item on the agenda is to take evidence on the Scottish Association for Marine Science Research Services Ltd report review of the environmental impacts of salmon farming in Scotland. I would like to welcome Professor Nick Owens, Dr Adam Hughes, Professor Paul Tett, Dr Lindsay Verr and Professor Eric Verspour. Welcome to all of you. Thank you for the work that you have done on our behalf with this report. As you can imagine, we have a number of questions to get through, so we will just kick on. Could you outline for us first and briefly the expertise that has been deployed in producing this report, the qualifications of the various scientists who have contributed to it? Indeed. The typical way that we do this is by assessing the work that is needed. We all have very good international and national networks in our specific field. We chose who we consider to be the best experts available to be able to help us. A number of the people are actually within our own institutes, and we sought the advice, particularly of colleagues in the University of Owens and Islands and other mass institutes. In terms of ensuring—this is a contentious subject, as we know—how did you go about ensuring and satisfying yourselves that the report is impartial and so far as it can be? The principal way that we do that is by using the very well-established peer review system. There hasn't been a better way yet found to ensure complete objectivity and as near as possible accuracy at the limits of knowledge. In fact, all the written evidence that we pursued had been in some way or other peer review. Thank you for your work. The review is an update on the review in 2002, although it has a slightly different focus. However, some of the scientific conclusions and some of the data problems particularly seem to be very similar. Have you, in the process of writing the review, identified any significant changes in the environmental impact of salmon farming since the review in 2002? If so, in which areas and if not in which areas did you recognise that very little had changed? I realise that there is a lot in the review, so this is more just about headlines. I would like to distinguish between effects and impacts. The scientific process that Professor Owens has described is aimed to tell us where there is a causal link between salmon farming and a change in some aspects of the environment. If the scientific evidence is there, then we can establish the link between salmon farming and an effect. I think we are confident, but an effect is value neutral. Impact demands require some evaluation of the effect. That evaluation will depend on the criteria applied. Those criteria are both formal legal ones, their understandings of ecosystem health, but they also relate to societal concerns. I was involved in the 2002 review. One of the most obvious things to me is the way in which societal concerns have altered during that period. If I look back at the conclusions of the 2002 review, I agree with you that not a lot seems to have changed. The first conclusion in 2002 was that waste and nutrients were unlikely to limit the expansion of the industry in the future. It is still the case today that, although we can detect effects of organic waste from the farms and nutrients on the environment, they are not such as to be of concern in relation to the ecosystem as a whole. You mean that they are not such to be of concern scientifically in terms of the impact? As I drew the distinction, science can tell you say that the effect of the organic waste from a fish farm is to change the population of animals and microorganisms in, say, 3 per cent of the sea loch beneath the farm. Is that something that society should be concerned about? From an ecosystem point of view, and I am an ecosystem ecologist, then the answer is no, because we know that if the sites are left to fallow, they will recover. This is only a small proportion of a sea loch. In contrast to that, if the farm happens to be close to a protected habitat, and that 3 per cent affected the protected habitat, that would be a considerable concern. That is where regulation comes in to ensure that sites of farms are not close to protected habitats. In the report that is recognised, in 2003, 16 of 346 operating salmon farms were sited above marl beds. Do we have a more up-to-date figure for that? Not as far as I know. We are talking about protected features. Your report goes on to say that, even after two years of following, that does not allow recovery for the beds. Remember that we were asked to review the scientific literature. There may well be evidence available, which you could obtain from Scottish National Heritage, who monitor these situations. All we can say is that no scientific papers have appeared since the paper was found. So you are not aware of an update on that figure? Thank you. We just have to get that one record. Sorry, Keith Holmes. I think that you are going to find that you get this answer in a number of respects. So, if I return to 2002, then the second issue was that the most likely issues to limit production are medicine usage and sea lice transfer to wild populations of salmon, which remains of concern to today. Professor Verspo is more qualified than me to talk about that. The third issue was the rate of escapes of farm salmon is probably unsubstainable and represents a major threat to wild populations. Again, I will pass over to Professor Verspo, if you want further information about that. Then the fourth issue is changes in fish meal supply may affect the sustainability of the industry. So this is concern two decades ago. Most of the raw material and fish feed came from wild fish. Much of that has been substituted by vegetable protein today, but there is still a concern over the supply of fish oil and the omega-3 fatty acids. Explore those topics as we go through this session. That is fine. In general, we are looking at the same set of concerns now as we were in 2002. It is worth remembering that although the industry had gone through a rapid expansion in the late 1990s, the early figure of God is 83,000 tonnes in 1996, rising to a peak of 170,000 tonnes in 2003. The review came based on scientific information from the earlier part of this period, so when production was lower. Since 2003, there has been no upward trend. There has been fluctuation up and down. The production did not reach that high figure of 2003 until 2015 when it got to 171,000 tonnes. The industry has continued in the region of 130, 140, 150, 160,000 tonnes during the period between 2002 and 2017. In looking at the recent literature, we are looking at a period when the production of salmon in Scotland is roughly twice what it was when the literature was reviewed in the earlier period. However, in very general terms, with lots of caveats, there is no published evidence that effects are more widespread in general now than they were detected in 2002. Mark Ruskell wants to come in. I hear what you say about the early growth of the industry and the production levels that it is at now. You said 176,000 tonnes, but the prediction for 2030 is 300,000 tonnes. How robust is the peer-reviewed evidence of what has come before, given that we are about to see an anticipated enormous expansion of salmon farming in Scotland? We have to extrapolate here. The extrapolation would say that without additional mitigation, we would expect more widespread effects. We have in the review suggested additional mitigations that would be necessary. It is probably fair to say that many of them are already in hand or are being considered. In light of the expansion over the past 15 years, as Mark Ruskell said, what is coming ahead? That might be an unfair question. Does it surprise you that the conclusions of the 2002 review are largely the same as that review? Does it surprise you that there has not been more published scientific evidence over the past 15 years and, presumably, very little changes in the practices of salmon farming? I am not going to comment on the practices of salmon farming. I noticed that there was a pattern in the scientific evidence. In the first decade, there have been a lot of papers published on the topic of harmful oval blooms. Back in 2002, it was concerned that the salmon farming industry was perturbing nutrient ratios in the sea and causing greater frequency of harmful oval blooms, which had harmful effects both on farmed salmon and on farmed shellfish. I think that that led to some international reviews. It led to commission work. It led to normal scientific work. All those publications suggested that the cause of harmful oval blooms lies offshore, not in the salmon farming industry. As a consequence of that, the research died away. John Scott, do you care to comment on any possible effect of climate change and sea-level temperature changes and how that might be affecting the effects as well? It is a big question of our age, isn't it? It is possible to see changes in ecosystems, certainly in the west of Scotland. What is very hard is to understand what is causing those changes. Is it climate change? Is it fish farming itself? Is it other effects of human activity ranging from the disturbance of seabeds by fishing by our removal of top predators from the food chain? We do not have enough information to be clear on that. In summary, there is a multiplicity of potential effects. It is a dynamic situation that will inevitably constantly change and fish farming is part of that. I think we need to accept the natural ecosystems, even without human influence, fluctuate of their own accord. On top of that, we have recovery from the ice ages and we also have human-induced climate change and a number of other human pressures. These are changes that take place on scales of decades. We need long time series of information to understand what is happening and then secondly to stand a chance of being able to correlate what is observable with what has changed in the human pressures on the sea. I guess if I can advocate something, it is for more attention to be paid to not so much a collection of long time series because we are doing that. The routine monitoring of salmon farming is providing a lot of data. What does not seem possible at the moment is the synthesis, the analysis of those data in the sense of looking at what is changing in ecosystems. It does appear that that is a gap since 2002 of... I would agree with that. We are not doing as much of that sort of research as we had been before 2000. Can I follow up on that point? It is a layman's question, but could you quantify for us the scale of the task that would be at hand if we were to address those points? How big a job, how long would it take to get a body of robust science to inform our understanding and get on top of the situation? I guess that that would depend on the particular aspect of the ecosystem and the particular area of concern. I can speak in relation to benthic impact and pelagic impact, which are not of concern at the moment. In terms of benthic impact, there is a very large amount of data collected from routine monitoring of locks with fish farms in. What is needed is a relatively small amount, a few person years of continuing activity to put these data together with information on other causes of change. How long would it take if we were to embark on a robust and extensive piece of work over the next five years? If we had you back in front of us in five years, how much more confidence would you have if this was put together properly in coming to conclusions about the impacts of salmon farming on the environment? Is it a five-year thing? Is it a 10-year thing? Those are layman's questions, but we need to get a handle on this. How far away are we from really understanding the issues? It is a fascinating question, and I think that we are struggling to answer it because it is not particularly specific. I can try and help by saying that I have just returned from a conference where we were talking about the observation of the global ocean. In order to pick up some of the big ecosystem changes that are happening because of climate change and so on and so forth, you are looking at decades and whole nations doing it. It would mean for Scotland doubling or trebling the effort that is currently going in just to get a better understanding of the natural changes and the climate change and juice changes versus those that are much more local. My sense would be that we are looking at probably a decade of really intensive work, and I think that we would probably have to up our game by about an order of magnitude. That certainly is the conclusion of this conference that I was at recently. We are looking at whole nations investing very seriously. It is not to underestimate—obviously, we are talking about a very specific issue here with fish farming and so on—that the ocean has a considerable impact much wider on the whole of society, particularly in Scotland. That is useful. Thank you. In terms of the scale of the problem that we define and the orders of magnitude being required to address a definitive view of the whole picture, is there any part of the picture that you would see that we in Scotland should be focusing on where you perceive a problem that is in much need of research and potentially addressing it? Yes. There are probably two key areas that are identified in the report. There is the whole question of the sea lice issue, and there is some work that we are beginning to embark on in sands that will help with that, but it needs investment to do that. There is some tractable work that we could do there, but Professor Bursbaw could comment better than me on that. I think that probably the notion of the organic material is an interesting one. Paul knows better than me about that, but I think that we could probably do more in that area. Certainly it seems to me and the little I know, but that is an engineering solution that is required to catching the organic material and scooping it up or harvesting it and taking it away and doing something intelligent. There certainly are engineering solutions out there. The Norwegians are leading the technology in this area, where the closed containment systems, where the sludge is taken off and removed. There is an engineering solution, but alongside that goes an economic cost. We will explore that subject in greater detail as we move along. Finlay Carson, you mentioned marlbeds a bit earlier. Can you tell me if there are any areas of environmental impact that the report does not address? Environmental impacts that you may not be aware of, but environmental impacts that you are aware of that are not covered in the report? Shall I have a go at that? We began with a process of trying to identify all possible environmental effects by drawing up a matrix of pressures, the human activities involved in fish farming, and then against that tabulating areas of ecosystem function from the marine strategy framework directive. I would say that we picked up all the major issues with the exception of plastics, which is of current concern, but about which there is very little literature in relation to their effects in Scottish waters. The next question is quite a comprehensive report. It takes quite some time getting through. Can you tell me what the top three environmental impacts of salmon farming are in Scotland? On the back of that, can you tell me what is the likely outcome of an increase in salmon farming on those three top concerns? I can refer back to my distinction between effects and impacts. The effects of those that we have established are reviewing the scientific evidence, but the impacts, to some extent, depend on judgment. You might get a different answer to this from different experts here, so I hope that I am not the only person to reply to that. I am a systems ecologist, so I am interested in the health of ecosystems as a whole, rather than individual populations. The top two issues for me are the global impact of getting the ingredients for fish feed, so clearly going to 300,000 tonnes of production is going to increase the demand for ingredients. Scotland will be in competition for Norway, which is talking about going from 1.5 million tonnes to 5 million tonnes with GLA with other world industries. There are global issues here about the impact of this on land use, if most of the protein comes from terrestrial sources. There is impact on fish stocks if we still need to get fish oil from marine sources. That would be my top issue because of the scale. Of course, Scotland is only playing a part in the global demand for this. The second issue for me is the low-level and long-term effects of chemicals on the environment. This is a concern because we do not know enough about the long-term effects. We have a good system of regulation, which involves environmental quality standards, which set maximum tolerable levels, but there has in recent years been some questioning of these standards in terms of their long-term protection. This is an area that we do not know enough about. It is one that could affect ecosystems as a whole through harming some of their essential components from the small animals that live in the seabed and by burrowing through the sediment spring oxygen to it, getting to the small animals that live in the water column and on an essential part of the food web. I have only given you two. I want to say that I understand the concerns about the impacts of farming on wild salmon, both the impacts of sea lice and the effects of escapes and genetic transfer, but I do not see that as a threat to ecosystems as a whole. My colleagues might differ. Anybody else who would want to add to those? My comment would be that whether it is a concern does depend upon which sector you are in. Some people will see certain things as a concern and other people will see other things as a concern. As a scientist and trying to answer those questions, my main concern is the lack of the information that one needs in order to answer those questions. In my area, which is Atlantic Salmon, farm-wild interaction is primarily related to the genetics. Very little has progressed since 2002 to now in terms of the knowledge specifically of the level of interbreeding between farm salmon that have escaped and the wild salmon. You might ask why that is. I think that it is because the investment has not happened in gathering that information. We are very far behind Norway. You ask what levels of funding are required. I think that you should go to Norway and see what is required. From colleagues, I have had indications that their spend on sea lice research alone is larger than the entire budget for all research here in terms of farm-wild interactions. As a scientist, that is my concern. If you ask us to comment on these things, if you look at the literature, the literature is incredibly sparse, particularly in Scotland and Ireland and anywhere outside of Norway. Who funds the scientific research in Norway? Is it the Government or is it the sector that is required to fund it? I am not 100 per cent sure of, if you said, the total spend who funds it. The industry does contribute and the Government does put a great deal of money in and through various departments. I mean, for one example, a few years ago, sea lice work, there was a 23 million budget for just sea lice research. Right, okay. Mark Ruskell. I want to go back to the issue of environmental impacts that perhaps are not covered by the report. It has been a very well-publicised incident where you have got the transport of dead salmon on the roads, there has been biosecurity issues with waste leaking out of trucks, potentially getting into water courses. I wanted to, to what extent, you saw that as a problem. Also, on animal welfare, if you see increasing expansion of the industry causing any issues in terms of welfare of the fish. Talk about the welfare, at least. Well, in terms of disposal, I think, where there are large fish kills or fish deaths, then there needs to be a robust system in place, and that's really difficult because a lot of these locations are remote locations and these may be once in a five-year, once in a 10-year event. So planning for such events is going to be difficult and expensive and it needs to be proportionate to the risk. I know that there is work going on at the moment looking at the process of dealing with large-scale fish kills, but I don't know where that process is in terms of evidence. Sorry, what was the second? It was about specific, whether you see, there are specific biosecurity issues with leaking fish waste, getting into water courses. Yeah, I think all salmon producers would take biosecurity very seriously and I think it would be something to talk to the salmon producers about, specifically about the plans that they have in place. I can't comment on obviously individual cases which have happened up on Lewis, I believe, recently. In terms of fish welfare, I think there's always going to be a proportion society who are uncomfortable with farming of animals and farming of fish. I believe that welfare standards are very high at the moment, but that's a personal opinion. As the industry expands, there's no reason for those welfare standards to degrade. The expansion I think is based probably on the current best practice. I guess that's a societal issue to decide what they want to decide is acceptable in terms of their food production and animal welfare. Is it acceptable that we see a 25 per cent mortality rate within the livestock, so only 75 per cent of farm salmon are actually making it to market? 25 per cent are dying? Is that comparable with other production systems? I have no idea if that's comparable to other production systems. I don't know if those figures are across the board for industry and whether that's acceptable. As I say, that's the society or yourselves to decide. To other countries? Pardon? How would that mortality rate compare to other countries? I don't have those figures, I'm afraid. I think that the Scottish industry compared to places like Chile, where they've had large disease problems for the last three or four years. We are probably above them or below them in terms of mortality rate, but I don't have the figures to hand them. If you're able to source those in due course, it would be useful to have them, particularly if they're comparable to the likes of Norway. That would be an interesting comparison. Kate Forbes. I have a supplementary point earlier about the Norwegian research. Several times in this report it was mentioned in relation to sea lice that there was no specific data for Scotland but that you had looked at studies elsewhere. What are the restrictions, what are the limits of using the Norwegian research in terms of applying it to Scotland, the Scottish environment? In respect of sea lice or genetic interactions, it's accessible, it's relevant, in terms of it informs the potential for impact and shows you the degree of impact often. However, what it also shows is that the impact can be very local and it can be unpredictable and dependent upon very much local circumstances. The sea lach, the design, but the layout of a sea lach, the direction of winds, those types of things. Therefore, it's very difficult to say whether you could predict what the situation is going to be in a given location. This is where you very much have to have local information and that's generally what is lacking at least in the public domain. This review is based upon what is in the literature, what is accessible, not just raw data but what has been analysed. There is very little out there. There have been studies but they are not systematic and they are not always up-to-date in most cases. Transferring from Norway to here only gives you a general idea of the potential for a problem, what it might be and what we need to do is collect information that shows what is actually happening. Given the lack of information and available science that we have been discussing today and is touched upon in your report, I am struggling to see where the precautionary principle has been applied in allowing the sector to expand in the way it has. Is that harsh? I could comment. I think that there has been an attempt to find a way to work together on this historically. Iceland has recently, and I would recommend that you contact your Icelandic colleagues and look at what they are currently doing. They are looking to expand the farming industry there, and they have put in place a new regulatory framework that takes the kind of approach that says, let's learn as we go. It's neutral in the sense that it says that if you don't find impacts, if you have evidence that there is no impact as opposed to there is no evidence for impacts, then the industry will be allowed to grow. If there is evidence of impacts, then the industry may actually have to contract. They have a system that is flexible and adaptive, but it is very much contingent upon collecting the information, and there they are actually going to put the onus on the industry to contribute to the monitoring of the environmental parameters, in this case sea-lice levels and levels of genetic integration. In terms of using Norway and Iceland's research, how important is the difference in the sea temperatures from my very, very limited chemistry? Warmer environments make things happen more quickly, as a rule, and therefore might the problems be worse in our warmer waters relative to Norway and Iceland, even though we are not measuring them, whereas they might happen more slowly in these colder waters further north. I will try to answer that. What you say is exactly true. The rate of biological reactions doubles roughly with every 10 degrees increase in water temperature, but the Norwegian coast is extremely long. Fisher Farms all the way up it, and in the southern part of Norway, water temperatures are not very dissimilar from those in the west of Scotland. By the time you get to the north of Norway, then the water is colder, but maybe they benefit from the flows of warm water across the north of Atlantic, so it is northern Norway. It is not as cold as you would expect, but there are differences. For example, in terms of lice control, I think the Norwegians seem to have a preference for using lumpsuckers, which are cold water fish to eat the lice, as opposed to the wraths, which are warmer water fish for which there is preference in Britain. Would the water temperature affect breeding of sea lice, the fact that it is warmer, would it breed more quickly and more readily than it might in Iceland? Yes, the life cycle would be shortened. And in terms of local environmental impact, then the typical fish farm, the typical salmon farm cycle is a two-year cycle with the maximum stock held in the summer of the second year. This is the time when the fish are growing fastest because the water is warmest. So, the metabolic activity is greatest. It is in the summer when they would have the greatest local environmental impact through excretion. So, as water temperatures increase, then it is likely that metabolic activity will increase. I am talking about climate change here now. We have seen roughly a degree temperature increase over the period that I have been working, which is going to have a small effect on metabolic rates. The same thing will apply to the sediments. It is coupled with the solubility of oxygen in seawater, which decreases as the water goes and gets warmer. Cold water is better for salmon because it is higher in oxygen than warm water. That is one of the factors that are in favour of growing seabass and seabream under Mediterranean conditions under warm water conditions. Finlay Carson, just to wrap up this section. I cannot jump in back, but given the projected increases in farm salmon and the answers that you gave on what the top two or the top three environmental impacts, can you tell me what role alternative approaches or technologies have on those two impacts? I guess that you are referring to recirculation systems, which are those closed containment systems that take the production out of the environment. Therefore, you have much greater control over things such as biosecurity, but also on where your efflants go and how you treat your efflants. There has been a long interest in recirculation systems for a long time. We are beginning to see first one or two commercial salmon recirculation systems here in Scotland and in Norway. The technology is coming online. It is a question of economics about the cost of production, the cost of your CAPEX. It is much more world capital intensive to build an onshore facility, although it is now moving to offshore closed containment systems in Norway, versus the running of costs and the environmental benefit. It is a technology that has been coming for the past 10 or 15 years, and it is still just on that cusp. It will have environmental benefits, but no food production system is without environmental impacts, so there are other environmental impacts associated with it. It is just a question of economics, of whether it is cost effective to produce a salmon in closed containment systems. There is also a societal perception of that. There has been work done that has asked consumers whether they think that fish farmed in a closed containment system is more environmentally friendly than an open water system. The consumers believe that the open water system is more natural, and therefore there is greater consumer acceptance for cage farming than there is for recirculation. Just on that, what is actually driving the change? Is it economics in terms of increased production because of fewer losses, or is it driven by regulations with regards to environmental protection rules? What is the driving force and the change to more containment? My personal opinion is that the main driver is free biosecurity to allow better control of that production cycle with less losses and a better prediction of what the end product will be. It is much easier to control the environment, and therefore you have a better idea of the product that you will get at the end of your production cycle. How does Government support in Scotland or lack of incentives compare with St. Norway? Let's look at the COI's issue in more detail, Claudia Beamish. Thank you, convener, and I start this having been involved with, as a complete lay person, with the aquaculture bill with some trepidation. Rather than dip into the areas that, as a committee, we may want to make recommendations about, initially, I want to start with the science, which is what you are here for, and where the science has got to, and perhaps what would be useful for the science in the future to further inform us. I am tempted to make one comment, which is actually not a comment, because there is a quote from your report, which actually says at point 1 on page 10 that sea lice are ectoparasite, which is, of course, yourselves one, but for the record, I just read that out, and a key impediment to the expansion of the Scottish salmon farming industry in the marine environment. I perhaps should have held back on even that, but there is a concern, not only in the public, but with respect, I would say, in the scientific communities, not just in Scotland, but globally, about this issue. Let's start with the science, please. Your specific question about the science, what aspect of it? You could cover each of you whatever it is appropriate to cover. For instance, the effect on wild fish, any views highlighted in the literature about the welfare effects on the farmed salmon themselves, or the trigger levels that might be appropriate for action in view of the science in terms of the numbers of sea lice on smolts, post-smolts and adults, or possibly on the transparency of the possibilities of analysis of the science in relation to whether it's appropriate that that should be more publicly available, which was my amendment on a farm-by-farm basis, which was rejected at the time in 2013. Or any other aspects of the science that are appropriate to comment on. It's really to open it out, because myself and other members have questions on this important issue. I think that Professor Busbor will answer the questions about the impact of the sea lice and the levels and the sorts of questions you're asking there. I'd like to end and follow up with some information and some thoughts about ecological modelling and how we might make a step-change in improvement, but I'll leave that to myself for the second point. The figures around the volume of farmed salmon that's being lost specifically to sea lice annually, I don't know the answer to that, but Eric, you might. Yes, I believe that there are estimates of the volume. However, as this review focused on the impact of the sea lice from farms on the wild populations, that's the literature that we reviewed. So exactly what is going on on the fish farms themselves hasn't been covered, so I think you'll have to bear with us if we don't have those particular figures. What we do know about the science is that an excessive sea lice burden on wild salmon can have a negative impact on their survival. What we do know is that there is an associated issue with the research literature that you've highlighted in your report. It does say that more than 11 sea lice on a smolt or post smolt would lead to mortality. There is scientific evidence that shows specific points as well. Absolutely. I'm sorry, perhaps you were coming to that. Well, I'm somewhat hesitant to say it's two sea lice per 10.3 grams of fish. It's going to depend very much on the circumstances and vary with the individual fish and other factors that might be affecting it. The size of the fish will be one factor, but there will be others. I think the state of the science is that you could probably say that if you increase the sea lice burden on a wild fish for a significant amount of time, you will increase the likelihood of it having a negative impact either on its growth or on its survival. Sea lice do not benefit salmon. The extent to which they are attached to salmon is going to depend on the local circumstances and that's going to depend on the time of the year, the environmental conditions and a lot of factors. So you can say that there is a risk, there is a potential of a problem. Whether it is a concern in a given location is another question and certainly in Scotland isn't in public domain, but it's a location that I'm familiar with. They have had historical highs in their salmon and yet those salmon have to go past a very large salmon farming operation. So are the sea lice having a negative impact if the salmon are at historical highs? However, there's a large number of confounding factors. The river is stocked. Is the stocking accounting for the historical highs? Is it because the marine conditions where those particular salmon go happen to have been particularly good? Not all salmon go to the same place in the ocean. Not all have the same journey. So it's very difficult to extrapolate from some controlled study in one location under a certain set of environmental conditions, including temperature, feeding regimes and that, as to so many sea lice per gram of fish, being critical. So you can measure that anywhere and that's going to be the trigger as to whether and how big your problem is. Could I just ask if the, well I would think that the there's also the issue of the amount of sea lice that there are actually on the salmon in the farm, which the wild salmon have passed. Absolutely. And you did ask the question about the accessibility to data. If you're going to do good science on these questions, you need access to data and that data, as far as I know, at least to some degree, is being collected, but it is not generally accessible. It is not universally in the public domain for scientists to actually take it and analyze it and say what it tells us. Is it sufficient data to answer the questions? Or if it's not sufficient, how should the data collection be altered to improve it so that we can actually say more about what the impact might be or how the sea lice might be controlled, those types of issues. So we've been asked here to review the literature, though that information is not in the literature, therefore we cannot comment on it. Could you comment on how important in your view, or any of the other panel members, before we come to Professor Owens, how important the issue of the transparency and the real-time public openness about data on a farm-by-farm basis could help the development of science in order to know how we... It would help the advancement of science. However, I do equally understand that there is a misuse of this information on both sides of the fence in the debate and what... There's a problem. Science takes a long time to actually crunch the numbers and assess the implications of it, and often what... When some of this data goes public, there are knee-jerk reactions to what these things actually mean or don't mean, and this is an obstacle, I think, to it. So yes, transparency in principle, if you want the best science to inform the debate, you need transparency of the available information. But surely how that information is used by anybody beyond the scientists would be just the same with an issue of... There was an issue of a leakage from a burn or into a burn of a discharge, which is public information that SIPA would do on land. Can you explain to me what the difference would be? Surely it's something that... I'm not... I'm saying that those... The reasons of the misuse of the data by certain sectors... But is that a reason I'm saying not to have science public? No, but I'm just saying this is why it's not happening. I'm saying that I... It should be happening because I think ultimately in the long term, if you want science to inform the debate, you need everything to be accessible for analysis. So could we go... Thank you very much. That's very helpful. Could we go to... Yes, certainly. And it's actually a very pertinent point to come in here because one of the things that we are in the business of doing is actually modelling the distributions of CLI. So we... combining a biological model with an ecosystem... Is that the same as biophysical modelling? Yes, basically. Yes. And one of the limitations that we've got in terms of almost getting a predictive model as to where CLI's will be transported to from fish farms and so on actually is the availability of real-time data. If we had farm-by-farm data on the distribution and numbers of CLI's in those cages, then we would have a considerable improvement in our predictive capabilities of the... Certainly the distribution of the CLI's. It's then a... You then move into a biological question as to what might happen to those CLI's and the impact that they might have on the salmon. But to take the example that we've just heard of, one of the possible explanations for apparently high levels of wild salmon in a caged area is actually the very fine-scaled variations that you would get in the distribution of the CLI's coming from the cages versus where the wild salmon are travelling. And we don't have that because we don't have the real-time data. Thank you. Thank you for that. Alex Rowley, she wants to come in just now. Yeah, I was thinking that the science of the impact of CLI's on salmon is perhaps something you don't hear being discussed in the pub on a Friday night, but when the one show run its two evenings programme on salmon fishing in Scotland, I think people were horrified to see the amount of dead salmon being put into lorries and being shipped halfway across Scotland. And I think there is genuinely, therefore, a public need to know in terms of these issues. This report doesn't, as you say, because, well, I'm going to come on to that. It doesn't highlight really the disease within the salmon farms. It really doesn't go into the detail why so many fish are being slaughtered. I do think to myself, the local farmer that I know always, dairy herd, if 25 per cent of his cattle were being slaughtered every year because of disease, there would be a serious problem, there would be a serious problem right across the industry. As Mark Ruskell said, those dead fish are being transported around Scotland. Is there a lack of data? Regardless of whether data can be used or misused, depending on who's got it, is there a lack of data that exists farm by farm of the amount of disease that's in the fish stock given that 20 to 25 per cent of it is being slaughtered? If the production of fish has grown twice the level of production since 2002, what's happened with the amount of fish that are dying as a result or being slaughtered as a result of disease? Do we just keep compensating for that? So, if we're going to double the production over the next 10, 15 years, is that to compensate? Should we not be trying to do something to tackle why this disease is there? Yes, I think that this is out with the remit that we have been given. The people who will be able to answer the question that you are posing, who have whatever information is available on that issue, will be Marine Scotland Science and the fish health inspectorate and people associated with them. Therefore, I would direct those questions to them. We have dealt specifically with the impacts on the wild stocks, not on that side of it. We don't have access to their databases, so I couldn't answer what information they do have and they don't have. If you have to look at the disease interaction between farm salmon and the well population, should you not have access to that data? If the level of disease is continuing to increase and being compensated for by farming more, is that not putting more risk to wild salmon and the rivers up and down Scotland? Yes, it potentially is. Again, this is the area where Marine Scotland Science and the fish health inspectorates and their team are. That is their area of work. There is some published information on it, but scientific studies, which are referred to in there, but the level of information that you are asking for is not out in the public domain and you would have to check with them. John Scott, I will go back to the sea lice burdens and the lack of published information in the realms of conjecture, which I would invite you to speculate on. From what you have said, would I be right in deducing that there are a number of key variables in the likely level of sea lice burden in terms of the genetics of the salmon themselves, which vary in their ability to either fend off or absorb sea lice? The feeding regimes that the salmon themselves are fed on might attract the sea lice to them, the temperatures and the water conditions in which they find themselves. I would be right in deducing that there are variables, almost to the extent that there is a differential equation and there are so many variables that make it impossible to solve, but are those the variables, nonetheless, that you have to contend with in terms of arriving at the conclusion? Yes. Again, the Norwegian research programme has been the one that perhaps gives the best understanding of the effect of a lot of these variables that you mentioned on it, but they have also said that there is an association across Norway with the health of salmon populations and the levels of sea lice. In general, they find that there is an association that the higher the sea lice levels in an area, the larger the effect on the wild populations. It is correlative. However, they do find exceptions. Of course, because of local circumstances, as we have discussed, we will probably underlie that. One final question on this particular section. The report says that sea lice populations appear to be developing widespread and serious resistance to many existing treatment. Is there any Scottish specific evidence of that? Are we talking global evidence? That is another gap in terms of our understanding on the Scottish level. Okay, thank you. In your report, it says that the methods appear neither to be succeeding in controlling sea lice nor capable of addressing the environmental effects of sea lice, and I quote from 214 in the report. I was addressing the question about whether the evidence for developing resistance of sea lice to chemicals is gained from Scottish work. Let's look at the discharge of waste nutrients. John Scott. Thank you very much. You provide information on what the literature says about EQS for imomectin benzoate. What does your review suggest in relation to possible changes to EQS for EMB in Scotland? I will start by explaining a little bit about imomectin and how it is used. It is an in-feed treatment. It is supplied in the salmon food. It is carried in the blood of salmon. In that way, it gets to the sea lice and certainly damages sea lice growth. It is a systemic insecticide. It reaches the sediment in the feces of the salmon and then can penetrate into the food chain if animals on the seabed then eat salmon feces or eat the bacteria which have eaten salmon feces. An environmental quality standard is something that is set by the regulators to ensure a minimum safe level of the particular chemical, hemomectin, in several different respects. One would be in respect of anything that was going to be eaten by humans. For example, there will be a EQS set for mussels intended for human consumption in order to avoid hemomectin getting into the human diet. Then there are a lower level set for concentration in the material of the sediment in order to protect animals that live in the sediment. The EQS in that case is based on laboratory experiments and a number of test animals, the marine equivalent of white mice. The test animals are things that can be grown well under laboratory conditions and therefore are pretty robust. The experiments basically determine the minimum of the chemical necessary to have a harmful effect on the test animal and then work out what concentration would have no effect on the test animal. This gives us the NEOEC, no effect concentration. It is necessary to introduce a precautionary factor because the test animals are very robust. The precautionary factor might be 10, 100 or 1,000. This is aimed to introduce sufficient precaution so that we can rely on EQS providing adequate protection of the animal community that lives on the seabed. There are two areas where this is now seen as an issue. The first is, are we introducing enough precaution into this because do we know how sensitive certain animals are? The second is, in developing these EQSs, we are talking about the direct effects on particular animals. Are there more general diffuse long-term effects on ecosystems, for example, on the behaviour and reproductive capacity of animals that will not show up as mortality but will interfere? It is at that level that it has proven very difficult to get evidence. Amongst the reasons for that include the necessity of relating sediment concentrations of Mmectin to the state of the animal community in the seabed. The two particular difficulties there, one is that most of the monitoring surveys of Mmectin are not sensitive enough to measure the levels that may be causing harm. Recent improvements in techniques begin to remedy that. The second issue is that the samples for chemical pollutants in the sediment are taken in different places and different times from samples for the biological contents of the sediment. It is very difficult to do a reliable statistical analysis to look at the relationship between the Mmectin content of the sediment and the biological content. One of my colleagues has attempted such an analysis and this is published in a report by the Scottish Agricultural Research Forum. That suggests that there are locks where levels of Mmectin are being detected some way away from the fish farms and that this is correlated with changes in the community of animals in the seabed. From a scientific point of view, you have to say that the confidence we have in those conclusions is only moderately strong. The statistical analysis is the best that can be done, but it is limited by the data available. This is one of the research areas where there is a need to do a specific, probably long-term investigation of a few sea locks where there will be research studies of the levels of these chemicals in the sediment and long-term studies of changes in the communities of animals and including the effects of other potential changes. The other effects which can be confounded with the effects of the medicines are the organic input from the farm. A big farm will have a lot of organic input. It will also use a lot of medicines, and it is difficult to distinguish the two. The two may interact one on the other. I suppose that I very similar to that. This is an area of research. It is an area of further research. From what I have read in a report, it appears that the breakdown of the evidence is linear, almost at the distribution of Ivermectin in terms of distance from the cage. I am more concerned about the effect on other species of the breakdown of the Ivermectins in the sea and the impact that it may have on other sea life. You are really saying that it needs more research to even begin to measure that. Is the breakdown process of Ivermectin—whatever it is properly called—declaring interest as a land-based farmer quite clear and quite well defined? Does it break down into components that are not dangerous in the degrading process? It does eventually break down into non-dangerous components, but as far as I do not know of research on the breakdown products, there is research into the breakdown time, which is around about half a year, typically. It does seem to vary between sediment type and sediment condition. Sediment type can have an effect on the breakdown process and the sediment type is a function of what the fish are fed on in the first. Indeed, what the seabed is composed of also. Exactly. One of the conclusions that I have come to from looking at all the papers that have been published is that there is no standard sea lock. There are a wide variety of physical types with a wide variety of sediment types. I think that it is clearly desirable for each farmer to understand the local conditions, which may favour rapid breakdown of the chemicals in some cases, or may retain them in other cases. There is little published information to tell us what spread of sediment is. Nonetheless, it would be an area that is hugely worthy of full investigation to provide guidelines in due course on suitable locations for future fish farming relative to the type of seabed, not necessarily just because of the species but because of what the seabed is composed of as well in terms of slunches. I agree strongly. We have a precedent for this in the locational guidelines that Marine Scotland started in 2002 and updates regularly. The locational guidelines look at effects on the seabed and the water column. It could be expanded to take into account the sorts of variations in sediment quality that we are talking about. Thank you. Is there any data and analysis gaps? Maybe I have already asked you this question related to the discharge of medicines and chemicals in the environment. If so, how might these gaps be filled and what would the benefit be of filling these gaps? Although I had not read that question up until now, it appears that you have already answered it from my previous question. I have answered it in relation to MMEctin and the sea life treatment medicine. There are two other categories of chemicals. One is antibiotics. The evidence that we have is that they are comparatively little used in Scotland. Vaccination of fish against disease seems to be part of the cause of this. The third category of chemicals are those used in anti-fouling, the paints that are applied to farm structures and the steeps that are used with nets to prevent seaweeds and barnacles growing on the nets. Of course, they are not only used on fish farms, they are used on sailing boats and any more structure in the water. As you may be aware, looking back over the past 20 or 30 years, there has been a big change in the nature of anti-fouling compounds. It was discovered in the late 1980s that tributal tin had very harmful effects on mollusks. Basically, it calls them to change sex. This had rather unfortunate effects on shellfish farms. From this and from other evidence, there has been a major change in the kind of anti-fouling chemicals used, and they are now based on copper and zinc with some organic ingredients. These are less harmful as far as is known, but there are some indications that, again, we don't know the adequate environmental quality standards for some of these chemicals in relation to ecosystem function. Now, this has not been raised as an area of concern so far, but I think it's something that would need to be kept under review if the industry expands, and particularly if it expands in large floating offshore structures that we're going to need anti-fouling treatment. Of those three issues, which would you say was the key one where the Government wanted to be directed towards research? I think that at the moment it's the direct impact of anti-lice chemicals. Can I ask—we're told in the report that the depth-mod model was now thought only to be accurate to 63 to 85 per cent, which is somewhat at odds with an original accuracy estimate of 13 to 20 per cent. That's still Liamann's question. From a scientific perspective, with how much concern should we view that differential? The fact that it's been considerably improved, I think that we should be pleased that it's improved, and we're still working on the models to make them even more accurate and more useful. That was my clumsy attempt to get that on the record, because I read that part of the report three times, and it could have been read two different ways. It's an improvement. I'm glad that I asked that question by half of the committee. Finlay Carson. The question comes from my experience of using ivermectin and cattle in the resulting very slow breakdown of animal dung. Is there any consideration of how, if it was to be withdrawn, what the impact would be on the breakdown of the sediment? Is there any work done on how quickly the sediment breaks down or otherwise with the use of that pesticide? Or should there be? I'll try to answer that. In very general terms, the rate at which fish feces break down and any organic input break down depends on bacterial activity, and that in turn depends on the rate at which seawater containing oxygen can get into the sediments. You might say that one of the key roles for the larger animals that live in the seabed, the worms and the prawns and so forth, is to burrow into the sediment to rework it and to let a flow of water in. So, if these animals are harmed, if their activity slows down, then the rate of reiratio of the sediment will slow down, and so the rate at which the waste material breaks down will slow, and that means that the following period would need to be longer. Should we bear in mind that, if those chemicals are stopped being used, the sediment is likely to break down far quicker and there may be an environmental impact of that? I don't think that we can say that we know that. It is possible to turn it around and say that, if those chemicals are affecting the macroventhic organisms, the re-workers, I think it says in the worms and the creatures like that, if they are being affected widely over the base of a lock, then it means that the general rate of breakdown of organic material will slow down. Let's now cover the issue of the discharge of waste nutrients and their interaction in the way that marine environment in Mark Ruskell. Thank you, convener. I just wanted to linger a little bit longer on the chemicals, though, and just ask about cocktail effects. Is this something that you believe has an evidence research gap? Are there proposals coming through SAF or elsewhere to study what the interactions might be of some of those chemicals? I think that the simple answer is that it is a research gap. I don't know what the situation is with new proposals for research on this. Turning to nutrients then, my understanding is that CEPA are feeding into effectively a sector review that will look at a revised environmental quality standard for Memectin, but it will also look on the nutrients side, introducing a new depositional zone regulation or DZR, which on the face of it could allow the industry to expand but could also increase environmental compliance. I just wondered what your thoughts were, particularly on CEPA's DZR proposal. It's something that we've known about for some time. It hasn't come up to the committee yet, and I'm just wondering how you think that reflects on the research base that you've been looking at. Yes. The change over to DZR, in so much as it has allowed a review of the current way that the fish biomass is consented for a site, is to be welcomed. I think that the prescribed limit of 2,500 tonnes of salmon per site as a maximum had no real basis in evidence. It was an arbitrary figure. I think that the DZR will now allow a more adaptive and responsive management of biomass, which will either be allowed to increase or decrease, depending on the impacts on the benthos. However, as scientists, we don't have any clear understanding of the mechanisms behind the DZR in terms of the detail. It's gone out to consultation and it's widely been consulted on, but we don't have the results of that consultation back. It's difficult to say whether the scientific evidence supports a move to DZR, because we don't know exactly what that move to DZR will mean. Okay. Any other thoughts or views on that? Okay. Perhaps if I could pitch this a slightly different way to you then. You've already mentioned the regulatory regimes that we have in Norway and Iceland that are very much focused on achieving environmental objectives. How do you see DZR, because there has been a consultation on it, so you're aware of what's coming in broad terms. How do you see DZR compared to those regulatory regimes that are very much focused on delivering environmental objectives first and foremost? Yeah. I think I could return us to the topic of adaptive management versus the precautionary principle. Adaptive management is learning by doing. It allows development to go ahead without being absolutely clear about what the environmental effects will be. But it assumes that environmental effects will be monitored and that knowledge of those effects will then change management practice as necessary. One can see the changes to the DZR in that framework, that if it allows or encourages the industry and particular farms to monitor the condition of the seabed in such a way that their management practice changes, then it will be successful. So I understand this is what you mean in saying it's preferable to set a standard and then allow a fish farm to find its own way of achieving that standard rather than to try to regulate it in terms of saying this is the maximum stock that you may hold at a site. So if I'm heading in the right direction I'd like to go on a little more with my answer. So an important question here then is what are the circumstances in which adaptive management can be properly implemented and will succeed? So this clearly requires some changes in the way we all think about it and it includes changes in the way that the public think about what the regulator is required to do. So if the regulator is seen as police there to enforce specific regulations about stock then this sets up a confrontational situation. There is a degree of adaptive management at the moment which comes about because in my experience regulators talk with farmers and in many cases are able to guide the farms in how they may change their practice or their stock without the need for a confrontational court case. But nevertheless I've been associated with the European research programme which has done research into public attitudes and what this leads to is some public concern about whether the regulators are doing their job properly. So in my view an improvement to adaptive management would also include bringing in probably two additional groups of people. One would be research scientists and the other would be one I think of as a citizen scientist. So members of the community who are sufficiently interested in these issues from either the pro-industry or anti-industry side but who are sufficiently interested to be willing to contribute some time in taking part in some aspects of the monitoring process. We have a good example of that in SAMS at the moment in citizen science looking at seashore communities. That would require full transparency from industry? It would require full transparency. There are truly issues around that and this is not something I would recommend as a panacea but it's something I think that could be usedfully introduced under experimental conditions to see how well it works. I'm sure there are some farms, some farming organisations that probably would welcome this approach and would be willing to go along with it. So do you believe then that this DZR approach should be applied to every fish farm including the existing sites in shore or should it just be restricted to expansions or new sites and more exposed locations? Where do you draw the line if this is a good thing? Yes well I think I'm saying that adaptive management is a good thing. I don't have strong views on the change from a allowable zone of effect to DZR. I think what I would like to see is some what you might call experimental social science, some monitoring of not only the environmental conditions at farms which have switched to the new system but also some monitoring of the way management is working and interacting as part of adaptive management process and how the local community feels about this, whether they are engaged, whether it's changing their views of the impact of the industry. Okay and I've got another question again as it relates to nutrients and around the issue of efficiency and the prospect of multi-trophic aquaculture systems obviously producing multiple products. What do you think is the potential for this? I mean if we accelerate to 2030 and the industry's anticipated growth I mean where do you see multi-trophic aquaculture sitting within that? So the concept of integrated aquaculture or multi-trophic aquaculture is as you say the waste products from one production level so in this case salmon can be utilised by seaweeds or by mussels so you reduce the environmental impact and you increase the growth of the species you are co-culturing and the idea is really attractive but the practicalities of it are difficult at a farm scale and you really need to go back to the question of what you're trying to achieve by implementing this multi-trophic system. So if you are trying to balance out nutrient budgets over the scale of a farm it's really quite difficult to do because there's a spatial mismatch between the amount of space it takes to produce a thousand tonnes of salmon and the amount of space it takes to produce a thousand tonnes of mussels and roughly if you want to a thousand-ton fish farm might be a hectare if you want to take up 10% of those nutrients through IMTA you're going to need about 10 hectares of mussels or seaweed so so at a farm scale that's really difficult to imagine that happening because you know that's a huge increase in production at any one site. If you were to start thinking about this at an ecosystem level where you were trying to balance the nutrient inputs from aquaculture and the nutrient reductions from things like muscle farming or seaweed farming then you may get a more viable model, a model that works better when you move away from the farm scale to the ecosystem scale but the benefits of IMTA or integrated aquaculture may be bigger than just looking at nutrient budgets. There's a diversification of aquaculture in there, there's development in new business, small businesses, rural economies, social acceptance of aquaculture so I think if you're the reason you're looking into IMTA is solely to balance nutrient budgets at the scale of a farm then there's a lot of logistical problems with that. If you're looking at it as a more holistic tool to look at an ecosystem for aquaculture to balance social need etc then I think there's more value in it. Okay thank you. Let's move on to the issue of escapes from fish farms and the impact that has agus McDonnell. Okay thanks convener and good morning to panel. Eric Wersper has already touched on the issue of escape escapes earlier however we see in the report that in Scotland between October 2002 and October 2017 approximately 2.2 million Atlantic salmon were reported to have escaped. Now we see what's called or referred to as drip escapes which are difficult to identify and quantify and are not encompassed by reported escape events but it's been estimated in Norway that it is quite substantial and we know of course that the causes of the escapes are human error, holes in the nets, predators and of course the weather. So how concerned should we be about escapes given that in a quote from the report the majority of salmon that escaped from farms will not survive to interact with wild fisheries populations end quote and how can we be sure that the salmon escapes won't survive to interact? The research that's been done in Norway and in part in Ireland indicate that even moderate levels, low levels of integration farm genes into wild populations can affect the normal life history characteristics of the populations in those rivers and once you disturb the normal life history characteristics then you will most likely increase mortality rates so it will compound the mortality rates that will be caused by other factors. In general these populations also show declines over on average so the genetic mixing of farm stocks with wild stocks will almost inevitably have negative consequences if it occurs. In Norway they found levels of mixing of to be highly variable from about 5 to 10 per cent up to 50 to 60 per cent and these are not are generally associated with rivers that are in areas of farming as opposed to rivers that aren't but equally there are some rivers in farming areas that aren't impacted and there are some rivers outside of farming areas which are impacted so it's difficult to predict what they have done in Norway is a system of monitoring they have developed genetic markers that they can go into populations and they can estimate levels of integration so they actually have an indication of the extent to which their impact on the assumption that which is supported quite well by the science that integration will have negative impacts then you can look at then managing that situation and knowing you have to reduce the levels of escapes in those areas to bring those levels of genetic mixing down. This is the adaptive management approach that the Icelandic government is going to be putting in place it has been approved and it will be the way that the industry is guided in the future if there is no evidence for integration the industry on that criteria will be allowed to expand if there is evidence for integration the industry will have to take measures to reduce those levels before it's allowed to expand or they will be asked to decrease production levels to a point where it is no longer a problem this is the principle of adaptive management. In Scotland we have very little information on levels of integration we do know we have evidence historical going back to the early 90s that escaped farm fish do ascend rivers they do reproduce and we have subsequent some evidence of integration but it's imperfect we had to use the Norwegian molecular markers which are specifically designed for Norway in Scotland and that didn't allow us to get an accurate assessment of integration it was suggestive then on the other hand i studied a very small river in on the west coast which is in the middle of a farming area and well we didn't even know there was a wild salmon population there we looked at it there was no evidence of integration despite it being a population probably composed of a few tens of breeding individuals so this can be highly variable the only answer to this is that we need to monitor on a regular basis levels of integration in Scottish wild stocks and then we can manage according to what the actual effect is knowing that if the integration does occur it is extremely likely that there will be negative impacts to some degree probably scaling with the level of integration okay are you aware of any molecular or genetic marking going on in Scotland at all well there's different ways of of actually addressing the issue in Norway they have markers that will indicate whether the level of integration they also have markers which allow them to associate farm escapes with particular cages so if they have a farm escape event they can actually then go to the local farms get samples of fish from those farms and they can then see where those escaped farm or farm fish may have come from and they've been quite successful they can do that using genetic markers or they can also use it by profiling the lipids in in the fish because the feed that they're being given and the can also be quite unique as well in Scotland we tried to apply it's myself mark Coulson who's a co-author on on it tried to apply these Norwegian markers but they weren't accurate enough in terms of distinguishing farm and wild fish we are we've currently just completed a UK research council grant where we're identifying genes for domestication which should give us better markers that allow us to actually go into any river identify farm fish identify hybrids between farm and wild fish and measure the extent of integration not fully but we should be able to do what the Norwegians are doing that is we have now a european structure innovation fund studentship where we will be actually going and looking at historical samples and contemporary samples and looking for evidence of integration okay that's good to hear can you i've got a couple of questions on rest you want me to wait yeah we'll come to that i'm only can i just wrap this section up and just to get clarity on something that's in the report it says at bullet point five point eight experiments to develop triploid strains have so far not proven commercially successful does that mean that it can be done it's just too costly or is it a bigger picture issue than that oh it is it's fairly inexpensive to produce triploids the the question about triploids is their performance the economics of them are they more susceptible to disease do they grow as well and the there has been well since the early 90s people have been playing with triploids to see whether they would be suitable but it's it's sometimes they find that the performance is equivalent sometimes they find the performance is superior other times they find it's inferior but the fact that the industry hasn't taken it up i think suggests that they have for some reason it doesn't work for them it may be public perceptions do people perceive of triploids as being genetically modified depends on your definition of genetic modification john scott other way i'm thinking of livestock farming that you can physically inhibit the breeding characteristics of fresh worthy to escape into the wild is there any other way that you can physically inhibit the breeding characteristics of fish and escapies worthy to escape to the world yes there potentially is i mean so farm strains are currently selected for the traits which are of economic value such as growth rate and delayed maturation or disease resistance but they're also inadvertently selected for domestication so fish that are happy to live in cages tend to survive and and that aren't are more docile but there are other traits which are not of relevance to a production which could be potentially selected for in breeding programs for example the tendency to migrate the ability to reproduce successfully there's a whole behavioral repertoire that's associated with successful reproduction in the wild you don't need that in a farm setting because they're spawned artificially so there's stress related traits as well they're important in the wild you have to be a little bit nervous in the wild in case you get predated upon in farm context it's it's you can change those traits stress related things are not advantageous so yes there are other traits that could be brought in but the gain the immediate economic gain in terms of production isn't there but there could be a longer term environmental gain by making them less able to breed in the wild so they don't run up rivers to spawn for fish that want to stay at home want to stay near their cage and stay near their source of food are likely to be the ones that do best anyway yes exactly there is some potential that it hasn't been explored yet there is some some how do you say hope that in the coming years we might explore those possibilities fascinating thank you let's move on to feed supplies Richard Lyle paltet actually touched on my question earlier and was i think it was one of your top issues in regards to sustainability of feed supplies including substitution within plant derived ingredients so we went up from 130 tons to 170 odd tons fish salmon being farmed we want to double that to over 300 tons so basically how do we feed and can we sustain and if norways doing the same how can we feed the fish and what it mean as your report said that increasing salmon production in scotland and elsewhere i norway will necessarily increase the demand for raw materials for feed required additional sustainable source of omega-3 could be obtained from wait for it transigenic or organic crops oil seed or as commonly known as GM crops oops nobody wants that in scotland we banned it so what do we do so i think the the inclusion of marine ingredients in uh salmon feed is mainly an issue driven by the consumer so in norway it's down to about 20 percent in scotland it's around 25 percent marine ingredients as part of the fish feed but that that's because the UK consumer prefers a product which is higher in marine ingredients which is seen as more natural because it's fed on fish so there has been complete substitution of marine oils for vegetable oils in salmon feed and there's very little difference in the growth rates so but what you don't have at the end of that process is you don't have a product which is full of omega-3 oils which are good for public health so i think the the substitution of marine ingredients can continue as as far as we want for terrestrial ingredients but we lose a lot of the health benefits and a lot of the consumer acceptance of the product so for the greatest respect to me i you um what is the answer is the answer to allow GM crops is it is it um to try and look at you know and the point my colleague made earlier two million fish lost 25 percent of them culled you know so they were fed so does the industry need to get better in order to sustain and to grow or do we just let you know do we do we just let rip and let everything come back in which i don't think a lot of people would agree but i think the issue of GM is something for society to decide Scotland's made a very clear statement that uh they don't want GM products to be farmed in Scotland as i understand so that that's a societal decision that's been made it's nothing to do with the science necessarily so uh other options are the there's at the moment most of the or a large proportion of the marine ingredients is sourced from uh South America from the the uh anchovetta fisheries uh along the Peruvian coast uh those fisheries are at the limit of their sustainable exploitation though most of them are well managed there there's no real room for expansion there the there is an increasing use of discards and fish byproducts to create fish oil and that has in some respects met that demand but i think there are developing technologies uh micro algal oils uh bacterially produced oils which may produce the oils that's required to go into the fish feed only so that we can get the public health benefit out of eating those salmon and that that shouldn't be underestimated because salmon is a major source or the omega threes to the Scottish population and uh that has huge health benefits so last question do you honestly think the industry's desire to double the production in the next number of years is achievable on would you like to pass on that question on terms of feed production i think it is achievable because no matter what the Scottish industry does the Norwegian industry is going to be an order of magnitude 10 times larger than the Scottish industry and they will have to come up with solutions for exactly the same problem so there are technological solutions out there there are societal solutions out there it's what we choose to adopt thank you cross call mentioned the um south american um anchivetta fishery um at what point do you think within the next 10 to 15 years will that fishery start to tip over its total allowable catch at which point will it be exceeding maximum sustainable yield and will therefore be in a state of collapse i don't have that information i'm afraid that's outside my area of expertise it's fishery's management group as i understand it it is sustainably managed at the moment which means it's managed at maximum sustainable yield so there is much fluctuation from year to year depending on the al nino cycle but it seems unlikely that we can expect much more fish from that fishery um and if it's not managed sustainably well we might get more fish from it for a few years but then we will have exhausted it but the the present information is that it is managed sustainably and it's giving us as much as it can so there are probably there are there are there don't seem to be any other major sources of fish oil available from the natural world at the moment okay so we're at the limit yes thank you could i just could i add one more thing because the one um adam mentioned one of the possible technologies is is growing what the industry calls micro algae to produce omega threes um in fact they're not what i would call algae because they don't photosynthesize the the promising method seems to be a sort of fermentation technology so it's more like brewing so my guess here is Scotland is pretty good at brewing so maybe this is an industry we we could develop okay thank you i have a brief question about acoustic deterrent devices adds and specifically it's around the assertion in the report 7.1.5 that most acoustic deterrent devices are left to operate continuously can i ask what evidence there is for that because i seem to recall in the last parliament in the racket committee we were told that these devices would and should only be used in short bursts as otherwise they'd be harmful to the wider marine environment our occupants of the wider marine environment so that would be quite a concerning assertion in the report i just want to flash that out briefly okay so i think this this this comes to me again but i confess that i don't know the precise answer to that the what i'm aware of is there's very limited available documentation on what sort of devices he used and under what conditions and what is there what is there for how long they operate and for how long they're they're not operating so how have you backed up that assertion then okay i can't answer that directly we will find out that's been written by one of the other experts at sam's and we can look into that for you could you come back to me on that because that's a face value that's an obvious concern because it does raise a question of the need for consistent add monitoring and perhaps a licensing regime that's quite an important point if you could come back to us on that okay let's move on to the issue of ras angus mcdonald convener during the course of the aquaculture bill in 2014 the former racket committee took evidence during a fact finding visit to lochabar and at that time marine harvest were already using ras to control lice infestations now i'm not sure when they introduced them but there seems to be more and more widespread use of ras since then in fact according to the report official statistics show that 1.7 million lump suckers and 1 million ras were bought by the industry in 2016 so overall does the evidence show that the commercial rearing of ras and lump suckers is a sustainable approach to controlling lice in the Scottish salmon industry and do you have any concerns about future increased demand for cleaner fish particularly given that salmon production is set to increase significantly in scotland and in norway which presumably there's only so many of the ras that can be bought so demand will be pretty excessive is the question for me again so the the information we have is that cultivation of lump suckers seems to be capable of supplying the demand the situation is not so clear cut with with ras so information from the industry suggests that they would like to be able to rear to cultivate all the ras they use to cultivate by this is by 2019 but it's not clear whether that's an achievable target so if it's not achievable then clearly the demand for wild ras will continue and in that case then i think there will be a need for fisheries management of the ras fishery following the example that's begun to be developed in southwest england where there's a local fisheries management board that has successfully managed the ras fishery in such a way that it provides a sustainable source of employment for people in that part of the country and much of the export of those ras then comes to scotland okay okay thanks and the colour question if the use of cleaner fish is so widespread why is lice still a problem so this is where we need more research i mean i suppose what what seems to be the case is that the industry probably needs a whole portfolio of different lice control methods some biological some chemical some physical but i have not seen published information as to what is the optimum mixture of the different methods and again it might vary from site to site depending both on the cultivation conditions for the salmon and the hydrographic conditions in which the farm is situated certainly temperature plays a part as as well rassa warm water fish lump suckers are cold water fish so the northern norwegians prefer lump suckers both because they grow more quickly when they're reared um and because they're more active in the cold temperatures in northern norway um so that's an issue which i think is still to be decided in the scottish fishery we hear a lot about ras but when you look at the numbers then clearly lump suckers are also important and if i remember rightly um lump suckers can be reared in a few months whereas ras take more than a year to to rear in a hatchery so they're clearly economic aspects here okay thanks thanks very much let's just as we move to wrap this up a ton to mitigation um Alex Rowley i must confess to you when i saw the BBC programme i thought that the ras or lump suckers that was the solution but in the report itself you talk about the recirculating agriculture systems um enclosed systems which would seem to be the solution so i suppose the question is what are the main environmental concerns related to enclosed systems could they become the main means of some in production in scotland uh for the future is that the answer if not why not if yes um just looking at the environmental side uh the probably the main concerns with recirculation systems are dealing with the solid waste which comes out of uh because you still generate the same amount of solid waste except you're generating it either in land or an enclosed system at sea so that needs to be dealt with some way it's a saline waste so it may not be suitable for uh the standard things like uh uh biodigesters etc which you might use on a farm but there are you can run a biodigester on saline waste it just needs to be dedicated to that uh or you know there's other ways of reusing that land uh reusing that uh material in terms of the disease control obviously you have much better disease control including lice control that you you are controlling the water that comes in and you're controlling controlling what goes out so it is certainly an option for uh development of the industry and one of the reasons the the industry is so interested in it is because of to try and reduce the uh impact of lice so but i go back to my earlier comments about the economics and making it uh economically viable for the industry uh to to develop that but we also as i say had the societal concerns that the perception of natural this is unnatural uh and also when you to make some of the economics work for recirculation systems you increase the stocking density well beyond what you you would do in an open water system again that has animal implications it also animal welfare implications also has societal implications about where we judge those standards to be so i suppose in terms of natural it depends on what we define as being natural in terms of the salmon that you see packed into these cages but i think john scott said earlier that it was more an ingenium solution that that you would be looking at for this could you say a bit more about the economic set would that would that mean far more investment by the salmon producers the companies in order to to reach a situation where where we had these these enclosed systems that were much safer environmentally okay the the capital expenditure to set up a recirculation plan is much more expensive than to set up an open water cage system and all as are your running costs to a certain degree but that that all depends on how much you offset against having the better control of that life cycle and a lower disease impact so i can't make an economic analysis that's something for the salmon companies to do but obviously at the moment that economic balance is not tipping towards recirculation systems or so it would be wider spread adoption of the technology so okay can i finally to just ask throughout this evidence session that there is it seems to me a lucky data in so many areas in a lucky research in so many areas and the norwegians seem to be so much further ahead in us in terms of investment and in terms of research would that be a fair analysis of conclusion to draw in my opinion absolutely absolutely i think the level of investment in research in norway is much higher than it is in scotland but also the level of technology development within this norwegian agriculture industry is much more advanced than what we have in scotland so okay thank you john scott um thank you and finally um you've spoken at some length about adaptive management systems um and i think you've pretty well said that that would be a good idea for to pursue that as a direction of travel would you just like to agree that i would like to agree yes absolutely just so that we have it on the record very definitely it's essentially evidence-based management in in an adaptive way so you as your evidence accumulates your management gets better because you're basing it on this expanding body of information and understanding of the system and in a real-time basis too i think you've said given the ability that we now have that we didn't have probably even 10 years ago to real in real time understand populations of lies and things indeed and i think there i think there is also the very important point that paul made and that is to also include communities individuals and society in a way that perhaps hasn't been included currently to minimise conflicts yes we take that more too thank you very much i'm fine we find we two very brief supplementaries mark ross call then claudia bimish just just further on that point you spoke earlier on about adaptive management versus the precautionary approach i mean isn't the reality that we need a kind of hybrid because there are still elements and we talked earlier about cocktail effects of chemicals where perhaps a precautionary approach may be needed but there are other elements where we've got some understanding there's a lack of monitoring and research is that fair to characterise that or do you see it as very you have precautionary approach or you have adapted no no no i think what you say is very apt yes i mean we need a mixture of precaution and adaptive management of course it's a judgment about how much precaution is needed and i think that that judgment goes back to what the risks of any particular issue you know are the risks likely to be unmitigatable in the long term or are they risks that we can recover from so the research that has to be done has to be on the monitoring of the levels to to look at compliance with standards but the research has to also be into the standards because we often don't understand enough to know what is a standard that is appropriate or not so really and that's part of adaptive management is is both monitoring and researching your standards and finally Claudia Beamish thank you convenient going forward could i ask if any of you wish to comment from a scientist perspective on the relationship or indeed not of fish funds and marine protected areas and other marine protections in terms of whatever you want to say briefly i was an author on a paper that dealt with this issue across europe last year so i think the the the conclusions that the working group we were involved with at the paper together was that mpa's normally have a specific purpose why they've been designated an mpa so it may be mull beds it may be transitory cetacean populations so what if aquaculture is to be cited within those mpa's and there's a lot of examples in scotland where aquaculture is cited in within mpa's you need to understand what the impacts of that aquaculture industry is going to be on the specific designation of or this specific objective of the protection of that mpa so uh you know if the mpa was around mull beds for instance the example you used we you wouldn't put uh a finfish farm over the top of it but if the mpa was around wading birds for instance or a shoreline teacher and and the farm was off the coast then as long as appropriate process has been through and and this scotland has quite a robust system for this then the using risk assessment approach that there is no impact on the conservation feature that the mpa is trying to protect then there is no reason why mpa's and aquaculture can't coexist in the same space thank you very much for your time this one that's been very useful in teasing out some of the detail on the report as i say thank you for your time and we will suspend now for five minutes to allow for a change of witnesses thank you welcome back to we will now take evidence on the Scottish Government's draft climate change plan rpp3 i want to welcome christ start director of energy and climate change claire hamilton the deputy director and head of decarbonisation and michael king the head of energy in the climate change unit welcome to you all apologies for the delay in kicking off this part of the evidence session i want to start this off by asking for some information around specific changes that may be made to the plan as a result of stakeholder engagement since the publication of the draft so good morning everyone i'm very happy to answer that question if i could i'd just like to make a short detail just to explain briefly what's happened since january and then i'll answer that question specifically so we've done we've done an awful lot of work since january since the draft plan and indeed i've been before you to talk a bit about that and in febru you'll see the product of all that i hope you'll like it but there are four ways in which i would categorise that and the stakeholder work is one of the one of those aspects so let's start with that the first thing is that we've been through quite an extraordinary amount of scrutiny actually and we've done on top of that a lot of work with stakeholders in each of the sectors and on the plan itself which i'll talk about just a second we've also done a few other things though we've developed our model and mike here is the architect of that we have made quite a number of revisions to the data so that we are more accurate in the way that we view the future and we've also introduced some new measures and it's probably there that you see the biggest interaction with the stakeholder work so over the past 12 months i think there's a really good story actually of how much we have done to amend to consider and to respond and that has included this work with stakeholders so i mean i mean there's been a heck of a lot done both by my team but also by the what we know as the sector teams that is the teams that work on each of the sectors within the climate change plan and we can talk about that in a second just a few highlights really from some of those things we've worked very extensively with the public sector which is something i know that the committee's been very interested in and i've done a number of things as the cabinet secretary to work with various aspects of the of the public sector to understand their views and we might also draw in just a couple of examples of where we've done some deeper stakeholder work and we will i'm sure refer to on a number of occasions in this appearance the plan that we're bringing together on energy efficiency this year and that has been very informed by a number of stakeholder sessions that we've held and we are in the midst now of putting the final detail around the plan which i hope will be a 20-year plan for improving the energy efficiency of particularly the building stock in Scotland which is greatly influenced by stakeholders particularly industry stakeholders and i might also i might also draw your attention to the transport work which has also been you know an area where we've responded i think especially to the views of this committee in setting new policies most obviously in the programme for government around what we know as youleves ultra low emission vehicles and active travel and and low emission zones all of those things really are the product of deep stakeholder engagement and i'm personally quite proud of the fact that we've done that but what specific examples could you give us of changes let's let's go beyond the stakeholders let's look at the criticisms that the parliamentary committee has made of the original plan the draft could you give us examples of changes that have been made directly as a consequence of those that commentary so let me draw i should probably preference this by saying i can't reveal the final plan as you'd expect that something in February although i do my best to tell you as much i can about it the two areas where i think we felt particularly it was particularly important to respond one in ccs and and i might add into that ccs plus biofuels and the criticism we received on what i think we can describe as a highly ambitious projection for decarbonised heat and we've worked really hard to mend that in the final plan again without revealing it so we we we certainly feel my team at least feels that the the work we've done with transport especially helps us to address i think the very legitimate criticism of that decarbonised heat run and i think we i might also agree that the projections we had for ccs particularly with for negative emissions were highly ambitious so these are things that we've been able to amend and you will see in the final plan they're very much a direct product of that scrutiny and that criticism that we received at the time so again without giving you full details of how we've responded to that these are areas where i think you can look forward to seeing quite a different plan in the future okay okay let's move on and look at the monitoring and evaluation framework Kate Forbes along similar lines you were discussing there at the impact that stakeholder engagement has had on the draft plan how has the Scottish Government engaged with stakeholders and could the committee on climate change in terms of developing the monitoring and evaluation framework so again it's another area where i don't mind seeing in january when we published the draft plan uh this was not not as fully fleshed as i hoped it would be so we've done a lot of work again on monitoring evaluation and i think we will continue to do that work so um we have done uh with the ccc some advanced work to to show them uh how we are planning to develop the framework for monitoring and evaluation we did that um by going to them early so demonstrating particularly i think might with the electricity sector how we might set some um some metrics and crucially how we would embed that properly in the plan and the and in the policies that that's sitting in that plan for each of the sectors um what you will see in febru when we produce the final plan is a very well i hope at least a very well embedded set of metrics around that allow you to monitor and evaluate how we are doing in the future um i i want to see here that that is very much an ongoing process so i mentioned earlier for example the the energy efficiency plan that we're bringing together at the moment at the end of that when we produce that plan and the current assumption is that we'll do something in may to launch the final plan um we will alongside the development that policy also consider how we'll measure it so it's it's a in each sector there is a very live process of considering ways in which we can track progress against the things that we say that are important um one of the ways that we'll do that in the future is by producing an annual report plan to do that in october this year um the it's difficult to talk in substance about how each of those things look until you see the plan itself but there are i think a good set of metrics and crucially they're timely so you'll be able to see in most occasions at least in most sectors at least that you know when when we are off track or when we are on track that will be something you'll be able to track annually at least and something that this committee I'm sure will be interested in in the future it's an ongoing process and in that sense I suppose there is a role for this committee in defining how you want to scrutinise those things too so that's a that's something that I'm sure you'll want to return to once you see the final plan um again it's been a process there has been a stakeholder process alongside those things so we think these are metrics and forms of valuation that will mean something to each of the key stakeholders in each of those sectors and it's something I hope that's that's live in the sense that we don't set them and let them go there are things that as the policies and proposals develop in each of those sectors we'll also develop the monitoring and evaluation framework very live thing but in the plan in febru I think you'll be happier with that we have a proper framework around this happier at least than that it has improved at least since febru when we spoke okay sorry you suggested earlier you would publish the annual report in october of this year is that the intention timing wise for future years because that would actually sit relatively well with the budget yeah I mean that that's the intention but again I think it's up to you if you like see something different then I'm sure we can we can accommodate that okay I think that's something we can reflect upon as a committee let's move on to emission onvolts and ambitions John Scott. Thank you very much convener and I'm pleased to hear that you've been interacting with stakeholders and developing the draft plan and I just wonder what progress you've made and I appreciate you may or may not be able to tell us of course but the level of ambition for emission reductions in the transport sector and the agriculture sector and again have to declare an interest as a farmer but if you could tell us a little bit about that would be very grateful so I mentioned earlier the four ways in which we've been amending the plan and you've picked out to the sectors where you will probably see the you know the product of that when it comes to transport I don't mind saying that we will have you know I think greater ambition here that you can see that written into the programme for government for example and a great deal of that has card say that a great deal of that is climate led so you know of a programme on transport that is responsive to the critiquing and criticism that we received on the draft plan and you know I'm I hope at least in the plan that you that you scrutinise in the future once it's published that you will see a greater ambition around transport and I think it's worth saying though that any specific areas that you want well I don't mind drawing out the things that were published so you as you might expect there is an impact from uh or well let me deal with the three issues in transport as I see them um there is the active active travel package um which is I think actually one of the one of the biggest things that we've done the headline grabbing thing was the the commitment on ULEVs which is eight years in advance of a similar commitment from the UK government and then there are low emission zones which are probably one of our primary routes to achieve the things that we say we want to achieve with transport um all I think that amounts to really quite an ambitious package on transport there was already quite an ambitious package on transport um and I think it's worth saying that it's not that in any sense the thing that we published last year was weak I just feel that there is more that we could do and I'm pleased that we've done it and you'll see that reflected in the plan. On agriculture I think there's a more interesting story that in each of the sections we have come to understand better as we've refined our analysis how we need to approach the climate objectives that we've set for ourselves we've understood more and more about how difficult it is in agriculture and even land use to and I'm keen not to leave you with any impression that we've stepped back in ambition from agriculture but we have understood it is harder let's put it that way and I think you will see that in the plan too again without revealing exactly what's in it. I suppose we have discovered and budget scrutinated the need for perhaps greater dissemination of information from our esteemed science community who do have some of the solutions and that dissemination of knowledge to rural communities I think needs to be better developed also that there is actually and I'm a great believer in the carrot rather than the stick approach but I do think that there's perhaps a lack of awareness within the rural communities that this is something that the government is immensely keen on there's a message to be put out there better than perhaps it has been thus far. Would you like to comment on that? I think I might agree with that and I go back to my earlier point that we have come to understand more and more about the challenges in agriculture and agriculture is doing very well as a sector in terms of its carbon absorption and indeed emission. I'm just drawing up the stats now 2015 so that agriculture emissions are downable in 25 per cent from baseline levels so that I mean there is a nice trend there that we would like to see continue. I think it is a more difficult sector to decarbonise and attitudes in the agriculture sector matter immensely to that so I might agree with you there that there is more that we can do with that sector to try and make this known to be a government priority. I would say there's an enormous level of ingenuity within that sector and if it becomes a mindset of practising farmers and those involved in the industry that this is something that we all actually want to really achieve subconsciously I think that that would have in its own way over the long term an effect. I think that we talk occasionally about co-benefits which is not always a very accessible term but there are benefits in every sector to addressing climate change they vary and developing a low-carbon agriculture sector is also, I hope, a means to see that sector continue to thrive in the future. I think that those are the arguments that we all need to make harder in the course of this plan. I don't believe that they're incompatible. Thank you. I wanted to ask about transport because the original plan was predicated on an increase in vehicle miles of I think about 27 per cent which obviously makes a big difference to the plan. Now when Hamza Yousaf was in front of this committee giving evidence on air quality on 5 December he said to the committee that we don't predicate our approach on increasing traffic he went on to say it would certainly give me concern if local transport strategies were predicated on increasing number of car journeys what will the final climate plan be predicated on? We draw here on the work of my colleagues in transport and it's fair to say they have a well-developed and probably probably the most developed few of appraising projects in the future that involves using what's called the transport model in my mind. It does have within it a set of assumptions and we have not tried to change those assumptions although I would say if we are successful in implementing the act of travel package I would expect those assumptions to change in the future and you will see that. I think it's important to see that those... Sorry could I interrupt just briefly. The transport minister has said that you do not predicate your approach on increasing traffic that's in relation to air quality you're saying the approach in the climate plan is still based is still predicated on increasing levels of traffic. There are a set of assumptions. A bit of a mismatch. No, there are a set of assumptions that are contained within the modelling that is done by my transport colleagues that we are happy to adopt so we take them. They are not predictive in the sense of it. With which set of assumptions? I'm afraid I'm not familiar specifically on them. There isn't going to be an increase in traffic or assumptions that there will be an increase in traffic. I don't know the specifics of it I'm sorry but I know that we don't have a separate climate model for transport. We fall behind how the transport view the future. They're not designed to be self-fulfilling prophecies however so that I would expect if we are successful in some of the things that we're trying to do in transport that those assumptions themselves would change. They're exogenous to the model that we use. So just to be clear is the minister wrong? I've made no statement about whether the minister's right or wrong. I'm afraid I don't have the data in front of me to answer that question. Is the statement contradicts perhaps the data that is being received by your transport Scotland colleagues in producing the climate plan? I wouldn't want you to infer that I'm making any judgment at all but Mr Yousaf's view of the future. I'm willing to explain how we adopt the climate model and the transport models. Claudia Beamish Thank you. Good morning to you all. I've got one very brief question on transport and one supplementary to John Scott's on agriculture. Is it the case that in terms of our recommendation as a committee in transport as one of the heaviest emitters that there was no rerun of the models? Is that the case? We recommended that there should be a rerun and to have more of a focus on active travel in that. I respect the fact that there have been increases in funding for active travel and all those issues, but I'm just asking for clarification. I'm going to turn to my colleague mate. Let's just explain to the committee exactly how we've approached the transport work in the last element. The transport analysis, as Chris Sayaw was focusing on a report that was commissioned by Transport Scotland, which was produced by Ailman Energy, which Sayaw a pathway for the transport sector. That analysis has been updated since then over the summer to take account of the programme for government commitments. That is the transport analysis, which now informs the development of the final plan. That is deemed to be the best analysis or the most up-to-date evidence for how emissions will evolve within the transport sector. We have then taken that analysis and adopted that within the wider times framework to understand what the impacts are for all the sectors within the times model framework. That is the approach that we have taken to transport and modelling. If I am understanding, in layperson's terms, and I don't think that I will ever understand the times model because I'm sure I won't, does that mean that the active travel commitments in the government and the increase in the budget in the programme for government have now been included in your deliberations? Yes, thank you. Following on from my colleague John Scott's question, I respect his views, obviously, as someone who is a farmer. However, I would highlight that it is agriculture, along with transport, and housing are the heaviest emitters. Is there, in your view, a place for some compulsory focus, as well as the voluntary support that I agree with? My colleague is very important. I just highlight the fact that it may be difficult in agriculture. It is more diffuse, but in transport we have a number of compulsory arrangements that are being developed. They are in part to do with pollution, but they are also in part to do with climate change and congestion and other issues. Can we have a comment on that, please? I don't feel that I'm equipped to make a judgment on the most appropriate policy measure, as I am content with what is in the plan, however. However, you have already made a comment on agriculture in terms of thinking that there is some agreement from you with John Scott, so I am asking for your comment on the other side of the coin. I acknowledge that it is important that we take food producers, farmers with us in this process. We have discussed the many reasons why that is a good idea. I would love to be able to say exactly what is in that plan, but I think that you will not agree with me. I suppose that the right way to answer your question is that we will monitor the progress against the goals that we have set in that plan, against when the monitoring and evaluation framework will come in. If we are not on track, then we will reevaluate our approach. In those cases where you are right to raise the transport example, that is where we have built a good evidence base to do the things that we are doing. I think that the agricultural work is good, and I think that in the future we will see the extent to which it maintains that trend that we have already seen. If there is an element of greater compulsion required, then if the evidence supports it, that is something that we can return to and reevaluate in our approach. However, you are with our previous committee in the last session. I had concerns that it was perhaps time for there to be more compulsion. I will just highlight that. Can I clarify something that I hope you will be able to answer? The elements of the programme for government around transport facilitate considerable improvement in the performance of that particular sector. Does that take the plan in terms of overall ambition to a more ambitious place, or has there been any rollback in any other sectors that would mean that, effectively, it is neutral in its performance? There are certainly not terms that I would recognise. Have we readjusted amongst that? I would not use those terms, but have we readjusted between the sectors? Yes. For example, to address the very legitimate criticism that our projections on heat decarbonisation were very ambitious, we have made the plan, I think, more realistic. One of the ways in which we are able to do that is by being more ambitious in some sectors than we were in January. I think that transport is one of those. We are still conscious of the need to—we will need to be incredibly successful in rolling out of this plan if we are to meet our targets, even the targets that we have now. I believe that we will be, but the harder we make this by having a harder headline target, the more we need to focus on making that a success. That basically requires us to be very conscious in every sector about how much ambition we have. My ambition is that we overshoot wherever possible. Again, you will see that in the plan. To be clear, you are saying that there will be changes there that might bring a raised eyebrow, but they are based on an outbreak of realism, as opposed to just deciding that it was probably too difficult to do. Definitely. That is a very good way of capturing it. Okay. Let us move on to policies, proposals and assumptions. I am Angus MacDonald. Yes, thanks, convener. I think that this has partly been covered, convener, but clearly everyone needs a plan B, and our committee report last March recommended the inclusion of a plan B, where particular assumptions have been made that might prove to be unfounded, particularly as you mentioned in the case of CCS. Just for clarification, as I say, you have mentioned CCS in your opening remarks. Have you produced any plan B time scenarios, should any of the significant assumptions that were made in the plan, for example, that the reliance on CCS failed to be deliverable? It might be worth saying just a little bit more about CCS, because I know that that is something that has been interesting to the committee. This is another area where you will see, I think, a change. I have made some reference to that. The plan, I do not mind telling you specifically, without saying specifically what is in it, we are not projecting CCS before 2030, so, effectively, this is a plan without CCS, and that is what we will publish. It remains essential, however, to the future, so the effort that we have been making in the past 12 years to maintain CCS as an option with the funds and resources that are available to us in the Scottish Government is essential about making sure that we have that option available to us, and we are very pro-CCS. I am unhappy with referring to it as a plan B, however, so you would not be surprised to hear me say that. This is a plan that still has CCS in it, albeit this is a set of projections, now it does not rely on it, so that is the best way to describe it. There are some other areas where we are changing the plan. It is, however, a plan, so I want to be clear on that. This is the Government's plan. We have thought a lot about, for example, scenarios and presenting those things in different ways, and we have concluded that this is the best way of going about this, we think, is to set a single plan, but to open ourselves up to scrutiny. One of the ways in which we will do that in the future, as I have said to the committee before, is that we will put the model out, we will allow others to do the inquisition that allows others to produce some of the scenarios that I know you have asked for in the past, and use that as a basis in which we might discuss future iterations of the plan. You will see a single plan, it is a plan A, albeit amended, since the one that was published in January last year. Touched on agriculture, does the plan refer to any specific requirements regarding soil testing? It was also commented on at earlier committee time about the lack of information regarding blue carbon. Is there any mention of the potential of blue carbon? Blue carbon, very happily, I can report, will be a part of the plan, and that is a really good story of the scrutiny that this process has put us under. I am quite excited by some of the things that are happening in blue carbon. I should say on blue carbon, although you will find that in the plan, it is not yet a part of the greenhouse gas emissions inventory. You will see a plan for that to be the case in the future, and I think that Scotland should very much be in the lead on those things, given all the advantages that may come from having that as part of our inventory. Blue carbon, you will see in the plan, and indeed there is a good story there. On soil testing and how compulsory it is, I am afraid to have to wait till February to read it. I would draw back to the story that I spoke earlier about when we spoke about the agricultural sector more generally. The elements of compulsion have been subject to a great deal of scrutiny in this committee and in others, and there has been a very active internal process, too, that has led to the set of policies that you will see in the final plan. On the subject of realism, given that the funding that is available in the draft Scottish budget for peatland restoration is considerably less than the current budget, has the draft plan target to double planned peatland restoration being reduced? Well, you have to wait to publish the plan, of course, but the— God loves a trial. God loves a trial indeed. I suppose that the other thing to say is that we are still very actively discussing some of these things, so I do not want to be too dismissive of the question, because there are still areas in which we are doing our best to resolve the final plan. I therefore feel very comfortable saying to you that February is the appropriate point when I want to talk about those things. It may be important enough simply to say that peatland restoration we know is very important, and indeed we have done the analysis to show how important that is. We noted, of course, the draft budget and the impact that it has, and I think that it is important to say that I am very hopeful that peatland restoration will continue to be funded in the way that I am sure that this committee would like to see it funded. The budget is part of that planning, and I am sure that there will be future iterations of budgets. And in a way that is capable of delivering on a doubling of the target? Well, you have to wait to see the target, wouldn't you? But I note your interest. It is a very strong interest in the— Sorry, I recognise the issues around budget, of course, and, of course, some of the additional sums last year were drawn down from other sources. There is a legitimate issue here, but it is obviously an equally important contributor to our performance around these matters. I am desperate not to be slippery, so I do want to say that peatland restoration is very important, and it is remarkable how big the impact is in future years. Far break for me to try and direct the committee. One of the areas where co-benefits are really important is that they are developing for a number of reasons for pursuing a policy of peatland restoration, and we will be making that argument, of course, internally, as you would expect us to. What of quality, exactly. Indeed, what of quality. Building an industry around those things is another one of those arguments. There are certainly employment opportunities around that. Absolutely. Okay, thank you for that. Let's explore behavioural change at Richard Lyle, and I think Alex Rowley wants to find out as well. Good afternoon. Behavioral change. Basically, the plan will only work if the public buy into it. So would you agree that changing behaviour will need to contribute to the plan? In particular, would we propose, you may want to tell me yes or no in this one, to have solar panels on new build as a policy to encourage people to do that? Electric car charging points on new build, you know, like you used to, you could plug in your phone or plug in your wi-fi, now you can plug in your car, or in fact change the way that street furniture is that we could have charging points on street furniture. So the whole gambit is behavioural change what we're going to do to encourage the public to change. So can I introduce the committee to the concept of carrots and sticks and tambourines and this is the way in which we've been considering things in the future. Our policy development in the past, certainly not under our watch of course, has been littered by the policies that haven't met the third element of that, and that is the feeling of being compelled to do something or wanting to do something. And there's been a great deal of work, for example, done on the green deal, which you may think about as an example of a policy that hasn't worked as well as was intended when that policy was used at UK level. And I believe passionately the reason that that doesn't work is because it was principally a financial instrument and it didn't have the tambourine element, which incidentally is about the feeling of wishing to do something. I am, I could not agree more with the way in which you summarised that. We will not be successful unless there is a change in behaviour. I think it requires though a very deep consideration of the appropriate way in which we change that behaviour. So the concept of carrots and sticks and tambourines is one that we've been thinking particularly closely about when it comes to the energy efficiency programme I talked about, which is I think at least a two decade programme to see an overall improvement in effectively the quality of the building stock in Scotland. And we add in a load of other things to that programme too. But to be successful we probably need a programme that for the first part of that 10 years looks more at incentives and the second half looks more at the harder edge stuff. And it is the foresight that builds the industry, the force of knowing that that will come. So your right to raise those things, I think they will be enormously important. How we plan the built environment around us in particular is one of the areas where I think we will need to be much clearer about the way in which we need to see things change and give suitable foresight that an industry can respond and the consumers can respond in their behaviour. I'm very keen on the idea of having a better regional or local plan around all those things and you'll see in the energy strategy that we published just before Christmas written into the kind of DNA in that strategy is the idea that we will need better localised planning around the whole energy system and that is heat, power and transport or the built environment and the idea that actually what we need is a well integrated set of localised plans for those things that would cover the issues that you've referred to in your question like charging points, like solar panels on roofs, I could go on like recovery of waste heat, those sorts of things. I believe that there is a grand endeavour actually over the next two decades that will require everyone to understand better how they will fit into that plan, it will require us to have a different plan for the central belt from the Highlands and Islands for example and behind all of that is a harder edge set of things including building standards and the regulatory tools and legislation that we will need to put in place to make that work but we won't do it through those things alone, we'll need some tambourines along the way too. In relation to electric charging points and I think to a lesser extent solar panels you'll have been encouraged by recent announcements by certain house builders that they're going to take this approach voluntarily. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about so the promise even of a harder edge, the approach to this is often enough to catalyse the change in the market and that kind of time horizon, I mean forget that we're talking about infrastructure here so decades is the correct time horizon unless we are well planned now on that then I don't think we will we can expect the industry to respond nor can we expect consumers to respond the right way. Many years ago people never thought of having a telephone plug-in point in the house now it's standard, Wi-Fi standard but the last question if you allow me convener what was the last time we advertised on television to say don't go in your car, have a wee walk down to the local shop? I don't know, I think it's a perfectly good question because we have a set of policies and marketing strategies that we pursue including ones under the ban of greener Scotland so I will forthwith go away and find out. Put it in the plan and put the tambourine in also. I agree let's have some tambourine. Thank you. I might be asked a couple of points there but you talked about the bill environment so has there been clear discussion and will we be able to look at for example the draft planning bill that's making its way through Parliament just now and the climate change plan and be able to see clearly where where these two fit? So I've learned in my time in this job then planning for a very good reason doesn't move very quickly and it's quite right that it doesn't and indeed what's very important in making any change to planning is that there is a good strategy in the first place for the things that you're trying to achieve and I think we now have that on energy and climate issues and I hope now that the planning regime will will will follow that and it seems to me that's the right way to do it. But given the legislation that's going through now will we be able to as a committee look at that and say yeah there is clearly the opportunity there through the planning I think you will so to be able to to be able to drive these kind of initiatives and developments and and have you been working at that? Yes so the planning bill is of course a really important important process for all of us but it's especially important for us given the issues that I've just talked about. If I could draw your attention to a couple of things really the one is a consultation that is in the second stage of consultation now around local heat and energy efficiency planning and it is basically the blueprint for the thing that I've just described to you so it's a very local authority led approach to local plans around energy efficiency and heat and it's not a great leap to think we might add into that transport planning and then you've got almost you know the full picture for a local plan for those things so you'll be able to see that and the other aspect the other thing that I would draw your attention to is the future revision to the national planning framework which I hope will be cognisant of the well I know it will be cognisant of the climate change plan and indeed now the energy strategy which again has the right long-term horizon to demonstrate how we can decarbonise our energy system in the round. In total the NPF and the associated Scottish planning policy alongside those localised heat and energy efficiency plans with transport will allow you to look I think at the things that you would like to look at so a well integrated set of local and regional plans for these things in the future and I think that's the right way to go about it. I look forward to seeing if that is the case. Can I also ask you to talk about the carrot in the stack? It's interesting that you have like McDonald's recently announced their plan is it 2030 they're going to do X, Y and Z and 2030 most of their executives will have moved on and whatever. Is there not a danger that we're seeing company after company make these big announcements about what they're going to do a decade, a couple of decades ahead when actually right now they're not doing very much? I definitely think that's a risk yes. I see though pretty regularly corporate practice changing quite dramatically I mean you might there's a pretty strong record of in recent years of investment holdings from the likes of universities in Scotland for example and how those things can change quite dramatically the outlook that we have. I recognise the risk and I suppose the right answer to your question is that it's one that I'm rather than being passive about those things I think we need to be active so I think you do need a long term set of plans which every corporate operating in the Scottish economy can feel that they want to follow. It needs to be though developed with those corporates and a corporate is not a thing really so it's the individuals within it so I think in setting the right set of long term targets and objectives in each of those sectors that gives us the platform then to discuss with those with the industries in those sectors how we can develop the right plans with them to see us I hope overshoot the things that we've said that we will achieve and that will be a mixture again of carrots and sticks and the tambourine I suppose is that for those corporates to want to do this because it is in their commercial interests for them to do so and I think that's an area where we haven't been perhaps as strong as we might so it might have been in the past so I would like to work harder at that feeling that corporates operating in the Scottish economy do this because it is in their corporate interests to do so not just because it's some sort of CSR measure for example but because it actually grows their business so I mean that the heart of all this is something I've said again to this committee that why are we doing this at all we have a very small impact in global patterns of climate change I believe the reason that we're doing it is principally an economic one because if we turn around the Scottish economy to a decarbonised basis then we will have products and services to sell to the global market as other countries in the world do the same and I think we need to work very very hard at establishing that principle and it's not something you can just do and put in a document and hope that it sits there and has the attention of those corporates you need to do it daily and weekly so you know hold us to account on that. Okay thank you. Final question from Mark Ruskell. So the climate bill will bring in new targets for 2020 and 2030. How does this plan address those new targets? Is it sufficient enough to meet those new targets? Well I think that the first answer and it's not the only answer I give is that we've put the plan together to meet the current legislation but clearly I mean it's the same people that I'm surrounded with that consider the issues. So we've had in mind all along the 90% trajectory and there is a process to go through for the new bill and I think it's worth just thinking about the 90% target for a second. We've been through a process with the CCC to understand that and then I'm paraphrasing here but the CCC said 90% is in line with the objectives that were set in Paris but it's extremely challenging. They also said that the current plan if everything goes well is just about sufficient and we're therefore looking at that analysis. I hope we do better than that so it may be that we need to revise plans I think it will depend largely on the trajectory of climate missions in the future but I do want to say that the bill process has been separate to the to the formation of this plan and we will have to bring those two things together later this year when the bill goes through Parliament and we wait to see for example the target for the central target I mean this is one of the kind of central issues and I can't say as I sit here before you the extent to which we may need to amend or otherwise the current plan. So I think the First Minister said in Bond that there was still consideration of a net zero carbon target whether that would be set at 2040, 2050 various countries are moving down that line including Germany, Finland, Sweden. Do you see a radically different approach if we were to set a net zero carbon target or is there a difference in traffic growth for example of 27% or are there more fundamental changes that would be required? I'll give you my personal view on that because you know I don't think we have set out the analysis of that but I do see a difference between net zero and 90 yes and I do think that the plan will need to be on a pretty steep trajectory to get to to get to net zero. Other countries have set it people talk often about Sweden for example but they've done that with the knowledge that they might be they buy international credits I think that what's been the hallmark of the Scottish plan is that this has been a domestic effort so I that's the thing I want to keep you know what I think about. Are you saying that you want to get rid of the provision of carbon credits within Scottish legislation then? No, I'm not saying that. I'm keen to maintain the hallmark of the Scottish plan which has been a domestic effort and not relying on some of those international mechanisms wholly. Okay thank you, thank the panel for the evidence that you've given it and can I take this opportunity to wish Chris Stark well new role at the UK CCC. I think the committee would look forward to engaging with you in that capacity in future. I'm sure you'll be looking forward to offering advice to the Scottish Government on developing policies that you have brought forward. Well they're a good bunch. Will you, just as a point of information, a colleague just asked that, will you still be in post here until the end of February? I will be and then indeed my start of it has not been arranged yet but I think it's good that we've had this on the record. I don't want there to be any implication that I'm conflicted in that role so we will work that out and I wanted the committee to know that the appointment process hasn't formally completed yet actually but I wanted the committee to know so we'll be very careful about the way in which we manage the roles in the period that's coming. It's a very good choice on the part of the UK CCC. Thank you very much for that. At its next meeting on February 6, the committee will take oral evidence from stakeholders on the Scottish Association for Marine Science Research Services report review of the environmental impacts of salmon farming in Scotland. The committee also expects to consider its proposed approach to consideration of the Scottish Crowny State Bill and a draft report on its air quality in Scotland inquiry. As agreed earlier, we'll now move into private session and I ask that public gallery be cleared as the public part of the meeting is over. Thank you.