 Good morning and welcome to the seventh meeting of the 2016 of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. The first item of business on the committee's agenda this morning is to consider whether to take item 8 in private. Are we all agreed? Okay, thank you, we are all agreed. The second agenda item is for the committee to take evidence on Scotland's climate change adaptation programme. We've been joined this morning by a range of stakeholders and academics. Because of the numbers involved in the nature of the discussion, the committee felt that this would be best done in what we call a round-table session, where members and witnesses are mixed in amongst one another. That provides an opportunity for, hopefully, a good-considered dialogue in terms of practicalities. However, if you would please indicate to me if you wish to contribute on any particular topic. You don't need to worry about the microphones, they'll be dealt with automatically. Rather than welcome all the witnesses individually, although you are very welcome, we'll go round the table and get people to introduce themselves. If I could just finally say, however, that although we have a reasonable amount of time set aside for this session, don't feel that you have to make a contribution on a particular topic, you don't feel that you're the expertise to do that. Similarly, if you do, please catch my eye and we'll seek to involve everybody as much as possible. Beginning on my left with Jenny Gilruth, if you want to introduce yourself. Hello, I'm Jenny Gilruth MSP and I represent Midfaith, Anglin, Northus. I'm Emily Taylor, I'm from the Crichton Carbon Centre where I head up the land management programme. I'm Farni Carson, I'm the constituency MSP for Galloway and West Dumfries. I'm Gary Pender, I work at Herriot-Watt University, I've been working in Flydriss Management for the past 15 years, and today I'm representing the institution of civil engineers in Scotland. I'm Kate Forbes and I'm MSP for Skyle, Haber and Badnoch. I'm Mark Ruskell, I'm a regional MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife. I'm Anna Moss, research fellow at the University of Dundee and joint lead on development of the climate exchange adaptation indicators. I'm David Stewart, I'm an MSP for the Highlands and Islands region. I'm Angela Heaney, senior sustainable development officer at Stirling Council. I'm Angus MacDonald, MSP for Falkirk East. I'm Emma Harper, I'm an MSP for South Scotland region. I'm Martin Ogilvie, I'm the Resilience and Community Safety Manager at Dumfries and Galloway Council. I'm Alexander Burnett, a constituency MSP for Aberdeenshire West. I'm Maggie Keegan, from Scottish Wildlife Trust, head of policy and planning. I'm Claudia Beamish, South Scotland MSP. I'm Maurice Golden, West of Scotland. I'm Graham Day, MSP for Angus South and the Committee convener. We'll kick off by looking at the natural environment and begin with biodiversity. Maurice Golden. Clearly, we want to ensure that the biodiversity for Scotland is protected and enhanced. I'm particularly keen on views about the data that will allow that to be progressed, so I would like to know your views on how that's conducted, how strong the biodiversity baseline is and whether that will allow us as a Parliament to progress with supporting biodiversity going forward. Hi there, thanks, convener, for inviting Scottish Wildlife Trust to speak today. With regard to data, I think that the State of Nature report showed that of the vast number of species in Scotland, we only had about 2,000 species that we could record. The best data that we have is on butterflies, birds, we have some marine species data as well with fish can, stuff like that, and plant species, but there's a lot of invertebrates that we don't know anything about when we're not regularly collecting data, so it's difficult to know the baseline and particularly what's happening everywhere. The other thing that came out of the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy is that we've developed a suite of indicators to measure the ecological health of our habitats and ecosystems, and those are called ecosystem health indicators. The Scottish Biodiversity Strategy Update report that came out last week, probably the day before Lord Krebs et al, where giving evidence showed that there hasn't been much progress made on implementing those indicators. I think we feel in Scottish Wildlife Trust that we'd like to see them out there so that we can see if what we're doing is helping to bring our ecosystems back into good ecological condition, and it's something that the committee might want to look at in the futures to why they're not being used. Anna Morse I really agree with those points. I'd also like to add that there's very little data around some of the species and habitats that we know are climate sensitive. SNH has been working quite closely with Climate Exchange to look at, basically on a risk assessment, to understand which species and habitats are the most at risk, but we do know, for example, that some critical and important species and habitats in Scotland, like snowbeds, for example, which we know are under pressure from Climate Change. We still don't know enough about those. Also, with regard to SNH and their site condition monitoring, although they've made a great step in adding climate change as a pressure that they consider in their site condition monitoring, they recognise that there needs to be guidance on how that pressure is acknowledged in the monitoring process, because at the moment it's not clear whether it should be acknowledged because there's a perceived risk or because there's already a detected impact on the site. Excellent. We'll move on to marine and coastal environment, Claudia Beamish. Thank you, convener, and good morning again to everybody. On considering marine issues, it's very important to be aware that the CCC has highlighted that understanding of the impacts on climate change on the marine environment could be better, and just to highlight some other ones also making more progress on shoreline management and on coastal realignment. There are obviously other marine issues that are relevant, but if we can open it up and if people would like to make contributions in relation to marine and coastal issues and highlight any other issues when they make the contribution as well. I think that this plays into a larger question about the role of the planning system and biodiversity, because I think that we've got quite a lot of the building blocks in place in terms of having, you know, a biodiversity strategy, we've got a land use strategy, a Scottish planning policy, a national planning framework, but they make reference to one another but they don't tend to go terribly deep in terms of integration, and it could be something to look at in the future if the land use strategy becomes better embedded in the planning system that it brings in issues like shoreline management, coastal retreat, the creation of new habitats. As conservationists quite often are quite concerned about the protection of existing habitats, and often that's what we do in terms of our ownership, but there's also the issue about the creation of enhancing new habitats that get created or should be created, so I think it's something I would look to wrap into a larger question about the role of planning and delivering biodiversity. Maggie Keenan In relation to the marine environment, there is a store of carbon sequestration in the form of blue carbon, and I know it came out in RPP2 that there wasn't enough research on we don't know how much stuff we have, we don't know the resource, we don't know exactly where it all is, and we're missing, like we're doing with Peatlands, we're probably missing a trick there in terms of building that resource to help mitigate and also adapt to climate change, but at the same time you're building the resilience of the marine environment, we'll have our 30 marine protected areas, what we need to see is the management and the monitoring and to see if that's helping in the recovery of our seas to achieve this healthy seas that we want to see. John Swinney Okay, thanks. Well, you've referenced Peatlands, which leads nicely on too. The UKCCC is quite clearly looking for further work to be done to enhance Peatlands. Their recommendation for on the report is calling on the Scottish Government by the end of 2017 to establish a target in the national Peatland action plan for the area to be under restoration by 2030 and introduce a monitored delivery programme. Okay, we have seen the number of restoration projects doubled between 2012 and 2015, but we're still nowhere near hitting the claimed achievable target of 21,000 hectares per year. Are we, as Maggie said, missing a trick with Peatlands? I look to Dr Emily Taylor for a response in the first instance. Yes, I think it's very useful to look back at the Peatland action programme that has rolled out across Scotland. That was a programme that came in 2012 with good funding behind it, the way that the project worked. It was administered by Scottish Natural Heritage, but it had external facilitators, so it paid Peatland action project officers across Scotland from Shetland all the way down to the Scottish borders in Dumfries and Galloway, and through that project, from 2012 up to March 2016, we saw 8,500 hectares of Peatland restored. That was very much going from a point of relatively low interest in Peatlands and Peatland restoration, very little understanding how you may go about Peatland restoration. We really learned a lot from a lot of the work that I had out in the north of England, for example, but we were a wee bit further behind in Scotland. Now we're in a different position where we have that momentum behind us, but possibly not the mechanisms at the moment to really help fund those restoration projects. I do think that the 21,000 hectare target is possible if you look at what you mean by restoration, is that actual sort of mechanical intervention by putting in peat dams, that sort of thing, or are we looking at good Peatland management through, say, agri-environment schemes to improve condition? Okay, so it's achievable, but how realistic a target is that at the moment? At the moment, it's not very realistic without the funding behind it. Currently, the only way you can get money for peatland restoration, there's a small pot of money through Scotland Natural Heritage for management plans on natura sites, or SRDP, the agri-environment climate scheme programme. There are provisions in there for peatland restoration, but that's just for ditch blocking, and the applications themselves are very onerous. I did a ring round of all the previous peatland action project officers, so Shetland's only done six applications. I've done three for the whole of the Freeson Galloway, so uptake of the SRDP scheme is very, very low. So without improving access to funding, we won't meet that 21,000 hectare target. Okay. Finlay Carson wants to come in. Just a very quick point. Is there the potential for a conflict of interest between the forestry and peatland restoration, where we see that the forestry sector is not planting the number of trees and are well-backed in their projections? Can you predict or can you foresee any problems between trying to restore peatbeds or protect them and the demand for planting more forestry? Yes, I think that we're seeing conflicts already on the ground. We should be recognised that Forest Enterprise Scotland undertook a thousand hectares of restoration under peatland action, so they're very keen on peatland restoration in the right place. At the moment where we're seeing situations where trees are being felled from areas of very, very poor quality and because of the pressures to reach the woodland cover target, they are now being replanted. It may be replanted with broadleaves, but it means that drainage networks are still intact on these deep peat sites, so it may be better to restore back to open habitat. The need for compensatory planting can often be an issue if you're a landholder that does not have an area where you could feasibly put in that compensatory planting. I personally have worked on projects where we've received funding through peatland action to work with Forest Enterprise Scotland to gather all the evidence that we need to look at a forest design plan and see where we want to be restored back to open habitat. We've looked at drains and hydrology, peatland condition, peat depth and yield classes for trees. We've come up with areas that are just more sensible to go back to open habitat. It takes a long time for Forest Enterprise Scotland to sign those projects off, despite the wealth of information and SNH effectively ministering funds to get that information. There are already tensions in the policies and it's something that would have to be considered if we're looking at 21,000 hectares a year in restoration. That's extremely useful, Maggie Keener. What I would say is that if we had an effective land use strategy, some of these conflicts would not happen because we'd have opportunities to constraints. I suppose that one of the things that we would also say is that we shouldn't be planting trees or storing trees on deep peat. It's a bit of an over in it. I spoke to the IUCN peatland programme yesterday. One of the things that I didn't realise is that across the UK, 16 million tonnes of carbon are being emitted from all the peatlands and the saving effort across the UK is 13 million tonnes. If we really got real about restoring our peatlands, which we have a massive resource in Scotland, 1.7 million hectares, at the minute, if we restored 21,000 a year, that's still 1.5 per cent of just what needs to be restored. Just to get the scale of things. Also, if we put off tomorrow what we need to be doing today, it is a lot more expensive. I'm looking at soils and agriculture, if we may. The recommendation 8 of the UKCC report calls for the publication of an action plan before the next SSCAP, which would include proposals for a scheme to monitor the health of agricultural soils and the uptake of soil conservation measures, and taking enforcement action where poor management practices are found. Lord Krebs justified that last week when he made the point that current farming practices, not just in Scotland but UK-wide and beyond, are essentially mining natural capital, as though it was a depleting resource, rather than a husband in it for the long-term future. Are welcome some thoughts on that subject? That was the loss of farmland, which is something that we've seen around about the green belts. There's a living green belt in Scotland at the moment. I'm certainly conscious of the green belt around Edinburgh. Edinburgh has a very demanding housing needs and housing targets to meet, and we're seeing the loss of farmland. When the green belts were brought in post-World War 2, part of that was to maintain good farmland and not lose it to development. Again, it might be an area where the planning system needs to work alongside soil management by diversity. I don't think that the two agendas are getting mutual recognition. Certainly, we've not seen it when we've been looking at the green belt issues. The loss of farmland has been a consideration. It's more about immunity. I'll let Mark Russell come in and then Dr Anna Morse. The green belt issue is an interesting one. The point that Covina makes is around soils and soil erosion. The committee last week highlighted some of the massive soil erosion that we see on the east coast of Scotland. We're now in a post-CAP, post-Brexit scenario where there's an opportunity to redesign agricultural policy. I'm interested in what views there might be around the table. Are we going to have an agricultural system in the future that's primarily about food production or is it about delivery of public goods? Is it about soils protection? How does adaptation fit into that? What is that going to look like on the ground? On the point of soil condition, it is touched on there. It very much cuts across different issues regarding adaptation. Not only is it an issue for agriculture, but it's also a serious issue from a water quality perspective. What we found with regard to the evidence that we were able to utilise in developing the indicators and that evidence that informed the sea's report, there is very little around regarding management of soils, what is actually being done. There are some views to improve that. I know that JHI is looking at field drainage, for example, but we did find that some of the information that was collected officially on management practices by agriculture, which contribute to soil erosion, some of those factors are not now routinely collected where they were before, for example. We certainly don't want to see an erosion, no pun intended, of existing data. We don't want to see any decline in that as well. I was just going to say that the trust is developing a sustainable agriculture policy, and I suppose thinking about going forward post Brexit is how tax payers' money is best spent for food production, but also for sustainable farming. Farmers recognise that farmers are the custodians of rural land. We need to think of a mechanism where we are paying for ecosystem services, so whether it is managing soil quality. However, what we should not do is support practices that continue to deplete soil quality. Farming systems, 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, come from farming agriculture. We have a voluntary system of farming for a better climate. Some of the guidelines in that talk about how to improve soil quality on your land and how to keep your soils on the land. However, it is not mandatory to carry out that. It is something that we have talked about for quite a while. I am not quite sure why it makes economic sense for farmers not to lose soil as a gardener. I know that I want to hang on to my soil and have good quality. What is the line of balance between a mandatory approach and a carrot and stick approach, if you like, in offering perhaps targeted subsidies, voluntary schemes, but also putting in place a robust regulatory framework that says that you have to soil test. Those types of practices are banned. What is going to shift it? At the moment we seem to have a problem on both mitigation and adaptation with agriculture? It may be that it is better to have incentives to promote good practice and then try to work with the farmers who seem to be not maintaining their soils or losing soils or into water courses. That is what is happening with phosphates and other things. That has a knock-on effect, because somebody picks up the bill in the end for cleaning up that water and it is usually the tax pay. It just does not make sense. We need to find a mechanism to promote good agricultural practices. It does not appear that the voluntary system at the moment is being taken up enough. I think that we should examine why I am not quite sure why that is not the case. At that point, with the peatland slant, I think that education is very important. My work has been going out working with landowners and explaining that that roading peat on the hill can be fixed and you are effectively just losing your soils, you are losing your ground. I think that there is that need to get people to understand their soil resource and that it can be fixed and there can be improvements, because fundamentally it makes sense to everybody. I would really like to hear from the National Trust the answer to Mark's question. I think that this is the second largest recipient of cap payments in four years' time, but could be gone. What do you see your policy and what work have you done so far? I hope that it is the second largest recipient. It is interesting that the shift that is happening in cap payments are declining and are moving to area-based payments. I imagine that that is going to change again. The current scheme will continue to 2020 and will probably get replaced and will probably be less money overall in the system, regardless of what public benefits are being bought. From my experience, there is something interesting about the structure of the industry. We are talking about care and maintenance of soils over a long period, but if the land use is short-term tenancy one year or three years, in terms of the person leasing the land, there might be less of an interest perhaps in land management practices that have that 20 to 25-year horizon. We have seen it with our colleague National Trust in England Wales in Northern Ireland, but they have been doing work in one of their farms, looking at the impacts of tenant farming and land compaction, because if a tenant farmer is covering a large area of land, they have to go on to the land, regardless of whether it is wet or dry. They just have to get it done, and using large capital intensive machinery, that is compacting the land to a high degree, which has got all kinds of impacts by diversity, flooding and so on. However, the economic drivers of that land management, you know that the contractor has got to get the work done and is working across a large area of land. It is thinking about not just the incentive for individual farmers but the structure of the industry as a whole. How would the industry respond to a change in incentives? I think that that is part of understanding how the industry is shifting. I think that the largest has been Frank Smart, but Frank Smart is not Mr Smart. It is a much larger conglomeration of business operations. I think that the cap is a good opportunity to look at it again, because it has been rolled forward every decade since the 1940s. On the search, I am actually looking to see what public money is going in and what public benefits are coming back, whether that is production or whether that is environmental benefits. Dr Anna Morr, I just want to ask the way that, particularly with regard to climate change, because it is projected that there are other areas of land that are going to become potentially suitable for prime agriculture, we need to consider that and the potential increase in pressure on soils from becoming intensely farmed or more intensely farmed than they currently are. That is a particular one that we are going forward with. Let us have a look at forestry, Kate Forbes. In the report, the CCC recommended that further action is required to reduce the spread of pests and pathogens and increase species diversity. I would be interested to know your ideas and recommendations for how we do that. Who wants to go on that? We have been involved. We have a catalogue of various tree diseases on our own estate, unfortunately, and we work with First Commission Scotland on that, and we are part of the stakeholder group for the ash-dyeback outbreak. The one smallest overlining from Brexit could be a change to the regime for importing plant materials, because at the moment we are part of a single area, it is possible to get a quarantine zone, but it is very difficult to develop the evidence to show that you ought to be given that status. There is an issue in terms of plant material coming from the continent. We are probably guilty for ourselves. If you want 100 metres of hedging quickly, you could go to Scottish nursery that might give it to you in three years, where you go to the Netherlands and get it next week. There is a lot of that kind of plant material moving around the country. In the case of ash-dyeback, if you looked at the mapping of outbreaks, a lot of it is up radial roads, and that is to do with the landscaping of road development and the contractor spying on plant material. Potentially, you could, at a UK level, have stricter controls on important plant material, which might help to ameliorate it, but that said, the trend is for globalization, the trend is to warmer climate, which is favourable to certain pest and diseases, so it is a difficult one. When we looked at the evidence on forestry and the two issues that we particularly looked at were Dothastroma, Fytoffa and Morham, what is important to bear in mind is that organisations such as the Forestry Commission and SNH do not necessarily manage for one specific disease at a time, so what is critical from their point of view is to manage to increase the general resilience of forestry, so that very definitely includes increasing the diversity of species, not just looking nationally across Scotland, but looking at diversity within individual stands. There are other ways as well that they can be increasing that resilience, but once they increase that general resilience, then the protection against the increase of some of those species will stand more chance. The native woodland survey showed that only 7 per cent of our native woodlands are regenerating naturally, and one of the problems with if you do not have natural regeneration, you do not have that genetic exchange where you might be getting the resilience in the landscape, and so it probably makes us more vulnerable to diseases in our natural systems just because we do not have their diversity within species, never mind between species within the little woodlands we have. One of the main problems with regeneration, obviously, that came out of the native woodland survey, was de-management and getting that under control, so just add that into the mix. Okay, thank you for that. Let's move on to the built environment. I know a number of members have questions in that area. Dave Stewart. Thank you, convener. Clearly, flooding is a major by-product of climate change, and the CCC and the evidence to us gave some depressing statistics that, for example, 90 per cent of at-risk properties are not protected by flood defences. My argument today is why are we building schools and housing and, indeed, hospitals on floodplains? Okay, who wants to come back on that? None of the local authorities? Professor Gary Pendle. I suppose that it comes back to planning regulations as well. I don't necessarily think that. One of the reasons is that it's cost-effective to do that, so if you're choosing a place to build something that is... Floodplains are flat, they're easy to develop, they're a sensible place to do it. Is it necessary a bad thing? Does it increase flood risk? You can take mitigating steps to make sure that doesn't happen, so I think what's required is a balanced approach between the planning authorities, given permission to do this, but making sure that these facilities are properly protected from future flood risk, which isn't an easy thing to do, but it can be achieved. In terms of protecting against future flood risk, calculated to what extent? When you give permission for a development in circumstances like that, are you anticipating what the flood risk might be 20 years from now, 50 years from now? What's the general thought around that? Well, this is an area of active debate at the present time. You can't give absolute guarantee that something won't flood in the future because we live in an uncertain climate, in an uncertain world, so society itself has to make a judgment as to what level of protection is acceptable. At the minute, I think that we're using the 1 in 200-year flood event, or the 0.05 probability of flooding, which would seem to be a reasonable decision point for making those decisions on. I find depressing about all this that SEPA, who is responsible by the Scottish Government, often advises local authorities that they should not be building, but they are overturned by other elected members, or, indeed, even after repeal. To me, that seems absolutely crazy. If you look again at the statistics, only one-third of Scottish local authorities have implemented schemes to boat uptake of flood protection, and there is no data available on the actual uptake of the schemes. As climate change gets worse, flooding gets worse, and anyone who has experienced flooding first hand, as I have as an elected member, will testify the human tragedy that affects not just housing but businesses and schools. If you don't believe me, go to the White Sands and the Frees and ask local businesses how they feel about flooding day in and day out. I don't believe that we're coping adequately flooding in this country, and we haven't even touched on changing our building standards and our style of housing to be more resilient against future flooding, as climate change gets worse, so flooding. Which really brings in the local authorities, Andrew Cainiad? Do you want to comment on this, and then Martin Ogilvie? I'll preface by saying that I'm not a planning officer or a flooding officer. My understanding is the one in 200 flood risk is the main plan that folk are looking at, and certainly when applications come in, CEPA comments and our own flooding officers comment, and when CEPA have advised against going at proceeding, then it's very rarely the work goes ahead. But I think we do have an awful lot of at-risk properties from historical building, which isn't to say things don't still go ahead in areas of flood risk. Of course, that's increasing, so I know that our own flooding officers have been looking at a particular area that is prone to flooding and have done some planning and projections, and already they're having to update that, because things are happening all the time that are beyond a historical precedent. Of course, we've got surface water flooding as well. The Stirling area has one of the highest at-risk numbers of properties for low-frequency flooding, so it's not necessarily the frequent floods, but the low frequency, which would be the more devastating floods, they just happen less often. However, there is a formula for building defences. It's a bit of a numbers game, and we don't fit within the criteria for getting significant capital, but it's a proportion. The numbers of properties affected are not high, but the proportion from the local authorities point of view are quite high. If we were to protect entirely, it would mean building a wall right along the side of the river 4th, so it's coming back to that point about what level of risk we're prepared to accept and what level of damage as well, and it's a constant balance. My interest is not just looking at the flooding as it happens, rivers or what have you. It's going further back and reducing what is actually flowing into the rivers to start with. I think it's got to be happening at every stage. We've talked about agriculture already. Again, I'm no specialist on agriculture, but I think we really need to look at land use in much more detail, have a lot more planting in the uplands to soak up where it's appropriate, not on peat soils, not on carbon rich soils, reduce the amount of grazing that's going on, too many sheep, too many deer, so that our land is absorbing as much water as possible, but also in the urban areas. Again, the bore of drainage is too small. We need to get wider and wider bore. We can't afford to keep digging up these pipes. We need to look at ways of, everywhere that we carry out developments, we need to find ways of absorbing water, of holding water back, any development, any maintenance. We need a lot more planting in the urban environment so that we've got a lot more greenery to soak up water. There was a very interesting piece of work carried out in Wales, Pontbren, where a group of farmers, helpland farmers, were looking at planting more trees and shet belts, and a bit of research there was finding that reducing the compaction from the animals once you've got tree belts, the breaking up the soil, but the absorption of the water 60 times what was happening on grassland. So it's right across the board, you know, I think some of the discussion we're focusing in particular sectors, but I think we really need to be looking more at making the links between all these different sectors so that they add up together for a global, a holistic approach to adaptation. So that yes, I think flooding is very important that we look at that and our flooding officers are doing a lot of work and we're pulling together river basin management plans, et cetera, et cetera, but going beyond that I think it's critical as well that we're holding back as much water as we possibly can so it doesn't get into the river courses in the first place. Maybe just prefixed by saying I'm not planning officer and I'm not involved in flood risk management either, but I am more involved in the emergency response, it's business continuity, civil protection that's my area of specialism, but I've been in Dumfries and Galloway for about nine years now and the first time in my experience was really 2009 when the town flooded badly again down at the White Sands and at that point the business owners and the homeowners down there really just relied on the council to come in and try and sandbag, but the work that we've done since has really been to encourage them through subsidy schemes to partner with us and to buy property level protection so it's floodgates, special valves that fit on the airbricks, it's to put in place their own protection measures to protect their own properties. Across the board, but particularly down the White Sands, we've made huge success by going down and doing very local engagement at the individual property owner, business owner level to try and get them to partner with us on the schemes. There's various other initiatives that we've tried to do as well. I think that we have a scheme called help, the home emergency life-saving plan, which through the schools and through communities we've managed to distribute to every household on a number of occasions now, a small template that we encourage homeowners themselves to fill in, which is some advice on what to do when there's extreme weather forecast, and that's not just for flooding, but that's also for extreme cold weather as well. You might come back to me later on too, I'm not sure on the society stuff that we do on community resilience, if you are, I'll kind of hold my thoughts, but one of the big schemes that we put in place since 2009 was to partner with the local fabricate now, the Scottish Far and Rescue Service of course, but we partnered with them and we bought flood pods that are demountable containers that fit in the back of lorries. When we have a certain forecast and the triggers are met, we deploy those pods to flood prone areas and those pods are filled with bits of equipment that can be distributed to properties that haven't invested in their own equipment, and we can help them to put special gates into their doorways that's not the flood water coming in, et cetera, and we've used that a number of times now, it's deployed almost on an annual basis, I'm afraid. I'm going to allow three or four members to come in with brief supplementaries and continue the debate. From there, firstly Claudia Beamish, then Finlay Carson. Right, thank you, convener. It's really to get the panel's views on the broader issue of the land use strategy, which has been mentioned already and how this fits with all those issues, because at the moment, as you will know, it's on an advisory basis that the land use strategy is considered by the planning authorities in development. I'm very interested to know how it can help in these climate adaptation issues more widely and what members of the panel think should be the future status of it has been reviewed, but just its actual status. Hold that thought and we'll get some other input to this. Finlay and then Mark. My comment was on our question. Do we think out of the box enough and do we always continue to do the traditional things when a flood bank gets washed away? We rebuild it. Before I start, I should declare an interest as a councillor in Dumfries and Galloway Council. The White Sands was mentioned. We've got a scheme potentially going forward to build a massive bond along the side of the Nith. Now, there's a real debate on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. I personally don't think it's a good thing, but we're looking to do something that's traditionally been tried to do over hundreds of years and that's protect a handful of businesses along the White Sands. Maybe we should be thinking of another solution and making sure that businesses that are situated along the White Sands are businesses that don't get affected by flooding. For example, if it's an electrical shop and it's full of electrical goods, if it's flooded, it's a disaster. If it's a business that doesn't get affected so much by flooding, we might be shouldn't be thinking about always about flood prevention, but actually completely out of the box thinking about allowing properties to flood that don't have the effect or rerouting rivers. We've got farmers who rebuild, flood prevent banks on rivers that traditionally change their course on a fairly regular basis, but we keep on rebuilding banks where they were rather than actually saying, well actually the long-term solution to this should actually be straightening the river here. We should be taking these bends out, we should be speeding up the river or slowing it down. Do we think out of the box enough? That's my question, it comes to the future. Mark Ruskell and then Dave Stewart. I should probably declare an interest as a Stirling councillor as well. My question is really about whether local authorities have got the capacity and the capital to actually address these issues to a level that is acceptable. It's always going to be difficult to protect every single property, but I was reading the Scottish Government's flood risk management plan and there are only three communities in Scotland where individual property protection measures are being subsidised. Now that's arguably a decision for local councils to make, but £8,000 per property, those individual property protection measures are expensive, so if councils aren't subsidising it, who is? The other issues are our major capital projects. There are 42 projects that have been approved in Scotland over six years. I think that funding for one of those years has been accepted, but other issues surrounding the deliverability of those projects are clearly not going to address the needs of the 252 communities in Scotland that live in potentially vulnerable areas, but out of those 42 is funding in place, is the capacity in place within councils in terms of engineers, technical expertise to actually drive through what is being funded, let alone what could be funded if we were to meet the needs of many of those communities in Scotland? Okay, there's a lot to respond to there. I'll let Dave Stewart in next. We'll take some responses to that and then have a number of other members with questions and we'll go to those and take those as one batch, so David Stewart. At any point, convener, I think it's crucially important that we take a more preventative approach to future flooding. We'll be making decisions in Scotland today at planning authorities, which will be building on flood plains, which will result in flooding in 10 years' time. I'm particularly concerned that SEPA's advice has been ignored, either to yourself, convener, as a committee or maybe individually. I'd like to ask SEPA how many decisions across Scotland have been turned down by them, because they've recommended no building, because I think that that's crucially important. I think that if there is going to be building on flood plains, there's got to be a stronger approach to have sustainable urban drainage approaches or indeed change to housing design to ensure that houses are more adaptable for flooding. The example that I'll give you from America is in Sacramento where there was bad flooding in Old Sacramento village and they rebuilt it one story higher. I'm not suggesting that we do that. I'm really saying that we have to think out the box, as my colleague here rightly said. I think that there is a stat around the SEPA question somewhere that I've read in the last few days. We'll have to look into that for you. There's a lot to respond to there, so let's kick off with Professor Gary Pender and then Dr Maggie Keane. If I can have a go at trying to cover some of those things, I mean, David Stewart is absolutely spot on. Flooding of any type is both a human and an economic tragedy. Unfortunately, we're not alone in having to adapt to it and I think that that's a key word actually. We're in a situation where we have to adapt to something that is an increasing problem for society and it's even worse than that in that we don't know what we're adapting, we don't know what the end point is going to be and there may not be some end point. So one of the big issues for academic work just now is looking at the uncertainty associated with our current predictions around climate change and what's going to happen in the future and trying to take rational decisions now that we can live with for the next 50 years or so, which is very, very difficult given the length of data we have available to us to take these decisions based on. It's little comfort, but we're not unique in that. I have the privilege of working in this kind of internationally, so many countries are wrestling with the same thing, so we're actually as a nation better than many actually. We're certainly bad by any stretch of imagination, but we could be better actually. We could be more joined up, so I think that that's a key thing actually. We need to work out what our adaptation policy is. It involves a whole portfolio of potential actions we can take to protect against flooding. I still believe that within that whole mix appropriate floodplain development will remain part of that because local authorities have competing economic and social demands and to try to approach it from the perspective of no floodplain development is probably sort of impractical. Of course, as David Stewart said, there's other things we can do to mitigate against that and to think out of the boxes to what we can do to protect properties where we feel it is appropriate to develop floodplains. Again, Finlay Carson made the point about thinking out the box into threes and the types of shocks and businesses that are there. You only have to go to York to see some of the businesses that have made a feature of the flood, so I visited the King's Arms. The King's Arms does make a feature of the fact that it floods regularly, it's got a concrete floor, there's a flood warning, floods come along, the proprietor moves all his furniture upstairs, the building floods, he sweeps it out, he puts another notch in the wooden post he's got, which is the flood on that particular date. People actually visit his establishment to look at how frequently it's flooded and how high the floods have been. If you look across the other side of the river, all the homes have garages on the bottom level in similar situations, people get flood warnings and move their cars elsewhere, the garages flood. There's lots of things we can do and it's not so much thinking out the box, it's just implementing practices that are found elsewhere. However, there are some things out of the box that we can think of. It truly is a multidisciplinary problem. I wonder if this was coming up when we were talking about the environment and peat and forestry. All of these things have a role to play in trying to control the way in which water flows off the flood plains and the natural environment and the built environment have to work together in that respect. The difficulty with relying on the natural environment is that it takes a long time to develop so you can build a concrete wall and you could probably do it in a month or so. Waiting for a peat bog to be re-established or a forest to grow or changes in agricultural policy are a much more longer-term approach. We need to try and get those two things working in harmony between allowing our natural environment to recover and still doing hard interventions that deal with today's problems in a relatively short timescale. There's a balance to be stuck in that. I'll probably stop at that point. I'd like to pick up on the point about the natural environment and the land use strategy in particular. It's now essential that we aren't just talking about the built environment when we're talking about flooding. We have the opportunity now where people are actually looking at the catchment that they live in to try and understand what the land is doing, where the water is going and what interventions can be made. I do think that there are some natural flood mitigation measures that can be done fairly quickly. You can go and break up your extensive drainage network on your hill fairly rapidly when in a couple of years you'll see the difference. In terms of land use strategy, I think that this is a great opportunity to pilot a land use strategy approach in a catchment. Looking at, well, do we want farmland upland? Do we want intensive agriculture or are we looking at taking out the levees and putting in wetland? There's a really interesting exercise to be done there. Just a note on the White Sands project. The Solway flood risk management plan actually had £50,000 allocated for people in restoration in that catchment because they recognised the need for that, but they need funding to deliver that work. Before we move on, I think that I can provide that figure. Someone got it for us. 21 out of 528 planning decisions were granted, contrary to SIPA advice in 2012. That was a guideline figure. I'll just make a very quick point, because I know that you want to move on. Just to say that the IUCN river restoration project that we put was out yesterday, and there's a very good example of how they're managing flood risk in the Edelston water to combat flood risk in Edelston and Peebles. One of the things that they've done is put back natural meander channels, and they've worked with local farmers and stuff, and they've planted more trees in the headlands. That's a demonstration project of what can be done with nature-based solutions. The multiple benefits that come with those, for example, the multiple benefits to water quality and quantity issues, when you start considering a holistic approach to tree planting, which raised before, you have the multiple benefits of mitigation, as well as around adaptation. You have obviously the natural flood risk management. You have the potential to increase habitat corridors, increase biodiversity, increase resilience of the forestry industry, particularly if that's done coherently and you're thinking about which species you're planting where and making sure you're planting species that are going to cope with those future climate changes. That's very much a need for that land use strategy approach to be applied in a meaningful way. Just to reiterate what others have said, I think that the land use strategy is absolutely crucial in this for the reasons already mentioned, particularly to act as a sponge to refer to surface water flooding, so it's not just about rivers. That's totally unpredictable, so we don't know where that's going to happen. In Stirling, we had two major landslides as a result of major rainfall incidents. The most recent one in August 2012 happened only two miles away from the centre of Stirling. It wasn't even raining in Stirling, washed out a minor road, but still it was a problem for people who used that road. We've been fortunate as signatories to the EU mayor's adapt project. We applied to their twinning programme, and myself and our senior planner visited Rowan in Normandy only last week to learn about some of the work they've been doing in urban regeneration. With the caveat that different legislation, different regulatory, different financial frameworks, but they were carrying out a redevelopment, harborside redevelopment, new flats and had introduced some of this blue and green infrastructure work, which is at a lower level than the roadways, has a small stream running through it most of the time and a lot of greenery. It flooded in that area, or rather the neighbouring area. There was a major rainfall incident earlier this summer, and they were really happy. This has only been in place two years, and that particular area didn't flood. There are examples that we can draw on and ought to be. Okay. Before I let some of the witnesses come back in, I have two or three members who want to ask short, sharp questions that will further stimulate the debate. Emma Harper. Thank you very much, convener. It's kind of on the back of what Dave Stewart and what Finlay Carson said about flooding and flood prevention measures, and it will leak into health as well. Last night, I was at a meeting at Newton Stewart, and the local people are still saying that we should be dredging rivers, whereas the experts are saying that we shouldn't. Is it common misconception that we should be dredging versus not? I'm curious as to what we should be doing about that. Do we dredge just to help please people that something's been done, or do we just educate people about what the best practice for dealing with those rivers is at flood? Okay. Alexander Burnett, who's had constituency issues around flooding. My question was for Professor Bender. It's been answered. Finlay Carson, you want to come back in. I appreciate you looking me back in, convener. It's very much in the back of what Emma said again. I think that we need to make sure that all organisations around the table look at long-term and not just short-term. A lot of the issues that we have with dredging rivers are down to the loss of habitat, but that's the loss of habitat potential on a very short timescale. If rivers are rerouted or moved into new positions, the habitats eventually come back, but we've got SIPA who are very much against any work that removes the river beds and so on. I know that there's some protection in place where you're only allowed to work on a certain meterage at a river, but we maybe need to look at it far longer. It's a short-term pain for a long-term gain, if you like, where rivers are rerouted and potential habitats at the moment are changed to make them more sustainable. I just want to answer the question about Landry's strategy. We're now into second iteration. We've had two pilots, one Aberdeenshire and one based around the Tweet Forum. The next stage is to get Scotland-wide coverage for it. SNH had a stakeholder event a few weeks back to discuss the next steps. It's fair to say that the general consensus was that water catchment areas made a lot of sense as the sub-regional basis for that kind of planning, which brings in exactly the issues about flooding, housing development and so on. However, there isn't probably going to be the funding to set up new partnerships, so it's likely to devolve to local authorities. You've then backed the issue about local authorities taking decisions at a sub-catchment level. I'd suggest that perhaps the future is perhaps local authorities working together on a catchment basis and bringing that Landry's strategy planning into that actual local planning cycle, which it doesn't currently do. That might start to address questions about development floodplains. It could be that you start to have housing targets at a larger than a local authority region area, and perhaps a local authority gives up some housing development. The next neighbouring authority takes it on instead, with a recognition that that's best for the social, economic and ecological health of the areas at all. Gary Pendorn Just to direct reply to the dredging question, in fact, it's also linked to something that Finlay Carson said about straightening. Both dredging and straightening allow the water to flow faster down the river channel, which is a good thing. What you're interested in doing is reducing the water level, which can reduce flooding. It's a pretty basic hydraulic question. First of all, we'll be reassured that the water has got somewhere to go, so things downstream can stop the water going away, even if you dredge. If you get away or a bridge or if the water is flowing into some sort of lake or higher water body, if it is tidal, the dredging won't have any impact at all. The water is flowing faster, so it can cause erosion, so you need to understand the relationship between the flowing water and the substrate that is making up the river channel, so you can end up with bigger problems around land erosion, transport of sediment and soils, which is some of the stuff that we were talking about earlier on. Again, it has a role to play. It's not difficult to work out what impact it will have and what the consequences are, but I don't think it's an obvious thing for people to ask for, but you need to understand what the actual technical consequences of that are. There are alternatives to it that might be better in some instances. Somebody mentioned earlier on ecosystem services. Of course, you're reducing the ecosystem benefit of the river if you dredge it or straighten it. There's a balance to be struck there again between the need to protect ecosystems and biodiversity and reduce flooding. If I could digress briefly, convener, what I should have said earlier on was also about data. Data is going to become much more important in terms of managing these things in future, both from satellites and from sensing. We're moving to a situation where we'll be able to monitor our catchments to the same extent as we do. Maybe our motorways or our railways are any other kind of system in that we'll be able to collect data to state the system and predict what's going to happen much more accurately. Probably in a more pragmatic thing, one of the things that we don't do is collect historic data. Often, if you go back far enough, our older people say, well, I knew that would have happened. It happened 60 years ago. There's a very limited memory that people have that move into areas around what the real flood risk is. An actual memory in historic data is maybe even more valuable to us than all the models that SEPA has of predicting what's going to happen in the future. I think that some more consistent way of collecting historical data and archiving it would be helpful. Can I ask you briefly what about collecting current best practice? We have certain councils, Dumfries and Galloway would be one, who have built up, unfortunately, had to build up on expertise about responding to flooding. Do you get contacted by other councils asking for your advice or thoughts on how you tackle certain issues? Through professional networks that some of the officers are in, we go along to annual conferences and we often get asked to speak at these. We're up for a COSLA Gold award on Thursday night at Creef, where, hopefully, one of the big projects that we put in place over the last few years will be formally recognised as good practice. It's just a combination of some databases that are live, real-time information, fed in from the NHS and some of the social work databases that feed in. When we have flooding or any event that might lead to an evacuation of an area, we can capture who the vulnerable people are, the people at risk within that and get accurate data and then go in and offer them the support that they need. The big project that we tried since the flooding in 2009, in 2010, we employed a member of staff to engage formally with the communities. We've got more than 100 community councils. It started slowly, but we've now got to a level six or seven years later, where we have 75 community council groups that have resilience plans. As the professor was saying, it really depends on the collective memory of the community as to whether they want to engage. The areas that engage first with the areas that are flooded with living memory. We've supported that with equipment. The Scottish Government has been very good at funding 50 kits for the first 50 communities to partner with us and to develop their plans and arrangements. However, we've also provided some basic templates on how to write an emergency plan and how to exercise that plan. It doesn't really take a huge amount of involvement from the local authorities, but we're finding that we're really pushing an open door and the communities are just lapping it up. To the extent that we're having to urge a bit of caution, because I wanted to go a bit too far, and some of our flower service colleagues are worried that some communities might take rescue into their own hands and start wading into water to get their neighbours. We're having to urge a bit of caution, but the communities have a huge amount of ability to respond themselves. We're not just looking at flooding, we're also looking at extreme cold weather. The two big initiatives that we have been very successful at deploying were along the winter resilience. We had those two really cold, extended winter periods in 2010 and 2011, when Dumfries and Galloway was sat at minus 15 for over three weeks. A lot of the water mains pipes froze solid because they weren't in deep enough, because they hadn't been buried deep enough 100 years ago. We had communities that were living on bottled water for an extended period as well. We were engaged with those communities and they noted the fact that the grit bins in the communities were probably put at the extreme ends of the village, not much help to the people that actually want to spread it. We said, well, redeploy where you put the grit bins, and they're only a few hundred pounds, we'll buy some more, so they looked at the village maps, they knew the pavements, they knew the areas, and they decided to deploy them in completely different locations, but ones that suited the community. With a little bit of extra money, we subsidised grit spreading machines, little devices that people push around. As it happened, I did that for part of my village, so I've got three or four pavements, so I go and spread salt or grit on, and that's the way that the villages are really bought into the winter zones. With the flooding, I suppose that there was a craving for lots of sandbags, and I suppose that the jury is out on whether sandbags really work or not, and some of it is psychological, because a lot of the older properties are 100, 200, 300 years old. The water doesn't just go in through the front door, the water can go in almost anywhere, straight through the walls in most cases, but nevertheless, there was a demand from the communities to put sandbags in and deploy them, so we, the council, now go out with the flatbed trucks and drop off large pallets worth of filled sandbags, and before we know it, there's a group of volunteers got together with wheelbarrows, and they're taking three, four, five sandbags out and putting it at the front door of all the homes that they know are in flood risk areas. So there's a lot of good work taking place at the very local level that just a bit of support to trigger it, to get it started, to support them during the first year or two, and communities have really bought into the schemes. The one thing that I think maybe the committee might want to consider if I can just recommend this or just put this forward is that the Civil Continuance Act was really designed during the 90s. It came into force in 2004, the Continuance Planning Scotland regulations came into place in 2005, placed six duties on category one responders, the Fire Police local authorities, the 14 health boards, the territorial health boards, put duties on them, and but the local authority had one additional duty and that was to promote business continuity. So we have a duty to go and engage with small and medium-sized enterprises, with the charitable sector and others, just to encourage them to prepare business continuity plans for when there's bad weather or any other disruptive event that has to be said. But we don't have a duty to promote business to, sorry, to promote community resilience. So it's discretionary at the minute, so our local authority, the Fifeys and Galloway, has done a huge amount to do that. We employed a member of staff and they're still working with us and they've had great success and they will continue to do that, I think. But some local authorities don't because it is discretionary. So if there was a future consideration of the seventh, the extra duty that applies to local authorities, it might be to adapt that promotional recommendation to reach into community resilience. We always welcome constructive suggestions. I want to wrap up this session and move on to something else. Before I do, does anybody have any other points to make around this? Fina, thanks, Fina. I mean, just about cost. I mean, that's a really interesting point around Civil Contingencies Act and there's obviously kind of voluntary initiatives that you're putting in place. But to go back to my point about individual property level protection, if that's costing councils £8,000 a pop to put in the relevant floodgates and self-inflating airbricks and everything else, is that not a concern for councils about where you would get the funding if you had, say, 700 or 1,000 properties that you needed to protect? A casting for other councils, but I know that we certainly don't have a limit of 8,000 or limits 1,500 and we expect our people or communities that are engaged with us to engage on a 50-50 basis. We provide people that are interested to get us a catalogue of a dropdown of types of equipment, but rather than a household or a business owner decide for themselves, a member for the floodgates management team will visit that site and do an assessment of the building, because each building has its own particular needs. Because we have the purchasing power, we buy the stuff through the procurement team and then sell at 50-50 subsidised, so the council is putting forward half the cost because we expect the business owners it's their responsibility to make a commitment into this. I must admit from the experience that the feedback that I have had, I don't think there is much reluctance from people to realise that it is a 50-50 subsidy scheme. No one has not bought the equipment because they have to make a small contribution. Do you think that people are on benefits? Well, there is also the flood pods, the one that I mentioned earlier. If people don't buy the equipment, we are also going to deploy flood pods to the areas so that if we get to an amber alert, we will be proactive about deploying the flood pods. There is also the sandbags initiative that I talked about. For property owners and buying the proper floodgates, they can still use improvised equipment, sandbags and others. We have worked a lot with the RS cells. The RS cells have been good at putting in place. Some of the schemes that we have are not just community councils, it is the tenants and residents associations as well that are realising that they need to do more to support themselves. They will also look after their neighbours if they are vulnerable. In fact, some of the best schemes that we have had are in the areas where it is the tenants and residents that are supporting their neighbours in doing work with them. Anna Moss and Angela Heaney come in very briefly, Angela Heaney first. I am sure that dredging has its place, but when we are talking about severe floods and there is a huge volume of water wider than the channel, the dredging that would have taken a little bit out of the channel would not be anywhere near enough to cope with that kind of volume of water. It is of limited use. There is a straightening angle as well. A lot of straightening of rivers is what has caused some of the problems because it is making the water flow much faster. What we have to be thinking more holistically with adaptation is that we have also got droughts to face and water shortages, which could be very close together time-wise. We need to find ways, not just from a flooding point of view but from a drought point of view, of holding water back and having more meanders, if you like, but clearly in the appropriate places. Just to add a couple of things, with regard to data gaps, we have already heard about the gap in looking at historic event data, but there is also a bit of a gap in understanding current impacts. There is not currently a database that is coherent enough for us to have used in the indicator work, for example, around current events, how long they last, where exactly they are and how many properties, for example, are impacted. I know that SIPA is working on improving that, but currently it is a gap. Also around defences, the Scottish flood defence asset database, for example, again, has issues with it that SIPA is working on. There is an intention, I believe, for it also to start including structures that are not currently designated as a specific defence. A natural bank, for example, could provide important defence mechanism but has no protection as such because it is not seen as being a flood defence, but yet, if somebody removed it, it could have important consequences. Around the issue of costs for local authorities, there is some work currently being done, I think, about to be published, that, from the climate exchange work very closely with Aberdeenshire Council, looking at the costs of flooding and trying to get a real understanding of the costs to local authorities, not just of the immediate impacts from flooding but of the more long-term impacts, the impacts on lots of workhours, for example. I think that some departments and some people within the council for long periods of working maybe 75% of the time that department was working on flooding issues regarding the floods last winter in Aberdeenshire. Once we can see that the significant real costs to local authorities from flooding will start to understand that there is a great cost benefit to looking at being proactive in flood management and not just reactive, which is where most of the activity takes place. We are giving that a good kick at the ball. Let's move on to other subjects. We will look at health and social care services at Emma Harper. Last week Lord Krebs noted the significance of being able to monitor the arrival of new diseases and suggested that the next Scottish climate change adaptation programme should reflect the need to monitor disease closely. I wonder if anybody has any thoughts on our human resilience and pathogens that we could potentially be exposed to. On the issue of vector-borne diseases, we do not currently have any useful information on the risks to humans from vector-borne diseases. It was not something that was obviously brought into the current scap, so we did not look at that. What we do know is that a lot more research has been done around vector-borne diseases, say, for our livestock. We did look at liver fluke, for example, and the known climate impacts on their populations because of the impact on their vector species—the snails that they spend part of their lifetime in. We do know that there will be impacts on vector-borne diseases. I would say that, for Scotland, it is not necessarily that critical at the moment regarding human species affecting humans. However, because that data is not there, we cannot categorically say that, so it is important for us to start monitoring what species are coming and travelling up from the south, because conditions are getting more advantageous for them. It is ticks and Lyme's disease. From our organisation's perspective, it is a risk to staff volunteers and the visitors for trying to raise awareness, but we do not have any good data as to whether the incidence is increasing or whether awareness is improved. Again, it is something that can feed into land management practices if there is less. I hope that Scotland's might be more bracken, more bracken cover, more ticks and more disease, so it might be a second unintended consequence of other changes as a result of other decisions. I will set me back a little bit to health and social care services. A number of the members of the committee visited the national resilience centre in Dumfries. We are all impressed with the model that is designed by Dumfries and Galloway Council with regard to identifying vulnerable people in communities where they are and keeping that updated so that, if an emergency situation arises, they can target those people very quickly to get them moved, for example, if that is necessary. In terms of arrangements like that, what knowledge do we have of how widespread that kind of planning is across Scotland? There is Dumfries and Galloway Council pretty unique in that. Do you want to come back one? The persons at this database has been around now for about nine years. The key step was when it moved from just a local authority-controlled database of information that maybe our social work department and other departments held to when we partnered with the NHS. As I said, it does not need to be updated in the sense that it is live information. If a GP goes on to someone's records and puts someone on to dialysis or there is some change in the medical condition, that data is live. At any one time, once a major instance is declared, that is the trigger for accessing it, because we have to abide by various all sorts of data protection rules and regulations. Once a major instance is declared, we can then ask some of our technical colleagues that have GIS mapping to put a polygon or an area on to a map. It will just tell us exactly where the vulnerable people within that catchment live. To answer your question, it has just been a date of Dumfries and Galloway scheme to really this year. The Scottish Government and the National Centre for Zones quite rightly have picked up as one of their leading projects. The first phase has just finished. One of my colleagues that retired at the end of last week, his job for the last four months has been to go out around Scotland and promote the persons at its databases. There is a scheme that could be picked up and ran with almost off the shelf across Scotland. That first phase has finished, and his report has been submitted. It is really up to the Scottish Government to decide on what to do next, but those schemes do not really take an awful lot of money arguably to set up. It is just the will to set up the information sharing protocols to make sure that the data protection rights are shared to ensure that there are champions and owners of it. I think that what we will see over the next two years is being rolled out across Scotland, because it is almost one of those things that, when you look back and ask why it has not been in place before, it really does beg the question, because it is almost so straightforward. Finlay Carson I discussed with Martin earlier. He has a fantastic idea about how we can get this information out there and work on good practice right across, and that is to have—I am stealing a thunder—a blue flag type. I should maybe prompt him to—Martin, would you like to share with your idea with the committee right there? I am lucky in the sense that one of my other jobs is a reservist in the army, and I get to travel abroad a huge amount. Every year I am in another part of the world looking at community resilience schemes. Whether it is Indonesia or, I have done about five or six African countries now, I am just back from Brazil. I look what is happening at the local level across communities all around and how we get communities bought into it. I was in Rio within the last month looking at what they are doing. They have a lot of communities that aspire to a certain standard, and it made me think about what we do in the UK. In the sense that we put a blue flag on a beach when it gets to a cleanliness level and we put a green flag on a school when the teachers do some work with the kids on making it eco-friendly and they have a green flag up, but we do not encourage our communities to have a level where they are recognised. Could we have a community resilience award that could be achieved? It would not be for the local authorities to say that it is when a trigger is met and that might be when it has an exercise emergency plan. It would also be to work with the fire service and say that it is when the percentage of households have smoke alarms fitted, or it is working with the ambulance service when there is a certain number of defibrillators deployed at community level. I was speaking to the chief executive of Dumfries and Galloway NHS on Friday about the idea. He said that under the healthier communities banner that he has, he has an initiative to work with the GP practices across Dumfries and Galloway to encourage the GPs to write business continuity plans, so that there could be a number of agencies that could work up a trigger, which when combined, once it is met, the community would then achieve a resilient community status, just like the blue flag or the green flag for the schools. There would be a bit of recognition that that area has done a lot themselves to make that area as secure and as safe as it can. That is a very interesting idea. If we have covered health and social care and air pollution and pathogens, can we now look at businesses, Kate Forbes? Over the course of the conversation, we have touched on different areas where we need businesses to work together and with various stakeholders. However, the report from the CCC identified that there is currently no co-ordinated Government plan to increase the resilience of businesses in Scotland, particularly to severe weather. Have you got any thoughts on how we get that co-ordinated plan and what its purpose needs to be, what its primary objectives would need to be? Who wants to come back on that? Something about the Scottish Form of Natural Capital, which works with businesses. One of the things that is emerging is natural capital accounting. You look at the risks to your business from whether you are mining natural capital. An example of how it could work is, with the whisky industry, because they extract water, but they put water back into the environment and put warm water back into the environment. The next extreme weather event would be drought and putting it back in. How does the whisky industry manage that in the future, because that could end up becoming a problem? Also, that warm water should be feeding into heat networks and not just going back in and being allowed to cool down. Just to say, that is just an approach that is being used. Natural capital accounting looks at one of the first things that it does is look at how it manages risk with climate. That is one of the first things that it should be doing. University of Sheffield and University of Durham a few years ago did some work on the resilience of SMEs to flooding. The problem is that we tend to think of flooding in terms of individual householders or big industry-type stuff. There is this category in the middle, which is SMEs. The information is out there in terms of SEPA's flood risk maps as to what areas are prone to flooding, so we can identify what SMEs are in that area. What the research found was that it is a bit like the individual household. You have a whole range of preparedness in terms of SMEs, depending on how aware they are of flooding. It also goes back to a point that somebody else made earlier on. I think that it is an amos about trying to quantify the impact of flooding. We do not really understand the impact that flooding has on SMEs in terms of economic output, but all the tools and data are there. It is just grasping this nettle. I am trying to work with the SMEs to help them to understand how vulnerable their businesses are to this. In some cases, it is relatively simple steps that they can put in place to make themselves more resilient in others that are more complicated. It is just another level of communication that is required in focusing on that particular group of businesses. Presumably, there are significant development challenges in some areas in terms of ensuring that those businesses are in flood-vulnerable areas. What information do we have around that? The UK Government introduced the new national insurance scheme for flood protection, so that all of us pay towards those at most risk. There is also the problem with cost. I know from my constituency experience that a business that I dealt with was badly flooded. It had real problems getting hold of insurance companies, and it is also not just availability. It is at what cost you prepare to do. The new scheme, I think, makes some sense. There is a default where there will be a provider of last resort. That is a good thing, but it is like many other benefits. Those at no risk pay for those who are at greater risk. That is just the model that is being developed. Jenny Gilruth, do you want to touch on something and wait until education? In terms of the report itself, I quoted the statement from it last week, raising awareness about the effects of climate change is likely to be most effective when people are already dealing with the effects of extreme weather, which I think we all agree sounds a wee bit reactionary as opposed to preventative. Later on, in the report, it discusses Scotland resource called Ready for Emergencies. I know that Martin Ogilvie has already spoken about the green flags through the Eco Schools programme today. In terms of resilience in building that in the next generation, I wondered what people thought about the best way to do that in terms of education in the classroom. To those of you who are from local authorities today, are you aware of any good practice in your council area at the moment in terms of how teaching about climate change is delivered in schools in your area? The one popular school in Dumfries and Galloway that has been running for a number of years now is called Operation Safety. As you would expect, the police and the fire and other agencies get involved in that scheme. It runs over a number of weeks. It has been tried in different ways. The current scheme was open for about three weeks. The teachers working with the primary seven kids, as it happens this particular year, are the target audience. They are busting to Dumfries and they participate in operation safely for a day. They go around a number of scenarios, making it a minor crisis that they might face as a young child or a young adult, and they are given advice by the agencies. That is one of the schemes. Part of that has been looking at what you would do if you were evacuated and getting them to think about preparing for emergencies. There probably are other schemes, and I would not like to guess, but I know that, from my own point of view, anecdotally, they come back and they work on schemes, such as project work, and they are looking at disasters. That is the cue. They might be looking at projects such as the Titanic, but they go a bit deeper than that. They are looking at the dynamics of an emergency, how it happens, how it is responded to, and a lot of other things are teased out just through the project that might run over in such a 10-week period. Anna-Morris My office in flooding can be—these extreme events can be a great routine for conversation, for engagement in communities, but what is really important is that we don't lose sight of the other issues around adaptation that are not necessarily headline grabbers, but which are going to be critical for communicating through education because they are going to become more and more important and more and more critical for the lives of generations to come. They might be more subtle at the moment, but that does not mean that we cannot communicate them in useful ways. I have done engagements in primary schools with children as young as six, and you can engage on issues around the consequences for Scottish farmers around adaptation, which I have done with them in very meaningful ways that bring the issues of adaptation alive to them in a way that is meaningful for them in their lives now, but also sets those seeds for them being aware of how important those issues are into the future and not just considering it, because they do not live in a flood risk zone, for example. Ajo Heaney I am not aware specifically of adaptation. Climate change certainly is dealt with in schools, but more often than not it is about mitigation. I think that that is a huge piece of work just generally across the whole population that there is this default position. If you talk about climate change, people think about mitigation. It is easier to get your head around, you can reduce it to one metric carbon, you can think about energy use. Adaptation is such a broad topic that it is difficult for people to get their heads around. I think that there is a huge challenge there to raise awareness, because for me this is the big issue. The mitigation side, yes, we have definitely got to do that, but if all of us stopped all of our missions in the UK tomorrow, we are only talking about 2-3% of global emissions, which is not to say that we should not be doing that, but emissions are continuing to increase globally. This is coming in our direction, so we really have to pay attention to what we can do. For me, it is not clearly that we have to respond to emergency situations when they happen, but we have got to plan to make sure that we do not get to that stage or to reduce that stage. That is really what is missing, is the thinking outside the box, the changes that we really need to have at all levels of society in agriculture, forestry, everything that has been discussed here today, but even broader than the topics that we have discussed here today. We have hardly touched on overheating, which we often think is not going to be an issue here because the temperatures we are talking about are average temperatures and they do not sound that great, but research in Stockholm showed that it was only temperatures of about 24 degrees that was causing major problems for them in a heat wave, because it is if the temperature does not decrease overnight that it becomes a big issue. I come back again, I have talked about it from a flooding perspective, but the blue and green infrastructure, we need to have more and more of that in our urban areas for cooling, for absorbing, for improving biodiversity, it is increasing the habitat networks. It is such a win-win situation to introduce more of this in urban areas in particular, which is where most people live. There are even more pleasant environments to be in, it helps economic development because people are wanting to spend time there, there is more walking, there is more cycling. There is a whole range of issues there that will improve overall, so yes, education awareness is rising definitely, but much, much broader than just schools. Okay, thank you. We move to wrap this up by looking at what the immediate priorities are for strengthening Scotland's approach to climate adaptation and what each of the witnesses think should be being undertaken now to support the development of the next iteration of the Scottish Climate Change Adaptation programme, which is due in 2019. I am looking for bullet point suggestions from as many of the witnesses who feel there is something to contribute on that. Who wants to go first? Strengthening national strategies. I know that it was mentioned last week that the digital strategy did not really take on board adaptation. Certainly, I know that climate change is mentioned in national planning policy, but the adaptation side is quite weak. The focus yet again is on mitigation, infrastructure strategy, I think that they were saying there wasn't a lot. So I think nationally, because certainly from a local government perspective I've mentioned about resourcing, pressures at all levels of government I know on resourcing, but if it's not there, if it's not legal or if it's not seen as mandatory or regulatory, then the tendency is to focus on areas that are. There is always a tendency in these situations to move towards more modelling and more sophisticated modelling and there's recently been calls at a UK level for integrated modelling including meteorology, hydrology and flooding. I guess that will give us a short term step forward. I kind of said it earlier on, but I think that we should be anticipating the availability of more cheaper data to understand how the system as a whole is functioning in terms of run-off and response and monitoring pipes and systems so that it may be trying to manage it like a motorway system is a bit too radical, but we certainly will be able to take more robust decisions based on data rather than based on modelling and we should be thinking five years ahead as to what's going to happen there. I think I made the point earlier on about historic data sources, I think that that's really important, we have to archive these appropriately. I think the other piece of work that has to take place is making better use of improved statistical methods. One of the issues in the world that I inhabit is we've discovered that mathematicians and statisticians have been doing a lot of research associated with improving statistical predictions of uncertainty, yet trying to translate these into practical tools that organisations such as SEPA and the Environment Agency can use is a bit of a challenge, so communication there between the academic disciplines to do that is quite important. The piece that I said earlier on about being joined up in communication is really important as well. You asked about sharing good practice, there wasn't time to answer that point, but the Scottish Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research does run a many conference three days where local authorities do get together and share good practice, which is a good model. The Society of Chief Officers for Technical Services also get together regularly to talk about flooding issues and share good practice. I think that we need to look beyond the bounds of Scotland, because there's lots of stuff even happening in England. From my perspective, the Environment Agency and SEPA are often doing similar things, but aren't communicating with each other. My own perspective is that the Environment Agency are much more connected with the academic community in the UK than our comparable organisations in Scotland, so encouraging them to do that would be useful. That's very constructive. Just a very quick word. If we're talking about allowing nature to adapt to climate change, we have to address some of the—to get habitats in good ecological condition, what we need is a national ecological network, and there's been a lot of slippage in that and the Scottish biodiversity strategy. In terms of targeting our actions on the ground and setting a target for 2027-2030, for peatlands it's a data thing. We need to understand baseline condition now, so we need to understand where we should be prioritising work and action, and then we need to have a robust system of monitoring, a consistent way of reporting our work on the ground so that we can show what we are achieving and tie that back into metrics for carbon emissions. Very much following on from that, I would say that the issue goes right across the board. The ASC raised very clearly last week the need for milestones and timescales to be associated with the adaptation programme, and to do that you need coherent, useful, full data, and obviously the issue around peatland, but as I said, it goes right across the board. We need the adaptation indicators that we've developed to give us a great base to start with. It has meant that we can now identify where some of the critical gaps in data are. Now, sometimes that's because there's no data that exists, but often it's because there is data around, but it's not actually in the useful form. We need to be creative about making sure that data is usable and coherent. We need to also be creative about, as I mentioned before, taking best practice. At the same time, as you're doing these great things in Dumfrucent Gallery, for example, ensuring that, whilst that's going on, you're also thinking about how you can monitor its effectiveness and think about how you're collecting that information and then share that best practice with other authorities and ensure that we can build up these databases to know that what we're doing is actually effective. That's going to be critical to improve. The Committee on Climate Change's point about SNH developing a monitoring system that would report species and habitats. I think that it's important that that does its currency off it, that it feeds into the adaptation strategy. The second point is the landage strategy. We could see that rolled out across Scotland even if it only focused on habitat fragmentation and water management, which we've spoken about quite a lot here. That would be a step forward. The third point is that we can have elephant the room. A lot of what we've spoken about depends upon cap funding. I wouldn't wait until 2020 before we start thinking about the public benefits that we need to get from any future system. That might happen at UK level, but Scotland's got something like 70 per cent of the less favoured area of UK agriculture, and we need to think about what the future is for the uplands. Martin Ogill, we do have anything left. One bit of feedback for the Professor and for everyone to recognise. Certainly in the emergency planning side of life, in our community, we've recognised that we've got probably more in common with Northumberland, Cumbria, the Borders and Northern Ireland in terms of the flood risk. For over 10 years now, we've been meeting them on a six-monthly basis, so we have an emergency planning forum. We do share good practice and best practice. The three recommendations, if you like the bullet points, promote community resilience, and that might need a little amendment to the regulations. One would be to roll out the persons at this database, and it's a Scottish wide scheme. The final one would be to base all our readiness and all our plans on what the forecasters are saying on our levels. At the minute, the emergency is either declared or it's not declared, but it's not that easy. We certainly align all our readiness levels to the yellow or the amber or the red warnings that come in, and we have excellent advice now. It's getting better and better every year from SEPA and the Met Office as the modelling gets better. Now, very accurately, we're able to say that you're going to flood in six hours' time or 12 hours' time that allows us to put in place all sorts of measures. Thank you very much for that. David Stewart was asked for the last word. Thanks. It's a story of my life, convener. Just an observation rather than a question. I was quite concerned that when we go to evidence from the Met Office in session 3 that Scotland doesn't have a complete range of weather predictive pattern because there's a gap in the high-density radar, specifically in Murray, which in my patch, which you will know, has a real problem with flooding. England's got a complete coverage, and there's a bit of an argument between the Scottish Government and the UK Government who provides that. My general point is that prevention is better than cure, particularly in an emergency planning point of view. Surely we should have the ability to protect severe weather patterns in Scotland as we do in England. Thank you. I take this opportunity to thank the witnesses for their time this morning. I think that that's been a very useful session, particularly for the constructive suggestions that it's throwing up. That certainly gives us a number of action points to take forward and to raise with the cabinet secretary in three weeks' time. Again, thank you very much for your time. I'm now going to call a short five-minute break to SWAT witnesses. The third item on the agenda is to take evidence on the draft climate change annual target Scotland order 2016. I welcome cabinet secretary Rosanna Cunningham, John Ireland, the deputy director of low-carbon economy division, and Tom Morrison, the climate change policy adviser to the Scottish Government. Can I ask the cabinet secretary to speak to the instrument? Thank you, convener. I want to say something very briefly about the background to the draft order. It sets annual greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets for the years 2028 to 2032 in a manner that is evidence-based and consistent with the Scottish Government's commitment to high ambition on climate change. The proposed annual targets match the more ambitious of two options that were recommended to the Scottish ministers by the Committee on Climate Change, who of course act as independent statutory advisers. They represent a reduction from baseline levels of 64 per cent reduction in 2030, keeping Scotland on track to meet our 2050 reduction target of 80 per cent. The committee will of course be aware of the recent announcement that proposals for a new climate change bill will be outlined in early 2017. Whilst we anticipate new legislation, the Scottish Government remains fully committed to discharging the obligations of the 2009 act, including the setting of annual targets for the years 2028 to 2032. The draft order arises out of the 2009 legislation and does not come from what will be the future, whatever that might set in terms of targets. Setting the current targets at the ambitious levels proposed, we think will provide an appropriate stepping stone towards future legislation. It will also reaffirm our long-term commitment to the low-carbon economy, sending important signals to investors and stakeholders at a time when the UK Government policy and Brexit scenario are causing a little bit of uncertainty. The proposed targets are ambitious, but we believe that they are achievable, given Scotland's strong progress to date and in the context of the transformative changes associated with the transition to a low-carbon economy. At this point, I would probably have to say that I am happy to answer members' questions. However, if you ask very technical questions, it will be the officials who will probably need to respond. Thank you, cabinet secretary. I will kick that off. Was it purely the fact that this was the more ambitious of the two options that prompted the Scottish Government to go for it, or were there practical considerations that led to that decision as well? In a sense, there were two issues here. The first was that we are setting ambitious targets for ourselves. We feel that it is better to be ambitious. In the long run, it is better to be ambitious and fall slightly short than to set not-ambitious targets and achieve them but then not feel that you have really achieved anything. We wanted to stick to the more ambitious of the two targets, although it is fair to say that the other target was a perfectly acceptable way to have gone, and the Committee on Climate Change would have been perfectly content had we chosen that. It gave us two options. We chose the harder one because we felt that it matched the sense that we were being more ambitious. In any case, because we had already signalled a new climate change bill, it also seemed to fit that movement that we were in. The two things really came together at that point to make it really obvious that you were going to go for the harder one. The softer one would have been acceptable. I do not think that anybody could have criticised this for it, but we just felt that pushing that little bit harder was probably the best way to proceed. Any questions from other members? Absolutely. Thank you. I just couldn't remember the rules. Just a good morning, cabinet secretary. I simply wanted to highlight that I welcome the fact that the Scottish Government has made the decision to go for the more robust option, so I would just like that on the record. There are no other questions or points to be made for the record. We will move to agenda item 4, which is consideration of motion S5M-01520, that the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee recommends that the Climate Change annual target Scotland order 2016 draft be approved. I am now going to invite the cabinet secretary to move that. I move that the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee recommends that the climate change annual target Scotland order 2016 draft be approved. Do any members wish to speak to that? Do you wish to wind up, cabinet secretary? No. I put the question on the motion. The question is that motion S5M-01520 in the name of Rosanna Cunningham be approved. Are we all agreed? I just need to clarify, are members content to delegate the signing off of the report to the convener? We move now to agenda item 5. The fifth item on the agenda is to take evidence on the draft climate change limit on use of carbon units Scotland order 2016. The cabinet secretary and her team remain as was. Can I ask the cabinet secretary to speak to the instrument? Thank you again, convener. A little background to the draft order. It sets a limit on the use of carbon units over the period 2018 to 2022. This is a different period that we are talking about. It is a more imminent period. This is a technical matter that relates to the carbon accounting that underpins the act. This too arises out of the 2009 act. The act allows emission reduction targets to be met through two basic mechanisms. Firstly, through domestic effort to reduce emissions, which includes the operation of the EU emissions trading system in Scotland. Secondly, through the purchase by Scottish ministers of international carbon credits to offset domestic emissions, the present order proposes a zero limit on the extent of that latter mechanism, the use of offsetting credits to meet targets over that period 2018 to 2022. By setting such a limit, the Scottish ministers are committed to meeting emissions reduction targets over that period entirely through domestic effort. The proposed zero limit is consistent with the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change and the Scottish Government's on-going commitment to a strong focus on domestic action to tackle climate change. I am happy to answer questions. I have a very specific question about the dreaded word Brexit. How does it relate the fact that there is an EU emissions trading scheme to the fact that the negotiations are continuing? I am not asking the cabinet secretary in any detail, but I want to highlight that awareness of what will happen if we reach that point. We have made this commitment. Obviously, at the moment, it continues to operate, so we have to operate within that structure that we are working in just now. Claudia Beamish is correct to flag up that there is a longer-term uncertainty in respect of the EU ETS. Section 22 of the act contains provisions allowing the amendment of such orders. Should the circumstances regarding the EU ETS change in future, what we have no real knowledge of is if they do change how they might change and whether or not there would be any mechanism for signing up as an external member or not. That is a question that I cannot ask. I have to say that the legal draftsman must have spotted something coming that we did not spot provisions that allow the amendment of orders should circumstances regarding the EU ETS change. There is a legislative mechanism for dealing with it, but until we know what we are dealing with, that is an impossibility to guess. However, there is not an enormous timescale now. The clock has been set ticking, so there is not a huge timescale on which to begin to think about that. Any other members with questions with the cabinet secretary? We move to agenda item 6, which is consideration of motion S5M-01712, that the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee recommends that the climate change limit on use of carbon units Scotland order 2016 draft be approved. Cabinet Secretary, do you wish to speak to and move the motion? I do not think that I require to speak to it. I move the motion. Do any members wish to speak at this stage? No? Do you wish to wind up, Cabinet Secretary? I put the question on the motion. The question is that motion S5M-01712 in the name of Rosanna Cunningham be approved. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The committee's report will confirm the outcome of the debate. Are the members content to delegate the signing of the report to the convener? Cabinet Secretary, thank you and your officials for your time this morning. The seventh item on the agenda is for the committee to consider the negative instruments as listed on the agenda. Those are smoke control areas exempted fireplaces Scotland revocation order 2016, SSI 2016-292 and smoke control areas authorised fuels Scotland revocation regulations 2016, SSI 2116-293. I refer members to the paper and I ask for any comments. I would simply like to put on the record that there has been concern expressed to me about coal fireplaces outside of smoke zones. I just think that it is important for us to be aware of that issue, that it does relate to air pollution issues. I am simply highlighting that Thank you. Anyone else? Is the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to those instruments? We are agreed. At its next meeting on 25 October, following the Scottish Parliament's recess, the committee will take evidence on greenhouse gas emissions, targets and climate change adaptation from the cabinet secretary. As agreed earlier, we will now move into private session. I ask that the public gallery be queered as the public part of the meeting is closed.