 Welcome to the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee's 18th meeting of 2019. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, can I remind everyone to switch off mobile phones as they may affect the broadcasting system? Can I remind everybody that's around the table that broadcasting will organise the microphone so there's no need to press any buttons to just speak and broadcasting will deal with it? The first item on the agenda is for the committee to take further evidence in the climate change emissions reduction target Scotland Bill at stage 2. Since the committee reported in the bill at stage 1, we've received responses from the Scottish Government. The Committee for Climate Change has published our updated advice and the Cabinet Secretary has made a statement in Parliament outlining the Scottish Government's response to the global climate emergency. Ahead of considering amendments at stage 2, we've heard from the Committee for Climate Change and the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform before hearing from stakeholders this morning on the updated advice to the Scottish Government. I'm delighted to welcome everyone in our first round table of the morning. We're going to be focusing on the broad issues and impacts, effectively what this new advice and the acceptance of that advice by the Scottish Government means for Scotland on the action that we take forward now. We've been out in the half with you and before we explore your views, can I invite everyone round the table to introduce yourselves? I'll maybe go just from my left right round. I'm, of course, Gillian Martin, the convener of the committee. Professor Jaffrey. St. Jaffrey, I direct the Centre for Climate Justice at Glasgow Caledonian University. Angus Macdonald, MSP for Falkirk East. I'm Ben Wilson, policy officer at SKEAF, the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund. Stuart Stevenson, MSP and the Bill were amending as the Bill I took forward in 2009. Dave Wright, Professor of Carbon Management, University of Edinburgh. Hello, I'm Mark Winskell. I'm Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and I'm Policy Director of Climate Exchange. Okay, I have my clerking team to my left. I'm John Scott, MSP for Lear. Jim Ski, chair of the Justice Transition Commission. I'm Rachel Howell, lecturer in sustainable development at the University of Edinburgh. I'm Claudia Beamish, South Scotland MSP and Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform. I'm Jim Densham, from RSPB Scotland, representing Scottish Environment Link today. I'm Clive Mitchell, an outcome manager for people in nature at Scottish Natural Heritage. I'm Mark Ruskell, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife. Okay, so I'm going to ask a very broad question, first of all, just to start us off. And I guess it's the milling of a question. We know where we need to go. We've been told to targets that there are pathways to get to. How do we get there? The CCC report is quite challenging and I've now had a chance to go the way through the whole report. The first thing to say is that it's very good in providing a sort of snapshot of what a net zero world would actually look like, but the report actually says very little at the moment about the pathway of how you would actually need to get there. This is something obviously from the point of view of the Justice Transition Commission that we really need to explore in more depth because the pathway and the journey from here to net zero is actually going to be the big challenge. Obviously, the invitation in terms of Scotland was also to think about the level of ambition for the intermediate years of 2030 and 2040 as well, so the CCC has come up with some numbers there, you know, expanding the ambition, the reduction by 2030 from 66 to 70 per cent, but I think I have to say looking at the report, there wasn't a lot of detailed bottom-up analysis that got you from the 66 to the 70. It was very much a case of drawing a kind of straight line from where we are now to the net zero point, so I think there's got to be a lot of work in Scotland on their revised climate change plan, which I think will need dialogue with the Justice Transition Commission to sort that out. So I think in the question of how do we get there, yeah, it's the million dollar question and it's something that we really need to start working on, but the CCC has given us the start of the thought on that. Any other thoughts on that, Professor Draffon? We know the road map ahead, ambitious targets set before us. From my perspective, we have a really good understanding of the technology and the knowledge that we need to put in place to get there. In turn, to answer the question, how do we get there, I think what we really need to focus on is societal and behavioural change. We need to engage with the public. Public engagement is critical to achieving a low-carbon economy. How we engage with the public across all sectors of society, no matter what the ethnic minority or the inequalities or the social justice aspects, it's absolutely critical that we engage with them and there's an absolute must for looking at education and a broad set of educational and public engagement messages that need to get through is vital to this. So I think the CCC have made a point of saying that the target was very much the end point, the 2050 net zero, the feasibility and affordability of that and I think they have demonstrated that. I think that there's a lot of analysis. There is a lot of bottom-up analysis that has worked its way into the report. In fact, the analysis was done on a bottom-up basis rather than a top-down basis and there's some discussion about that in the report. I do agree with Jim that the actual filling of the interim targets needs a lot more analysis. That needs analysis within Scotland as well as the UK. I think that the committee has been fairly open about that. I think that they have demonstrated what they were asked to do, which was to demonstrate the feasibility and affordability of net zero by 2045 for Scotland, 2054 for the UK, so I don't think that they see it as the finished job themselves. I should say that climate exchange will also be very keen to work with government across government on filling out the evidence base, which is something we've been doing already in the time that we've had. What the climate change committee said very clearly in their report is that Scotland can go much faster than the UK because of our wealth of carbon and ability and land to store more carbon and to sequester more carbon, which is really encouraging. It shows that nature-based solutions can do so much for us to help to achieve those targets. We really need to put those in place very soon, not just for the climate but for nature and solving the multiple problems that we have in terms of biodiversity loss as well as the climate change issue. That's really important. The report talks about afforestation. It's something that we've known about for a long time. It includes peatland restoration this time, which is very important. We have a great opportunity to do that in Scotland. It touches on other things, but there is much more that we can do. I think that one of the things about the report, as the committee has talked about, is that it's using today's technologies. It says that it's feasible with today's technologies, and there's lots more that we will know about quite soon or we can know about if we put more effort into it, such as the value of blue carbon. We know that there are huge stores. SNH has put lots of work into calculating the stores of carbon in our marine environment. That's okay as a block of storage. We must protect that, but we can recreate coastal habitats to store a lot more carbon than a RSPB report from a couple of years ago called Glorious Mud looked at how much potential there is for coastal realignment right now. We could do up to 4,000 hectares of coastal realignment right now, which would store huge amounts of carbon in those coastal areas right now. Those things aren't included in the report and could be, and there are many more other technologies that we will know more about if we put more money and effort into research them. David Ray. In terms of how we get there, I think Professor Jaffrey completely agree with her points in terms of we need to bring everyone with us. This is going to be really difficult. What the Committee on Climate Change has laid out is really stretching in terms of the 2045 target, and at the moment we've got this context of real public support, I think, for what the Scottish Government have done in terms of accepting the advice and going for that target. We've got great will, but there's a real risk of losing that, and I think Jim's commission is key to that in terms of the just transition. Also, I think the skills, so that was highlighted in the Committee on Climate Change report. The skills based to deliver this across all the sectors in our society, we haven't got that capacity yet. We need to build that, and so there's a real role for further education, higher education, all levels in terms of getting that skill base there so we can transition in terms of jobs, but also deliver across everything from, like Jim was describing, the people in restoration needs expertise right through to how we have zero carbon housing, for instance. So it's the people, as ever, are the way we will get there. Yeah. Rich, well, one thing I'd like to stress is that we'll get where we want to go if we start immediately. This is a really interesting thing we've got to do because it's a long-term project, it's a marathon in one sense, but we've got to go out of the blocks as if it's the 100 or 200 metres. So I think we need to be very, very careful to understand that whatever date is set for reaching net zero, we haven't got, you know, 30 years or whatever to start. It's starting right now. Like Professor Geoffrey and Dave Ray, I think it's very important the public engagement aspect, that's the bit that my expertise speaks to. In addition to education, I think there are also other ways that we can make this a collaborative effort with civil society organisations to help overcome some of the barriers to public engagement and to behavioural change. Ways, for example, to increase a sense of agency and self-efficacy, and I'm happy to explore and give some suggestions about that. Yeah. I'm happy for you to do that right now, because one of the things that seems to me that if public engagement might just attract the people who are already completely aware of the sort of things, the actions, the data, the actions that they might take, but how do you reach those harder to reach people used to the latest effect? I think we're at a really exciting place now in terms of the context of engagement because the polls are showing that there's a higher level of concern about climate change than for many, many years. So the proportion of people who are aware and engaged is much higher than it has been, and that will be helping to change social norms. And so the hardest to reach people, I think, will in part come along once things become more normal. So one of the things that I think is most important is that we make it the most normal or the cheapest or the easiest thing to do things in a sustainable way. And we're also seeing that the media attention to climate change is the highest it's been since the Paris Agreement in 2015. So, for example, one aspect I've written about in my response was the dietary changes that we need from a health perspective as well as a climate change perspective. Now, there's lots of different barriers to people adopting more sustainable behaviour. Some of those are financial, some of those are practical. For example, if you don't have a bus service that you can't commute by bus and so on. But some of them are more psychological. And when it comes to dietary change, some of those will be the more psychological barriers. So there are quite a lot of people who are saying, I'm willing to make changes, for example, changing my diet, or for example, cutting down flying would be another. I'm willing to make changes if I can see that others are making them too. There's no point me doing it on my own. So we could work with groups in society who are pushing for greater changes. You've got extinction, rebellion, friends and their whatever and say, right, okay, these could be organisations which would set up commitment platforms, which would actually work with their members and with the supporters to set up sort of agreements where people say, yes, I'll commit to doing this and there could be different levels of commitment if this many other people also commit to it. And that's how you can kind of overcome some of the agency, some of the psychological issues and actually give the civil society organisations, which are pushing you to do more, a role to play in engaging their members on that sort of thing. And that could be a relatively low cost way. Now, obviously, there are other barriers that are going to be needing policy change and are going to be needing infrastructural changes. And it's extremely important that we or you, the policy makers, are not asking individuals to commit to behavioural changes where the barriers are such that they can't remove them. But that's one of the things that I could see being quite a useful contribution. So you've got extinction, rebellion, for example. Whatever target is chosen for going next zero, they're going to say it's not enough. But I would be wanting personally to go back to them and say, okay, so get your members to commit. If you can do more than this report is expecting society to do, then we can do more. So I'm asking people to put in practical actions and rather than just... That's what people are wanting now. That's what people want. They want to know what they can actually do themselves. Clive Mitchell. I think we have a triple challenge in terms of how we get there. The net zero report makes it quite clear, as Jim's already indicated, that we can't get there without land use, land use change and forestry emissions being taken into account. Over the timescale that we have to do it to 2040, there's at least another half a degree of warming left in the inertia resulting from previous emissions. So the trends and changes that we've seen in terms of drought and floods and pests and disease and so on will intensify and get a bit worse over the same period. So we have to adapt at the same time as we take actions to reduce emissions going into the atmosphere. And since we can't put a spade in the ground with affecting both adaptation, mitigation and the state of nature, we need to address issues to do with the loss of biodiversity at the same time as we move to a net zero economy. As others have said, doing that through a just transition to that economy. I think it's worth reflecting in terms of the points that have been made about collaboration that in terms of mitigation, we can see what we can do on the basis of an organisation by organisation sector by sector approach over the last 10 years, which is three or four percent emission reductions a year, which is impressive and it's been great to see that. But we need to more than double that from 2020 onwards in order to get on to that net zero pathway. And I think the key to that, as others have already indicated, lies in collaborative place-based approaches to create those communities of interest and peer groups that we can identify with and move with together, addressing both mitigation, adaptation state of nature and the associated UN sustainable development goals all at the same time. We have a couple of members wanting to ask questions. First person by his hand and they have Stewart Stevenson. Thank you very much, convener. Listen with interest so far. It seems to me that the contributions have fallen into two stools. The larger is controlling emissions, the slightly smaller by which Rachel and Tazim focused on gym and clive, perhaps more looking about sequestration and mitigation. I just wonder how the two play off because of course what we're looking for is not zero, we're looking for net zero. The report that we're looking at focused much more on emissions rather less on sequestration and I just wonder if there's more to do. Now sequestration of course is one of these apparent free lunches because if you could do it all by sequestration and not have to change behaviours wouldn't that be lovely except there are other reasons for changing behaviours besides just what we're dealing with and I just wonder how those two play off against each other and whether in the room we've got specialists if you like in emission management and changing behaviours and specialists in sequestration and how can policy makers and government help focus those people with the specialisms to deliver the maximum in their area without necessarily being distracted by what other specialists would do in other areas. In other words, trying to break the generality of the problem into the specific contributions that each of us can make in our scientific and professional lives, how do we do that as policy makers? I think it's a great question. I work for a body called climate exchange which is one of a number of sensors of expertise funded by the Scottish Government. Climate exchange deals with both adaptation and mitigation, so we think about this quite a lot. It's very much the business of bringing different specialists together in a collaborative environment. I think that we're talking about the policy challenge but it's also mirrored by a research challenge. How do we actually bring the different disciplines or the different expertise together to think about this as a whole economy problem, which is absolutely clear now that this has to become a whole economy challenge throughout different layers of government, but there's also an equivalent challenge for us as researchers because you have a number of different experts around this table. One other thing that's difficult for researchers and all kinds of different specialists is to bring that together. I think that that needs real attention in thinking about how Government funds its research, how we go forwards on this together, how we do the analytical job. There's been a lot of attention through the Scottish Times model, which I'll talk about, but that's just one way of thinking about the whole economy challenge. I had one other point that I just wanted to come back to because I think there's a bit of a danger that this net zero implies. It's much more about behaviour and much less about technology because this is known technologies. I think that's slightly dangerous for both research and policy. When the CCC says this is known technology, it's technologies that are currently, in many cases, some of the more difficult street sectors are far too expensive to be adopted at scale. We need to bring... Innovation is very much about getting things demonstrated. Decarbonising heat is at the moment looking much more expensive than the options for decarbonising heat look a lot more expensive than our current ways of supplying heat to lots of buildings in Scotland and others. Even building sufficiency needs a lot of technological innovation. The committee did actually look at this. I wouldn't reliably use these figures, but they suggested that technological solutions were about 40 per cent. Behaviour change was about 10 per cent, and the rest was a combination of both. I think we have to kind of... That's a very broad brush, but I think we can't take our eye off the technological challenge. I know that's difficult because some of the technological challenges are things that require a lot of international work on CCS and things like that, but the Scottish Government has to be careful in not taking its eye off them and thinking about infrastructure spend appropriately. So there's a good alignment between infrastructure spend available in Scotland and the climate change plan. It's a massive role for the UK Government in this as well. It was something that let the decarbonisation of the gas network. That comes back to that whole thing. We haven't heard of a response from the UK Government yet, and that's going to be key, isn't it? Absolutely. We're expecting a heat strategy next year from both UK and Scottish Governments, and they have to be aligned. My point was really that there is quite a lot of infrastructure spend happening now in Scotland. We have an infrastructure commission and infrastructure programmes. We have significant amounts of money, which can be leveraged with UK money, but that has to be directed appropriately so that we can find out more about how we get the costs of low-carbon heat, hydrogen and CCS. I think that Scotland has an opportunity to attract UK funding by leveraging its own spend in those key areas. Jim Ski. Just to follow on what Mark has been saying by taking a kind of systems view on that. If we recall the 1.5-degrees report from IPCC that I was involved in, then the way that that has moved into the Committee on Climate Change report, I think very much the message is that, because of the level of ambition that you're looking at, there's really nothing that you can leave off the table. I don't think then you can say it's either behaviour or we can do carbon dioxide removal. The ambition is such that we need everything. To support Scotland's 90 per cent greenhouse gas reduction by 2050, there was a scenario called ambition. The new report has a scenario called further ambition that gets us to 96 per cent and a scenario called speculative, which is needed to get to the 100 per cent. It's really giving you the signal that there's nothing that can be left off the table. My kind of view is that the or is probably the most overused word in this debate. It's and, and, and when it's coming to the different measures. One thing that I would flag up and it's to pick up on both the behaviour, which I entirely agree about, and Clive's one on nature-based solutions. The report also talks about bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which is a very difficult issue to talk about. It also talks about direct air capture of carbon, which it suggests could be located with bioenergy with carbon capture and storage in order to take advantages of economies of scale. One of the reasons, as I understand it, that the committee argued that Scotland could be more ambitious than other parts of the UK was greater access to those particular approaches, technologies and Scotland. I'm not commenting on the feasibility of that, because the Just Transition Commission, we are specifically asked not to talk about the ambition, that's not our job. We have to think about how you get there and the fairness, but it is, I think, something to recall that what differentiates Scotland from other parts of the UK is not greater access to, potentially, carbon dioxide removal. I think that we need to keep that in mind as well. I'm just going back to the question that was posed. I completely get the need for different mindsets to come together and to brainstorm where we're at just now. I think that one thing, as policy makers, is that what we shouldn't do, what we try not to do, is to assume that we have all the solutions. I'll just give you a very quick, classic example of that green infrastructure. We have researchers working on green infrastructure in some of the poorest parts in Glasgow, and the communities in those areas don't want green infrastructure. They don't want to have trees planted on their doorstep. Policy makers are sitting round the table wondering, why not? That's the most obvious solution, but when you look further into it, it's to do with issues about security, particularly for women and children. Parklands are not lit, it's unsafe to go out, it encourages alcohol and drug abuse and so on. It's those issues that are beginning to come to the fore, which everyone sitting round the table thinking, we had no idea that those issues were coming up. We mustn't overestimate that we have the solutions and they are the definite solutions going forward. There's a real critical issue, and we need to look at co-designing and co-developing solutions with communities. We mustn't go back to the point about technology, but we mustn't underestimate the value of small-scale solutions and low-cost solutions that can have significant impact to encourage behavioural change in bringing down how we're dealing with our climate. There's a lot of merit in that, rather than always going for the high-end, high-cost technology development, which there is a place for, but we mustn't underestimate the small-scale things that we can put in place. Clive Mitchell? To answer the student's question directly, we don't have enough planet to do all of it by carbon sequestration. We need about three probably to do it that way. The bulk of the effort has to be on removing and reducing emissions that are going into the atmosphere in the first place. It's also clear that we need to use the land carefully to close down the carbon cycles that we've exploded over the last few decades in particular. There are other key nutrients and geochemical cycles around nitrogen that are key to this as well. The other aspect that I was going to mention is that peedland restoration is really good for keeping carbon in the ground and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. It also helps to regulate water flows and reduce flood risk and so on. Blue carbon would be another example where things like kelp beds are good for sequestering carbon, but they also dampen wave energy and reduce coastal flood risk during storms and so on. Again, I re-emphasise the point that it's both adaptation and mitigation and state of nature altogether. The final point that I was going to make about technologies is recognising their importance. I think that reinforcing all the points that have been made around the table is that, inevitably, technologies drive behaviour change and it's really important to recognise that. Particularly when we're talking about large-scale technological interventions, we need to think carefully about what kind of behaviours are they going to stimulate as a result of those technological interventions and how are they compatible with net zero and addressing new and sustainable development goals. Going back to the expertise, Stuart, my earlier point about needing more skills and more capacity, we need that. We've got a wealth of expertise in Scotland. The Committee on Climate Change talked about how we're ahead in terms of our emission reductions and in terms of our capacity to deliver more. Part of that is the expertise that we've got in academia but also in our practitioners from our farmers through to the oil and gas sector, for instance. In terms of that expertise, we're a good way along the line. There's a real danger of silo mentality, where we break it down and say, my specialism is agriculture and land use, but if I just look at that and don't talk to Jim, for instance, then there's a real danger there of unintended consequences. I think we do need to do everything, like Jim Ski laid out. It's and, and, and, but that must be looking at the system and looking at those unintended consequences rather than some of the mistakes we've made in the past, particularly in terms of aforestation of peatland for other objectives. They were made in a context where the whole system wasn't really being taken account of. There are dangers there, certainly if we just rely on siloed experts. I think we can couple sequestration and litigation. I think it would be useful to do so in certain sectors where behavioural change has so far been hard to achieve and where there are fewer technological solutions, certainly in the near term. So the obvious example is flying and I think we can actually directly link payments, extra charges on those kinds of behaviours and say that those are necessary because in order to achieve net zero emissions we must sequester the carbon, although it would be more useful in a public forum to frame it as the pollution. So, you know, we are asking you to pay extra as a fair measure to help to reduce the pollution, you know, through planting trees or whatever, so to actually link them rather than to play them off against each other. Although, as you'll have noticed in my response, I've said it's quite important, I think, not to frame that as an offset because once people believe that their behaviour can be entirely offset, that might actually encourage people to even feel that they can fly more. So I think the framing will need to be something like, reduce the effects of your pollution, so not completely offset it and not make it, not use these terms like carbon and someone which don't resonate so much with the public and make it about pollution. So that also requires whatever revenue would come from that kind of activity, would actually ring-fenced into... Yes, that's what I'm suggesting that actually that would be probably necessary for certain sectors and could be useful in encouraging a more positive views of it. Although there is research in Germany which shows that people lack trust in whether it's ring-fenced, so there needs to be real transparency about it. John, you had that question. On just a very brief point now, thank you very much. It was about Rachel's point on taking people with us and one of them, you said that the polls are very much in favour of this, but I think one of the hard to reach groups of people might be the elderly and people are living longer and longer and I think behavioural change will be much harder to deliver in the elderly. I'm probably the oldest person in this room, maybe not completely, but I know just from my own experience of my parents and others that people don't want to change as they get older. I'm disappointed to hear what Mark said about that. Only 10 per cent of the solution to this problem is going to be behavioural change and 40 per cent might be technology, as it were. I'd rather hoped that it would have been more, behavioural change could have been more, and that takes into modal shift. Could you speculate on modal shift? How are we going to deliver that? I think that public transport has been overlooked in much of our discussions. I refer to the committee because that is not my analysis at all, of course. That's the analysis of the committee. Whether what one derives from that number, because it does sound disappointing, is either we're underestimating hugely the potential of behavioural change, or behavioural change is a lot more difficult but into practice for all kinds of social, political reasons. I don't think the committee would… The other 50 per cent of the change is what they call in combination social and technical behaviour on technological change working in combination, so I'm not disagreeing with anyone. I'd agree very much with Jim about this being and rather than or, but I do think there are challenges. One of the jumps I have is with the UK Energy Research Centre, and we did some survey work on UK-based energy experts and stakeholders about where they think decarbonisation is going to come from for the different sectors. For transport, the vast majority of people thought electrification of the vehicle stock was going to be the huge kind of route to decarbonising individual consumer transport stock private vehicles. The expert views about the contribution of modal shift was very mixed. There were lots of experts who were saying modal shift is going to be hugely important, and there are transport experts who believe that modal shift is going to be hugely important. Others are sceptical about the role of modal shift, and often the reasons for that are because it's politically and in policy terms quite difficult to how much you force behaviour change in all kinds of parts of the sections of the population, not just the sort of leading edge. I understand your point there about the elderly and so on. I'm not an expert in this area, but I think one would have to look at evidence. One other thing that I'll just say is that the committee did some really good analysis of which policies have proven effective to date on the transition. It's a really nice mix because it's about carrots and sticks. They discussed the role of subsidies for learning and for expensive technologies. The reason why offshore wind is now a lot cheaper is because subsidies have provided lots of learning. It's also provided competition amongst producers and so that auction system that we use in the UK has proven really successful. That's been a huge kind of and the committee suggests 70 gigawatts. I mean, a massive expansion of offshore wind is necessary, doubling of the electricity system. The other contributors have been tax, landfill tax, getting emissions out of waste, and that's been hugely important in Scotland as well. The other thing is regulating things out. Where there's a next stage technology that can be brought in, and the example there is condensing boilers and not allowing conventional boilers to be built anymore and to be installed, those three things together have made huge strides, massive amounts of CO2 no longer emitted through just those three measures. Mark Ruskell. Thank you, convener. I had quite a technical question, actually, and it's about the bill and it's about the decisions that we need to make, particularly about interim targets, need for action in the next 10 years. The Climate Change Committee has obviously produced their report. Within that, they provided some analysis around peatlands and around how we view peatlands at the moment within the inventory, whether we see them as relatively carbon-neutral or a type of habitat that could be significantly contributing more than we perhaps had expected in terms of carbon emissions. That has quite a change in terms of the assumptions around the target that we should be putting in place. I think that their advice is to effectively set a target based on a revised inventory rather than the current inventory that is in the bill. If it was based on the current inventory that was in the bill, then we would be setting higher targets than what they initially had recommended. I wondered what were the views around the table on that. Perhaps separate to that, a number of the submissions have mentioned blue carbon, wetlands, kelp forests, convener knows I'm a big fan of kelp forests, and a range of other habitats. That is an entire other form of habitat that we don't really know that much about in terms of whether it's sucking up carbon or whether it's releasing it. What do people think about how blue carbon will be treated going forward? Can we get to a point where we have to revise all the inventories again? We just suddenly found out that our oceans are emitting far more than we thought, or that our oceans are sequestering far more than we thought. I apologise for the technical questions, but they are very important because it absolutely comes down to the decisions that we need to make about 2030 and the other targets and what amendments, if any, we're going to put into the bill. Great questions, both, Mark. I love technical questions. On the peatland inclusion, I think that we need to go with that advice in terms of including the peatland emissions, which are a substantial uplift in the Scottish account. That's because only about a quarter of our peatlands are undamaged or have been restored. I think that it's taking the hit now to set a baseline which allows us to then show action. Peatlands at the moment are, in Scotland, a net source of CO2. Even if you look at the Committee on Climate Change's 2045 target, they're going to remain a source of emissions, but it's going to get much smaller through restoration. It's being honest in terms of how the atmosphere sees CO2 as the key. Our accounting is all well and good, but how is it contributing to warming? I think they need to be in there. I think our science has come on leaps and bounds in terms of how well we can monitor, report, verify the emissions now and how changing mitigation action can change those emissions. On the other ones, in terms of revising, there will be revisions in terms of national greenhouse gas reporting, changes in global warming potential factors, and things like blue carbon. I think that that shouldn't stop you, as a committee, as a Parliament, from taking the advice and acting on it. In terms of things like blue carbon, that might well be a larger sink than we think, or it might be a source just as you suggest, Mark, but that shouldn't stop acting on the advice as it stands. I think that, again, going back to that research base that we've got in Scotland, we're very strong, and that is an area where a lot of us are focusing our attention is on the blue carbon and quantifying that, so we can get it to the stage that we're now at with Peatlands of saying, right, can we include it and how can we manage it better? Thank you, yes. Very much echoing what Dave has said. It's always going to be more difficult to measure emissions from land-based sources than it is from a pipe, just because one's a pipe and one's the land, and emissions in land-based settings will depend very much on the context in which they sit in different parts of the country. It's going to be very difficult to draw a hard and fast rule that applies to everywhere in the country, so I would certainly see, as Dave has said, the need to restore Peatland is clear, that if we don't, then they just contribute more and more. It's carbon to the atmosphere, and the atmosphere doesn't worry about how we account for these things, so I think that that's essential. On the blue carbon side, we're still working through the inventory to find out just how much there is and where it is, and sediment sources are probably going to be the largest of that in the end, particularly in the fjords and locks of the west coast and so on. We need to understand better what the consequences of that are for how we manage inshore waters and associated stocks of blue carbon, and the way that they not only store carbon but, as I said before, with kelp flores to reduce wave impacts during storms and so on. In many ways, I think that measuring all of that is probably going to be cruder than it is for pipe-based emissions, so we probably need to see the land and sea as a kind of insurance, really, stuff that we need to do, to keep the greenhouse gases where they should be in the ground or in the sea, but focus our efforts on reducing the emissions from fossil fuel sources that we are burning. Rachel Hale. I want to speak please to the interim targets part of your question. Yes, the inclusion of peatlands is important, but the new inventory actually presumably unintentionally means that the interim targets, the advice for an interim target of 70 per cent, is actually lower, and we can't be going backwards on commitments. The CCC state that that target in the current inventory method would equate to 76 per cent by 2030, so I would say 76 per cent as a target for 2030, 96 per cent by 2040, as they have stated, would be the equivalent. Is the minimum necessary? You have the advice, the report that Kevin Anderson produced about what Scotland can do a few months ago, his advice equated roughly to, I think it was 86 per cent by 2030, so yes, I think the interim targets definitely need to be more ambitious than the ones that are currently proposed, for which there is no scientific, rough and rational whatsoever. They simply took a straight line, and I understand why they had to do that. They didn't have time to do that, but obviously that's not evidence-based policymaking, and I would have thought the Government would be slightly embarrassed to say why we've set our targets on the basis of how a ruler fits on a graph. I think it is more ambitious interim targets, really necessary also for the point of getting out of the blocks fast, as we discussed earlier. The target that's enshrined in the bill, if it is net zero by 2045, that needs to be seen as a starting point, and I would be hoping to see that whoever announces that to the media is making a commitment that that will be revised as we see how it works out, with an intention to actually bring forward that net zero date if progress should prove faster than expected. Jim Ski. Just to say on the inventory's point, and it's worthwhile saying that when an inventory methodology is revised, it doesn't just affect the emissions in the current year, it affects emissions in the base year as well, and Scotland moving towards percentage reductions, it actually makes these more robust against inventory changes than would otherwise be the case. I think that that's a point worth making out. On the question of the prospect of future inventory changes, I had the misfortune to be at the approval session for the latest version of the inventory guidance of IPCC about three weeks ago, and it was painful indeed. However, just to give an example of the kind of changes that you might see, the new guidance includes guidance on how to deal with emissions from flooded land. Now why that would directly have an implication for Scotland is if you ever wanted to do hydroelectric development, any creation of new surface waters like that would have implications for the inventory. So these are the kind of things that you might see coming through in the future that would expand the scope. It's worthwhile saying that—I hate to say this, but there's an almost a theological debate that goes on between what is natural and what is anthropogenic, and a lot of the ocean stuff is essentially seen as natural not, and not as anthropogenic and would not fall within the scope of the inventories at least at the moment. I totally agree with what Dr Rachel Howell said, that we really need to have the strongest targets possible and obviously include peatland restoration. Be honest about the emissions that we've had since 1990 and before as soon as possible so that we can really make changes and incentivise land use change. It's really important because I think that the IPCC report on 1.5 was very clear that we need to keep to 1.5 and not have an overshoot and go beyond 1.5 before bringing us back to 1.5, and that's really important for wildlife, which is very vulnerable to temperature change. I think that the committee's report talks about—it has a kind of a headline saying every degree matters. I would say that every tenth degree—one tenth of a degree matters for wildlife because they are so vulnerable. Not every species acts in the same way, not every species is as vulnerable as others, but some really are very vulnerable so we cannot—we need to go as fast as possible, as soon as possible, sprinting out of the blocks, and this makes a difference. It goes back to your point, Mr Stevenson, about sequestration. We need to make sure that we are doing as much as possible not just for CO2 mitigation but for the hard-to-think things that involve biological processes such as nitrous oxide and methane, which comes often from farming and balance those. We can do as much as we can with sequestration and reduce as much and really go for that untapped potential in farming. Quickly expand on that using the land use strategy that we already have to plan some of those interventions and make that map planning so that we know which farmers can do more on sequestration and which more on efficiency measures and how much dietary change can make a difference and then use what is coming up with post-cap funding, how we support farmers to pay for public goods, not just for food production but also for sequestration. That is really important because some of them will need that support to keep going for that fair policies to make sure that they can continue to work the land but be paid for for public goods. A number of members want to come in at certain points, but I will go to Ben Wilson first. I just want to come in on the point of the interim target, which is a really important one, in particular for SCIAF, who is concerned with the impact on the global south. Just following on from what Dave Ray said, it is how the atmosphere sees these emissions, which is really important. Or you could say that it is how the global south sees the impact of those emissions, which is really important. Therefore, we need the best and most accurate accounting and the strongest target based on that best and most accurate accounting by 2030, in particular. On 2030, in particular, it has already been said by a couple of colleagues, but the point of this CCC report was to respond to the IPCC special report on 1.5. That report was unequivocal that we need 1.5 if we are going to protect developing countries from the greatest harm, which is possible, and that we could reach 1.5 within 12 years. However, what that CCC response was not clear on was what Scotland's fair share of a contribution towards holding to that 1.5 temperature goal was by 2030. It was clear what its view on an equal share, a fair share of Scotland's contribution would be by 2045, and that was net zero, but not on 2030. Lastly, some of the things that we have been calling for in civil society is to make sure that the bill does not just set the targets that we need to reach, but also sets the principles that we need to follow to reach those targets. When it comes down to conversations like this, that becomes ever more important, because this piece of legislation is going to direct the targets that we set up until 2045 and perhaps even into the future. There will be changes in those next 20-30 years, like inventory changes or whatsoever. Therefore, it is crucial that, now, whilst we have the opportunity, we make sure that it is explicit in the bill what principles we should be following to achieve those targets. I would like to focus our minds back briefly on behaviour change and ask two questions. How important is framing the arguments for behaviour change to take society with us, such as on climate justice and intergenerational justice? I am not going to go into highlighting issues around climate strikes and those issues, but how important is that? In terms of specifically regulating things out and the shifts that need to happen, such as modal shift, what support do anyone around the table this morning see as appropriate, both in financial and advice terms, particularly for individuals and communities, where there are a lot of people on low incomes? I have a supplementary question on the back of what I call it, because one of the things that I was conscious of was a very interesting statistic about the Dutch investment per person of 35 euros a year on cycling infrastructure, but the communication of the health benefits and the longer-term impact of that in terms of health spend was £19 billion. How are we going to start to communicate that short-term investment in things into long-term savings, even in an economic basis, but also in a wellbeing basis? That fits neatly into what Caudiw I guess is asking as well. Anyone want to tackle any of our thoughts on that or questions? That is a really good question. I think that framing the argument is really important against the definitions of climate justice, but not just justice, but looking at the injustice aspects of the impacts that climate change will have on the poorest and the most vulnerable if we do not address the impacts that will have on people at all levels of society. The question about financial support is really important. The UK House of Commons published a report on international development select committee. They were looking at aid spend across their programmes. They have recommended that using a climate justice framework will be really important to help to look at how that spend is dealt with. Although we are not looking at international development spend, we are looking at a different pot of money here. The framing of using climate justice is really important, but also to ensure that the financial support is there to enable the poorest and the most vulnerable people to adapt because they are the ones that do not have the capacity and the ability to adapt as readily as others might be able to. On one hand, you might have people who can put solar panels on the roofs, but other people in society just cannot do that. It is really important to ask that we have of our community, of our society and of the expectations that we have. We cannot expect everyone to adapt, and there are limits to adaptation in people's ability to adapt. We need to look at that carefully. Just going back to the question on the health benefits, I think that communicating, the broader message, is really important. It relates to the point that you made about the elderly, and all of those things are packaged together. The question that comes to mind is what has got to do with me, why do we need to change, what is in it for us? This is a problem that is happening and it is elsewhere. A lot of people in Scotland do not really connect with what is happening in terms of a change in climate. We need to really think about how we communicate that message out. One of the interesting things that was in the news last week at the BAFTA Awards, there was an announcement there saying that they need to consider embedding climate change, messaging into documentaries, into soap operas and into programmes so that people can connect with what is happening through different storylines because we have to find an in-road to doing that, rather than coming up with bottlenecks. We need to develop that conversation and engage people to help us to do that and not assume that we have the answers. All of those things are happening. With the health benefits that I mentioned last time around, the World Health Organization had published the 10 threats to global health report, which came out just at the start of the year, which highlights that climate change. It is the number one thing that is going to affect people's health, but if we do address it, the benefits could be benefits to our health. If we are able to turn negative messaging into positive messaging, that is perhaps what is going to engage our society. I think that people are generally fed up with negative messaging. Overwhelmed. We are working on mental health and climate change injustice as a programme of work. There are real issues to do with eco-anxiety. The school children are worrying about the impacts that it is going to have personally to them. You have seen that with all the protests with the extension rebellion, but all the children that are leaving school and protesting, they are really worried about what is happening. We need to take that away. We need to somehow turn that on its head to say that we, in the Scottish Government, are really going to be dealing with this issue. Our society does not need to be worried going further. That is a huge conversation. I am not sure that we have got to you in this committee to take that forward, but there is a lot that needs to be unpacked, I feel. Just from the perspective of echoing the previous comments, there are a lot of positives here. There are a lot of positives in terms of human health outcomes, such as cleaner water and cleaner air. For a community that I work increasingly with, which is the land use and agriculture community, there are a lot of positives in the Committee on Climate Change report in terms of negative net cost emission reductions, particularly through nitrogen management, for instance. I think that most of us who have neighbours who are farmers or maybe a farmer ourselves know that the extension services in Scotland are not perfect everywhere, and the kind of change that we need is going to require a huge uptick in terms of that provision and also the quality of that provision. What do we do? We were talking earlier about how individuals want to know what to do about climate change, but that applies even more for a lot of farmers. If the expectation is that they are going to grow trees, that might not be an expertise they have, and there might be some real cultural historical barriers to them doing that. Having a lot of assistance with that is going to be key. Also, in terms of the people who live on our land and manage it, not all of them are landowners. There is a real risk here that if you are a tenant farmer, you are actually at risk of policies that could deliver in terms of carbon sequestration, putting at risk your livelihood and pushing you out of where you currently live. I think that, in terms of the positives, there are a lot there, but for all sectors, I am just talking about the land use sector, we really need to get those extension services, that information, out to everyone. Thank you. I mean two points on behaviour. The first one is on this question of the links between health and climate change mitigation, because often it is described that we take a behavioural intervention and say that it is a climate mitigation measure with health co-benefits. I would like to raise the question about whether it might actually be portrayed the other way round, that it is a health measure with climate mitigation co-benefits. For example, if you are looking at changes in diet or changing transportation mode to be more active, walking and cycling, the message would be that that prolongs active life effectively, that it benefits your family and that you are contributing to the collective good. I defer to colleagues like Tazine and Rachel here, but it seems to me how you frame that message might affect it quite a lot. If I could wind back to one other point, which was the question as to why the CCC report only referred to 10 per cent of change coming from behaviour. I am no longer a member of the committee, but I have a history with it, and I can recall the certain culture of the committee. It wants to be evidence-based and it wants to be quantitative. It is much harder to gather evidence of that nature in relation to behaviour change, which is often qualitative in nature. The message that I would pick out is that, when we have behavioural interventions, it is incredibly important to do expost evaluation properly to understand what made a difference and why one intervention was better than another. Obviously, we have climate targets that are framed quantitatively, but the behavioural evidence is qualitative. Anything that we can do to bridge that gap would help us quite a lot. Rachel Hill, you are absolutely right, Jim. I think that it would be helpful to frame certain measures as being primarily about health with secondary climate change benefits. For example, one of the policies that could be brought in to help with dietary change could be to ensure that in public institutions, for example hospitals, prisons and so on, long-term stay institutions, that there were far more meat-free options and that perhaps some meals there would not be a meat-based option. I think that there is a very clear reason to do that for health reasons, particularly in hospitals, but there is a kind of duty of care to prisoners to ensure that they are eating a healthy diet. I think that that would be more understandable and, quite possibly, more publicly acceptable than to say, well, we are going to place responsibility for carbon reduction on prisoners who do not have a choice than on every day people in their homes. To go to your questions, Claudia, how important is framing the arguments in terms of climate justice? It is very important how we frame the arguments and, unfortunately, it is a little bit complicated because we need to speak to people's values and people have different values. There is an organisation called Climate Outreach that has done a lot of really good work about how to frame arguments to speak to different parts of the political spectrum. A framing of climate justice or environmental justice works very well for people who are centre-left to left. It does not work well for people on the other end of the spectrum or even centre-right, but they have done a lot of work on how to frame it for the centre-right. So, there is going to be a slightly complicated need to have different kinds of messages for different audiences. This does not mean that we are telling people different truths, but we are just using language that is going to speak in different ways. I wish I could remember off the top of my head some examples. I cannot actually remember, but I think on the right there are things about traditional responsibility. For example, talking about measures that will protect our natural heritage is one that resonates more. If the committee is interested or if you personally would find it useful, I can certainly give links to those reports afterwards. In terms of what support is appropriate, particularly in terms of finances or advice for different sectors of society, you mentioned low income and I would like to come back to your question about elderly. One important thing to recognise is that in general, there is a strong positive correlation between income and carbon emissions with poorer people in general having lower carbon emissions. The good news is that a lot of the behaviour change that we need to see is going to come from people who can afford in financial terms to make that behaviour change. What we will need to do is to target advice and support for those behaviour changes that are going to benefit the poorest. There is a lot of variation between different income deciles and the people who are in the lower deciles who do have high carbon footprints. The primary reason is that they live in very hard-to-heat homes. In general, they don't own those homes, so there will need to be policies and support that target the landlords, whether they are social or private landlords, so that those people have the ability to live in well-heated homes and also lower their carbon emissions. In terms of the elderly again, if we are talking about the real elderly rather than the recently retired, their carbon footprint is often a bit lower than others because they are not so mobile. They don't tend to take nearly as many flights, particularly international flights. Again, the particular areas where behaviour change might be more difficult for elderly people will be things like diet and living in large homes. There, it might be that there is advice and support needed in terms of perhaps some encouragement, not forcing of course, but encouragement perhaps to consider downsizing, but also to be more to install and to be able to use smart heating systems and so on and to recognize that if one wants to keep a large home with lots of bedrooms so that one's children, grandchildren can still visit and stay, there is actually no need to keep all of that heated all year round when the extra bedrooms are empty. I think it's going to be really important to look at what are the particular sectors, what are the particular behaviours, but I do think there's really good news that actually where we can focus our attention first is on the people who have more ability to make changes because they do have, they're often better off and they're often better educated as well. It's more about, as I said, making it more normal or cheaper or easier. I agree with what's being said there. I think it's important, not again to kind of, perhaps I introduced it so I've not been particularly paying attention to my own advice, but not to kind of bracket off either behaviour or spend on infrastructure and innovation because one thinks about cycling or heat. What makes low carbon options attractive is often the kind of infrastructure that people can see outside their windows or the kind of options that are made available to them. I think that we have to kind of understand that if we're interested in modal shift in transport infrastructure spend is highly relevant to that. So let's look at the low carbon infrastructure transition programme in Scotland, let's look at other infrastructure spend available in Scotland and see how much of that we can see as being directed towards encouraging modal shift. I don't know what the figures are at the moment, it'd be interesting just to take stock of how spend is being directed. I think the same applies for heat. I think we have to make affordable options more available over time. I think that's difficult at the moment. I think that's well understood within research. So the Committee on Climate Change has introduced a recommendation that no new homes be connected to the gas grid after 2025. So that's okay for new homes but that's a very small proportion of the overall building stock. I think we have to move to a stage where we're able to kind of regulate out the most by far the most popular way of heating buildings over time. I don't think that can be done very easily, very quickly. And I think if we try to do that very easily, very quickly we will cause problems with people being put in disadvantaged situations, the elderly, the vulnerable and so on. So I think getting the messaging right on those things is really important. And often regulating things out works really well when it's made rather less visible to people. So when their natural replacement of things like boilers happen and become more efficient over time because less efficient technologies have just been regulated out over time so it's not an option to the consumer. I think there's an active question about how active to make these choices at the level of the household versus smart regulation by governments and regulators. I think that a lot of good behaviour change happens because of the latter. I'll just come in quickly on that point about the question of climate justice, just to highlight that SCIAP and other organisations have been calling for principles of climate justice to be put on the face of this bill and I think this conversation that we've been having here demonstrates again the need for that, that we need to be clear about how we're going to apply this bill in terms of policies. What we've all agreed is that this presents great challenges but also great opportunities and I think that there are the structures already through the national performance framework, which is underpinned by the SDGs, to evaluate those changes and to make sure that they are achieved correctly, but they themselves need to be underpinned by climate justice. I gather that there was some debate around the question of principles in the bill in previous evidence sessions but, again, I would just highlight the needs for those principles to be there, to make sure that we are enacting this bill in the proper way. Those principles, the principles that we are calling for, are informed by the climate justice principles of Mary Robinson, which are things like human rights, gender, intergenerational justice, which Claudia Beamish touched upon, and the right to development. Fundamentally, if we don't act on this climate crisis, the reason that we're all here, we are undermining the right of other people in the world to access their basic human rights and to access the development. That's what the Paris Agreement is about and the Paris Agreement is the reason that we're all here. Clive Mitchell. Thank you, yes. I think that framing is massively important as all the comments around the table all the way through the morning have indicated. I think that that does go back to the earlier discussion about collaboration and who's in the room talking about the problems and finding solutions to them is vitally important. I think that I would emphasise in that the importance of involving young people in making decisions, as well as all the other various people in societies who are affected by the decisions that we take. Also in that, I think that in terms of the quantification of costs and benefits, we have quite good methods debatable to assess the aggregate costs and benefits of various decisions, but most of the issues to do with the state of climate and nature lie with the distribution of those costs and benefits across people and societies who wins and who loses. I think that we probably need to develop much better tools at evaluating the distribution of those costs and benefits in order to inform a just transition to a net zero economy. John Scott. Thank you, convener. The clearing and interest as a farmer, I just wanted to go back to Jim Denton's point about land use, and I wondered what the views of the committee are or an idea that I had which was to change the land class or develop a new land class of land, a climate change mitigation land class to essentially lump into one body, peat bogs, forestry, and all of those potentially valuable assets in terms of climate change mitigation, and to have that as a positive thing for land users and managers and how that might then be targeted by those who want to support external funding that might perhaps support that just briefly. I don't want to. Jim Denton. I think that it's really important that we carry on recognising and educating so it's about telling and supporting farmers to understand what their land has to offer in terms of the carbon sequestration that they can do, be it agroforestry, which is more integration of carbon and food growing, as well as planting some trees, or if they've got peatland to restore that peatland, or if they're on the coast, maybe doing coastal restoration. So it's about that. I wouldn't say that what we need to do is classify land separately or it's more about recognition. I think it goes back to my point about the land use strategy. It's really important to have an integrated approach. What we want to do is avoid what we've done in the past which is saying this land is really good for arable and this land is really good for upland beef and this land is good for housing, for example. We need to, and then therefore looking and extending that to saying this land is really good just for sequestration. We need to have much more of an integrated approach and farmers to realise that if they're not in area A they can still do something. There's lots to do in terms of mitigation that isn't necessarily about carbon storage and sequestration. A land use strategy which really is used and works and with regional approaches could really help those bodies and farmers who are in that region to drill down into what's really important, what's the priority in that area. For some it will be, say, in the flow country it will be peatland restoration because that's massive. In other areas it will be the opportunities for tree planting but in other areas it may be really good for agroforestry. So you can direct the support and the advice and the funding into those areas. I think that's really the way we need to go ahead and we've already got a land use strategy in Scotland and it should be used much better. Thank you. I'm very much echo what Jim said. I think I'd be cautious about introducing a kind of zonation in a crude way into how we use the land just reflecting simply on the zonation that's occurred through the planning system since the 1950s and planning around the use of the car and zoning for housing, zoning for retail, zoning for industrial and so on. Has made it very difficult to get about towns and cities in anything other than a car so if we want people to be more active in their daily lifestyles and walking from A to B and so on, we need to think very carefully about the granularity of different types of land use within a given space and I think that applies equally to how we use the land for farming, forestry and nature and food production and so on to derive the kind of multiple benefits at a scale that can address adaptation, mitigation, state of nature and the sustainable development goals. Stuart Stevenson had a question but it seemed like a long time ago so I apologise. Well I've no good about six questions but it's all right. Although I will say that I'm six years older than John Scott but I wanted to come back in particular on Jim Ski on the change that is in the bill that's before us from the volume of CO2 that we're taking out and other gases to percentages. I just wonder whether, speaking as a former minister who got hurt in political terms by changes in the inventory that damaged the apparent progress that we are making, whether, however, that both the percentage and the inventory management actually conceal the fundamental truth, which is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has to come down. While percentages make it easier for ministers and policy makers to explain what's going on and what they're doing, it kind of hides the underlying reality. I wonder if the change which I would, if I was minister, would be almost certainly supporting is concealing that. Just before I go, the other one of the six, which I will say, if you don't mind, is that all people can find good things to do that help them. Our heating bill is £700 a year less than it was. That's 1,300 litres less oil we're burning to heat our house, simply because we went from 200 mill to 600 mill in the attic. I think there's lots of positives we can get old people on the agenda. If we look at how we persuade people to buy good, valuable interventions that actually help and get people in the mood to do more. I think that that was a direct challenge there. You've absolutely pinned it down because if you're using percentage reductions, it's good for considering the amount of policy effort that needs to go in and keeping some stability there. If you were to take a longer term view and think what is on a science-based approach, how much carbon dioxide can we afford to put into the atmosphere, then the absolute quantities would probably be the better way to do it. I'm struggling to remember this, but I think you got advice from the Committee on climate change on how to handle inventory changes. If I remember it was basically to say that over the short term, maybe up to five years, you should look at compliance with targets according to the methodology in place at the time that the targets were set, but over a longer-term timescale, you need to keep reconsidering the targets in terms of science-based needs. That, if I recall correctly, was an attempt to square the circle in terms of the dilemma that you've rightly put out. But certainly from the convenience of policy makers, the percentage reductions in terms of retaining the stability, I'm sure, in your previous roles, you will have understood the potential advantages of that. What policy makers if not for the climate? Final question from a member, and then I'm going to use the rest of our time just to answer if there's anything else at the panel. Claude, do you say that it's not your final question? I know that there was a number of reflections around the issue of infrastructure and around potentially locking in particular behavioural pattern system changes. I'm just wondering if there are thoughts on how the bill is currently constructed and how we do or don't look at infrastructure at the moment in relation to budgets and our assessments. It seems that we've got a system that's very much based at looking at the kind of carbon of the concrete of building something, but not necessarily at its use going forward. I don't know if there are any views on whether the bill could be improved in that regard. Do you give us a more accurate picture of what's coming and we start using what's being built? David Ray? In terms of the consequential analysis, which is exactly as you articulated Mark, in terms of not just the embedded carbon, for instance, in a new road, but its consequence in terms of potential emissions change, we've got the ability to account for that. I think not to answer your question directly, but more about the revision to the climate change plan and locking is you could look at that 4% difference in terms of 66 to 70% and say, well, that's nothing for 2030. Surely we need more ambition there, but actually for the revised climate change plan, it needs to take into account the locking issues in that the trajectory is now to net zero at 2045. So it's not just about that 4%. It's actually what decisions are made which could make zero by 2045 impossible. So, actually, it needs a wider look than just how do we make up the 4%. Just very quickly, I think that we need to embed some of this knowledge and start into perhaps not just this bill or other bills, but right across the board. Obviously, this bill and the climate change bill can really steer how that is done and I think there needs to be something in the legislation which helps to create that, make that happen, especially towards the budget where the budget really needs to look ahead and pay for things and really account for things so that, like you say, we don't pay for something which is going to completely massive, increase our carbon budget in the future and make those wrong decisions. Right down to how we look at a future agriculture bill and what's our land going to be, how we're going to pay our farmers and that sort of thing, so that we can make sure that the decisions in there are becoming more climate beneficial rather than doing the opposite. I thank you, convener. I think possibly with your agreement, if I ask this question, if they wish to comment on it, they could perhaps comment on it in their final remarks if they rather than go back again. It's a very specific question. While I appreciate that this is a high-level targets bill, it does also, especially in relation to 1.5, which we've been exploring today, it does actually focus our minds very sharply, as we've heard, on policies. I wonder if anyone on the panel wants to highlight any specific policies, just in a sentence or two, which they think are really significant. I give you one example, which I would appreciate to comment on, which is, does this in any way alter what we think about in terms of our procurement policies? It's for the panel to say if there are specific policies that they think we need to be looking at, and that might feed well into the climate change plan, which will lead on from the bill. It's a great final question, so I think I'd actually like to go round the table to our guests and ask them to say that a direct top-line ask on policy change that Claudia has asked for. Are you up for the challenge to seeing Geoffrey? What would you like to see in the climate change plan and policy change? I'll come back to you. The way that I'm thinking about that relates to your question earlier on framing and climate justice frameworks and so on. It may all just come together. My thinking is that, on a practical level, I would suggest the development of a climate justice framework against certain parameters, procedural justice, distributed justice and intergenerational justice. I encourage the development of that framework to look at the development of indicators of impact, measurable change, indicators of impact and of change that we want to do. If we package all that up, how that feeds into the direct policy change that we're after. I'm not sure whether it's a policy change in communities, in that side of the arm of the Government, or in that side, I would like to see that we can measure against to show that we've delivered change against this certain policy in that. Saskia, you're a member of Southclimate Care Scotland and, collectively, as the coalition are calling for a nitrogen balance sheet to help us understand and to eventually deal with agricultural emissions, but also action on housing, so an EPCC target by 2030. I could just quickly comment on a couple of other amendments, not policies, and I've already mentioned the climate justice principles, but I think that this bill also requires a tightening up of some of the definitions, for example, around fair and safe. At the moment, it's very clear what we mean by safe, but not very clear what the bill means by fair, and we're calling for more equity in the bill. David Ray. So agriculture for me as well would be a key one in terms of where the current climate change plan isn't ambitious enough, and so I think that that would be an area where, based on the Committee on Climate Change Advice, it needs to be more ambitious. I think one of the things we haven't mentioned today is the rest of the world. So south of the border we mentioned a little bit, but where we are as a nation in Scotland, if we deliver even a proportion of this in the next few years, we will learn a lot of lessons and will be a fountain of information for other nations who are looking to see how they can do it as well. So we've got the conference of the parties next year, COP26, which will bring Paris into force and new ambition from all the nations, and I think as part of these kind of discussions, but for the wider Scotland, we have a real role to play in terms of how other nations can decarbonise rapidly, and so we can move to that 1.5 because we certainly can't do it by ourselves. Mark Whitskell. So my comments are probably more about the plan than the bill, I'm afraid. So what's kind of exercising my mind at the moment is the six months we have from Royal Assent to the new climate change plan, and I think that poses a kind of challenge to policy, but also a challenge to us and the research community. What I would like to see is a much more joined up approach to doing that as a kind of research policy business. I think the six months is incredibly difficult and are the work starting now. It's a revised climate change plan, not a new one. Yeah, okay. So this is a more general point perhaps then, but I think there are challenges in bringing all this evidence together. There's been a lot of different kinds of perspectives on the problem across the different parts of mitigation and adaptation today. I think that's quite a formidable challenge for any kind of analytical body in government or without, so I think we need a lot of transparency about the evidence. I think one of the points that came up in your session with the committee itself was that there's a lot of spend happening on innovation, and a lot of it isn't finding its way into a public evidence base that we can use sensibly to understand how much faster we might be able to go on interim targets and so on. So that helps to address what the challenges around lock-in and so on are, which I agree with. I think the other thing is how difficult it is for different levels of policy to think about this problem. So local government is being expected to do, and local authorities are being expected to do a lot in certain aspects of this, around heating, for example, and energy efficiency. I think that making their approach and response and investment consistent with the national approach is very, very challenging. I think that again we need an approach to that, which research can help to address the local, national and international level. For bodies like climate exchange, that's very challenging, so I think that we need to have a much more integrated approach working together on that. I'll just use that to highlight the work of the Just Transition Commission, because a lot of the conversation has been about communities and consumers, but I don't think that we mustn't forget that there's a work element to this as well. So I'd just like to flag, I think, the importance of investing in infrastructure, developing new supply chains that will be needed to actually allow this transition to take place, developing new skills and transferring skills from industries that may go into decline. So this is really the core of the work of the commission. Just to say, I think it's important also to be joined up across different institutions in Scotland as well. So the work of the Infrastructure Commission is going to be important here, as well as the Just Transition Commission, and I'd also flag the role of the national investment bank as it develops. We're well aware, for example, that sister national banks like KFW in Germany invest a lot in built environment, improving energy efficiency, building up supply chains with SMEs, and I think that's an important area to consider. So I think that my top-line message on policy is that infrastructure skills is going to be an important part of it. Rachel Hill. Since you want a brief answer, I think that we're going to focus on the areas where I think there could be more ambition, travel and diet. I think that in terms of diet, I would be suggesting that you need to look at policies to ensure that people are eating healthy diets, which will also mean that they're eating more sustainable diets. I've mentioned the possibility of regulation about what kind of offerings are made in public institutions. My research recently has led me to be reading health-based papers about diet, and I've been really shocked to discover just how problematic eating red meat and particularly processed meat at the level that we currently do is for health. To me, it looks like it's the new smoking. There really is an extraordinary range of health conditions which are affected by that, so I think that there needs to be serious attention paid, and that's very much a health issue as well as a climate change issue. I think that the NFU is right to say that it would be wrong to try to reduce production of meat before demand has reduced because that would drive imports, and I think that we're going to need to do messaging around diet, which is about health, but which is also about positioning red meat as something that you want to be buying that if you're eating more plant-based meals a week, the ones that are meat-based can now afford to make sure that that meat is really good quality, really tasty and therefore ethically produced meat. That could be very good for Scottish farmers, so positioning Scottish meat as really good quality and ensuring that the regulations around production of meat in Scotland are such that it is ethically produced could be positive. In terms of travel, one thing that might be interesting would be to talk to the Welsh Government about what they're doing. They've got this really interesting scheme now where all the long-distance buses across Wales are free to all users at weekends. There's nothing in their public messaging about why they're doing that. I think it would be interesting to talk to them about why they're doing it, how they're affording it and what impacts it's having. Certainly my experience of travelling around Wales has been that there's been a high uptake of buses. There was one route I was travelling on where they had to put two buses on at the same time because the first was so full. If that is people who are doing a modal shift, then that's really good news. If it's just people travelling extra, perhaps not unless it is then leading to those people being more willing to take buses at other times. Thanks. I was going to mention nitrogen balance sheet. I won't say Ben stole it, but he's mentioned it already. I'll talk about afforestation. Obviously, that's really key within the committees on climate change's report. We need to do better, I think, at understanding the mitigation potential of different trees in different situations, in different locations, on different soil types and what the nuances are on that, because at the moment we tend to look at, well, a plant a sicker spruce tree and it grows faster, therefore it will sequester a lot of carbon. That is true in some situations, but it depends where you plant it and not all trees are good in different places. For example, agroforestry and integrating that within food production systems isn't going to be all about sicker spruce, it's going to be about other types of trees in rows, etc. We need to understand what those trees are doing in terms of actually sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. That's really important. We understand more about how to plant broadleaf trees better for the climate, as well as conifers and managing our existing woodlands better and protecting them. I think that from everything that we've heard, for me, it's not about a single policy, it's about the whole economy approach. It's about better integration. When we talk about infrastructure, it's about grey infrastructure and green infrastructure and how they work together, how we secure the investment in that, both from the public sector and the private sector, working together towards a zero carbon economy. This is a big governance challenge. I think about who is involved in the decisions that affect them, particularly young people thinking about the intergenerational aspects of this issue, striving for multiple benefits, addressing mitigation, adaptation and the state of nature altogether. For any decision, what does this look like in a just net zero economy? I want to thank you all very much for your time this morning. I'm going to suspend this meeting briefly to allow the changing panel. Thank you, everyone. Right. We continue taking evidence on the climate change emissions reductions chart targets Scotland Bill at stage 2. This is our second round table today. Welcome to everyone that's come along for that. Many of you will engage with the committee's part of our consideration of the Bill at stage 1. We've got a good two hours to spend talking to our sectoral stakeholders. We'll do the same as we did in the first session. We'll go around the table. I don't think that the members need to introduce themselves again, but if we can go around our guests starting with Jess Pepper, just say who you are and where you're from. Hi, I'm from Transform Scotland, the Alliance for Sustainable Transport, and we work on walking, cycling and public transport to make it affordable and accessible for everyone. I'm Morag Watson. I'm the director of policy for Scottish renewables, which is the industry body for renewable energy in Scotland. Good morning. I'm Colin Campbell. We're representing the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institute. Good morning. I'm Will Webster for Morning Gas UK. We represent exploration and production companies in the North Sea and contract as well, and we have about 350 members. Hello, I'm Margaret Simpson. I'm here from the Freight Transport Association representing freight logistics. Hello, I'm Andrew Midgley. I'm Environment and Land Use Policy Manager at NFU Scotland. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Leighton. I'm the director of the Existing Homes Alliance Scotland, and we are a coalition of housing, environmental, industry and fuel poverty bodies, all working to call for greater action to improve the existing housing stock to address fuel poverty and climate change. Good morning. I'm Angus McCrone, chief editor of Bloomberg NEF. We used to be called New Entry Finance, and we're a group of about 250 people within Bloomberg who research everything to do with a sort of low-carbon transition globally. Good morning. I'm Andy Biddonald. I head up the Energy and Low-Carbon Transition Team at Scottish Enterprise. Okay, right, and I guess... Apologies, Dr Casey. I just completely got confused on your call. I'm Diana Casey from the Mineral Products Association. We represent cement, lime, concrete, dimension stone, silica sand, activities in the UK. Okay, apologies for that. It's just as well, John Scott sat beside me. That's what I always say. I'm going to put out, I guess, a question about your reaction, and I would like to ask you to give a positive reaction. What did you think of that that you could positively do in your sector to help Scotland achieve the targets that have been advised by the climate change committee? I guess I'll come back to you, Dr Casey, and ask you first. Yeah, sure. There's a whole range of things where we believe that the materials that our members produce can do to help. Actually, a lot of it wasn't in the CCC's report, so it would be good to get that across now. First of all, recarbonation is one thing. The report mentioned enhanced weathering, but actually recarbonation is the process where cement and concrete take in atmospheric CO2 throughout their life and permanently store it within the materials. So it's happening in our urban environments every day, and at the moment it's not included in greenhouse gas inventories, but it adds up to quite significant sums. That would be one way to help, including that, to help us get to those targets. The cement industry has already done a significant amount of fuel switching away from fossil fuels to waste biomass fuels, which is another thing that's not mentioned in the CCC's report. We feel that this is a very good use of biomass. When it's already been through one cycle of its use, it can then go to cement industry where it not only contributes to the energy, but any of the mineral content within that biomass is recycled in the cement product, so it aids a circular economy. Another area where we feel our materials are really beneficial to reaching net zero is that heavy weight building materials provide thermal mass, which also wasn't mentioned in the CCC's report, and that can significantly reduce energy consumption in buildings throughout their life again. One of the areas that is mentioned is that it's overheating in buildings, and thermal mass can really help prevent that in a passive way without requiring mechanical cooling. Of course, there are greenhouse gas emissions associated with mechanical cooling, and that again isn't included in the committee's report. Jess Pepper. Really welcome to the UK CCC advice, and great to see the Scottish Government respond so quickly and strongly to it, especially to put in a commitment about structural changes across the board and planning procurement, financial policies, processes and assessments. That's all really important stuff, too. Lots more, similarly. It's good to see good stuff in the report. Plenty more that we could be doing within the transport sector in Scotland with lots of multiple benefits, and it's great to see that such a strong theme in the sessions today. There's a big focus on electric vehicles. They have a role to play. We would like to see lots more investment in active travel and the public transport system because of all the co-benefits that that could produce for Scotland. Lots more positive stuff to say, but this is a good start. Our members are extremely welcoming of the net zero target. It's going to be challenging. As the report said, we're looking at possibly quadrupling the amount of electricity that we need to generate from clean sources. The renewable energy industry stands ready to help meet that challenge. As we've already seen, with the falls and the cost of onshore and offshore wind, we're now being the cheapest source of electricity. With the right long-term policy environment, we can really achieve that. Our members stand ready to contribute to Scotland's net zero target and make Scotland a world leader in supplying our own energy needs from clean renewable energies. I very much welcome the report and the opportunity that it gives to actually have a refreshed thinking about how we do things. I think that the safari and the institutes that represent the environment, food and agricultural sector have obviously been researching climate change and the issues around it for a very long time and see that as a moment in time in which to actually think again about how we do it. I think that in the environment, food and agriculture area, it's quite challenging. There have not been huge amounts of improvements in the last sort of eight to ten years and we need to have new ways of actually thinking about it. There's a huge amount of research that we're doing on improving the efficiency of our agricultural and food production systems. Those are very aligned with meeting greenhouse gas emission targets, but they're mostly incremental. We're also doing research on how we alter our systems and have new systems of agricultural production, for example, using agroecological principles. Those are all again very aligned with how we mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. We're also conscious that we need to have even more transformative ways of doing things. We're also able to do is to come up with new ideas about how we grow food, for example. There are new technologies available in indoor vertical farming, which is a necessity because of the changing weather that we're going to have, but it actually has huge benefits in terms of environmental footprint and saving greenhouse gas emissions and can disrupt food supply chains, reducing food miles, reducing food wastes and lots of other technologies that are coming along. What we think is really important is that those new technologies are considered because many of the projections in the report are about using existing technologies, but we think that there are lots of new technologies that can contribute to the future. On the reaction to the CCC report, we saw it as a really positive blueprint. We saw it as a big challenge across the whole of the economy and society and to all sectors. It was an honest report, and it was frank and honest about the costs that are involved across the board. From our perspective as the oil and gas sector, the projections for production and consumption of oil and gas in the UK economy are actually fairly consistent with our own. We see things in two kind of timeframes, one going off to around 2035, where we have our vision 2035, which is to maintain production from the North Sea during that time. By 2050, the world is going to look quite a lot different. I think that there is a recognition in the CCC's report around the positive impact that our sector can have to support the energy transition, and we found that really important. In terms of what we can do as a sector, the interesting thing about the CCC report is that it saw an on-going role for use of gas going forward in particular, in decarbonised form increasingly, and what that says about the necessity to roll out carbon capture and storage, which was a theme that ran through the report constantly, which is one that puts the oil and gas sector at the centre of this transition, and we recognise that. In terms of our own emissions, there was some sexual analysis in the technical annex across all major energy-using sectors. Our emissions are around 3 per cent at the moment of the total UK CO2 emissions, whereas on the consumption of fossil fuels it is about 60 per cent. We see the priority looking at how we go about how we use fossil fuels in the economy, not necessarily about how we produce those. There is an important question about competitiveness there, in that if we unduly add costs and add requirements to our production sector, that will simply mean replacing indigenous production with imports. We think that it is important to get the balance right in terms of what has the priority. That being said, we will have incentives in the next 10 years or so to reduce our own emissions in that we are covered, like all industrial sectors, by the EU emission trading scheme, and we expect some version of that to go forward. That adds a lot to the costs of using CO2, so the incentives there are increasingly as the emission certificate price has been increasing sharply, and the amount of free allocation is being reduced. That puts a lot stronger incentives on both our sector and all other industrial users. Those things will all naturally mean that a contribution continues to be made from our sector. The FTA very much supports the paper and what it is trying to achieve. It is important to point that out. Our members are already doing what they can with the introduction of the Euro 6 vehicles in 2014 on the heavy goods side. Our members continue to look at alternative fuel options. There is no definite answer with that yet, particularly towards heavier goods vehicles. The freight and logistics industry is all about efficiency, so anything that reduces costs and improves efficiency can only be good for the Scottish economy. I would also mention, do not forget, that the freight and logistics industry does not exist for fun—I know that sounds a bit childish—but it is very much there to provide a service to everybody else, whether that is industry, business or individual customers. There are a lot of aspects to that, and I think that there are lots of different solutions that will work with different elements of the industry to help to improve the situation. NFU Scotland welcomes the report. At the same time, we recognise the challenge that it presents to the industry. It is such a challenging target for the industry that we wanted to recognise that it marked a moment that is era-defining for Scottish agriculture because of the nature of change that will be required in the industry. Ultimately, we have to embrace this change, and we, as an organisation, have committed to doing that. Ultimately, we want to see the farmers as part of the solution. We want to see farmers continuing to farm, and quite often, at the moment, the way things get talked about doesn't seem like that, but we want to make sure that the people on the ground are enabled to change and are part of the solution. There are lots in the report that farmers and the industry can do, and there is some emphasis on the win-wins. There are things that people can be doing that saves them money and reduces emissions, but equally, we have to recognise that there is significant change in terms of dietary change or land use change, which presents a real challenge to the industry. The positive thing that we wanted to emphasise is that we recognise that what we see here is a collective challenge. We have to work with Government here because, yes, the industry can do lots itself—those win-wins—to save themselves money and reduce emissions, but there are lots that are also being talked about, which really presents businesses with high costs, infrastructure changes, and we have to work together to work out how to do this. As an organisation, what we have said we would like to do is view it in that way, work with the Government in order to move forward in a way that the industry doesn't feel that its emissions reduction is just something that's been done to them. We have to work collectively so that we've got the common objective and then work out how to get there and take the industry with us, and that's the best way to get there, and that's where we can feel that we can help in that regard. Okay, thank you. The Existing Homes Alliance is also very much welcomed the report and the Scottish Government's decision to accept the Committee on Climate Change's recommendations on the targets. In terms of housing, there is no doubt that it's not only what housing can do in terms of supporting reducing of emissions but what it must do. The CCC's report said very clearly that we cannot meet climate objectives without major improvements in housing and also specifically without near complete decarbonation of the housing stock, so it's one of those things that is simply not an option. You can't leave housing as it is and do transport instead. It has to be tackled. The good news is that, particularly in Scotland, we're not starting from a standing start, so I don't know if there's mixing of metaphors, but we can be out of the box fast on this. We have a good infrastructure in place. We have the energy efficient Scotland route map that is in place. We would argue very much that the targets that that route map needs to be revisited now to make sure it is aligned with the new targets and that it will need to be accelerated, but we do have an infrastructure in place that is working on advice and support for homeowners on energy efficiency and decarbonisation of heat. Also, to emphasise in terms of the framing that was spoken about in the first session, it's definitely not a sacrifice. You're talking about an improvement in people's housing. You're talking about healthy, beautiful homes that are affordable to heat. They're warm. They're healthy. They're comfortable. This is an improvement in people's quality of life. In terms of things to do, the CCC in their housing report, they've got 36 recommendations, not all of them specifically to Scotland, but many of them apply to devolved administrations. There's plenty to get going with on housing. It's always good to have a business plan if you're in the private sector because it gives you something to aim for and you may well make it. If you don't have a business plan, you probably won't as a business. In that sense, it's very helpful to have the long-term targets from the Climate Change Committee. I must admit that reading the report, I was flummoxed a little bit by the technology mix that they presented as being the future. It seems to me that a lot of this is a global issue. What's really going to work are the technologies that prove themselves to be competitive on a global scale. Those are the ones that will overwhelmingly be replicated in Scotland and in the UK generally. For instance, we're a lot more aggressive with our forecasts on future cost reductions for wind, solar and batteries than the committee assumes. On EVs, we expect them to be a much larger percentage of the passenger car fleet and also the commercial fleet more quickly than the committee's assuming. On the other hand, some of what the committee's putting forward on carbon capture and storage, we really struggle to see that at the moment unless there's a high carbon price, unless there's a technological breakthrough, CCS has been talked about for a very long time. Since I've been doing this job 13 years, it hasn't really advanced greatly. We struggle a bit with that. I think I would emphasise the technologies where we can see a clear path to global cost effectiveness, in some cases already achieved, but with more cost improvements to come. I echo some of what Angus McRown said. We welcome the climate change plan update and the committee's work as well. It will accelerate and bring clear focus to a number of the things that we need to deal with. The fact that it is cross-societal as well as cross-sectoral means that there is a broad engagement that should allow us to bring together all the excellence in Scotland, the UK and beyond to address some of the challenges. As we bring academic and industrial innovation, particularly to bear, which is in our domain within Scottish Enterprise, to try and find solutions with companies, then hopefully some of those will also be the solutions to some of the global challenges as well and therefore can be internationalised and traded as well. There will be an economic benefit from those services and products as well as the obvious benefit to ourselves in society and as citizens here. Just before I go to Mark Ruskell, just when we in our report specifically tasked the enterprise agencies with having a priority on low-carbon enterprise and innovation, that is going to require maybe a different mindset. Innovation possibly is not successful 100 per cent of the time. Is Scottish Enterprise prepared to accept a certain amount of trial and error? We have always been at the end where the risk is high. That has been our function as our share of part of the operation in innovation. We are very aware that not every innovation will succeed, not every project will succeed. That is the challenge of being the economic development agency in that mix. Mark Ruskell I was reading the CBI submission. A lot of businesses are basically waiting to see what kind of technologies and innovations emerge, whether that is hydrogen or carbon capture and storage or whatever. Time ticks on 10 years to make big transformative changes. I am just wondering what you see as the best mix in order to stimulate that innovation to start to answer some of the questions around which technologies, which big transformative changes, should be pushed. Is it about allowing markets to effectively make decisions, or if it is about the state taking more active role through national investment bank or whatever, what does that actually look like? What does that involvement look like in order to drive forward that innovation with private and public sectors working together? I am very well aware that there is another evidence session in this Parliament looking at the Scottish National Investment Bank bill this morning, so there is almost a bit of a cross over here in terms of other agendas. Your question is directed to Mr Macroon, perhaps? Anybody who is interested in innovation and technology has a heavy reliance on CCS in hydrogen and other interests around the table. If I can respond to that question in terms of housing, because there has been some caution from the Scottish Government in terms of accelerating progress on standards and expectations for improvements in existing housing, because saying that technologies are not ready or that we cannot get ahead of the market. Also, concerns are not capacity or skills in the supply chain. We did a survey of suppliers and came back with a response that said that 90 per cent of the suppliers think that EPCC band C is achievable by 2030 rather than 2040. That is because they said that the technologies to meet that C are available now. That is this accelerated action in the next 10 years. They say that we are happy with our current capabilities to meet EPCC band C. Need to realise that we are not inventing the wheel here. The technology has been widely used throughout Europe, but we remain miles behind and treat every installation as if it is the first ever. I know that I am just speaking about this sector, but this caution that tends to drag progress rather than giving them what they are saying, the key success to delivery against the target is clarity and consistency. Set the target, confirm it will not change and the supply chain will deliver. There is still plenty of room for innovation in the housing sector, but, in terms of a band C, the supply chain message is pretty clear there. I have talked about investment in our public transport system. There is a good reason for doing that for a just transition so that everybody has access to better choices for their travel. We need to decarbonise our public transport system. I draw attention to three modes that we could be looking at. This is a nation that makes and has great expertise in buses, trains and ferries. We can afford to be much more ambitious as I mentioned when we gave evidence before in terms of buses. Again, buses are largely overlooked in the UK climate change committee's advice. That seems to us a missed opportunity because investment in buses as well as decarbonising is an opportunity to achieve real modal shift. The big problem that we have right now is in transport that has not shifted in 30 years is road traffic. To improve lives, to improve efficiency, to improve health and to tackle inequalities, investment in buses is really important. We make buses, we can demonstrate and we do demonstrate globally leadership on bus manufacturing. We host two global bus headquarters and there is a massive contribution to make with some serious investment, which also connects to everyday active travel when you are commuting. That is reducing risk of major diseases amongst all sorts of other health benefits. On trains, since we last saw you, we have been working hard with industry to explore exactly what the potential is in terms of decarbonising our entire rail network. It is good news, industries and rail experts. You will see some of that coming out across the UK. We have been looking specifically at Scotland demonstrates that we should be aiming to decarbonise our entire rail network by 2030. That is entirely possible with intercity routes and rural routes as well. Nobody has left out. This is an inclusive, attractive system that everybody can have access to. The urgency to crack on with that rolling programme is now. It is not thinking about it and making plans and debating it further. It is now. We have secured ourselves 10 years by making the decisions that we made 10 years ago to electrify between Edinburgh and Glasgow and also to buy the high speed trains that are going now across Scotland. Those will not be around forever and that buys us 10 years of a window of opportunity to get in place decisions that will impact upon our rolling stock choices well into the next decades and possibly beyond 2050. If we are really smart and we invest in our infrastructure and in our rolling stock then we could be ahead of the game and that brings with it transferable skills and employment opportunities in exporting that experience elsewhere. We have a good track record on rail in Scotland and we need to crack on and invest in that. What a great opportunity, what an attractive resource that could be for Scotland. Ferries as well. We need to be thinking lifeline services. We have three hybrid ferries just now. What is the opportunity to look at investment and ambition there too? We talked about improving lives and all the co-benefits, addressing inequalities and the efficiency for freight transport. For example, this is all important and reducing providing other solutions not just for passengers but for freight. We were seeing in the freight evidence that we could be shifting that on to trains. Absolutely, that is what we need to be thinking about and we could be improving our railways to take more freight as well. We have got the skills, the opportunity, improving lives. If we provide, and this is evidence on modal shift, if we provide quality, affordable, accessible alternatives, people will be attracted to them. We see that now with the 385s, the new Hitachi trains running between Edinburgh and Glasgow, that when they did the polling on whether people preferred them and enhanced their journey, the answer was yes and people are keen to use them. Real opportunities there. Just to come back on something, Rachel Hill on the last panel mentioned easy and cheap. Now, if you live what I do, my constituents do. Public transport is not easy, it is not cheap and it is not particularly available. There is no rail in Stuart Steams. I will say it before you do. There is no rail in Stuart Steams' constituency of Banff and Bucking. There needs to be big infrastructure and investment before what you are saying comes to fruition for rail communities. We are working on this with a costed and timetabled example of what needs to happen between now and 2030 and looking to the future in terms of rail. We are also working with bus companies and our members in terms of what needs to happen on bus. For example, in terms of modal shift, what makes it easier, what makes it more attractive, where the investment needs to go to make it accessible to everybody. Back to Mark's question about innovation. Is our member's view that the majority of the technologies that we need to meet our clean green energy needs already exist in Scotland, if they are well established, particularly onshore, offshore wind, solar and hydro? Our members are also at the cutting edge of innovation around the new technologies. Scotland is a world leader in wave and tidal technologies, particularly the centre up in Orkney, who is developing things there. We also have the world's first offshore floating wind farm. Those things are already in place. For further innovation to take place and for those things to come to market, the key thing for our members is that we need to have a long term ambitious target and a stable policy environment. If we have those two things, that is the space in which people have the confidence to invest and innovate and bring forward the refined new technologies that we will need. In relation to this question, it is possibly CCS that is of most relevance to the cement and lime sectors in the UK. In terms of the mix, almost all of our members are involved in the research and development part of CCS. How do we capture the CO2 from the cement plants in the first place? We need government policy and intervention for the whole transport and storage part of that. The bigger problem that we have at the moment is that we know that CCS is not a nice to have in the cement sector. It is absolutely vital. It is the only way that we will get rid of the process emissions. Most of the cement plants in the UK are located outside of the main clusters. Of course, that is where all the focus is at the moment, which is completely understandable, but we need a plan of how that will then be expanded to those more isolated sites. It is a missed opportunity to be honest in the CCC report to start thinking about a plan to put that in place. I think that we also need—sorry, I mentioned transport and storage—when you put CCS in place, it is going to double the operating costs of cement production. For those companies or sites that move first, some sort of protection is going to be needed, whether it is through procurement, which I think was mentioned in the previous session, or some other tax break or something, because otherwise you would just go out of business by doing it. One of the big advantages of the changes that we are looking at now is that they are a whole system. We have supported innovation work recently around hybrid ferries, for example. Now, looking at hydrogen ferries, we have brought with partners funding from European programmes as well as UK programmes in to do that, but the ferries are being used as part of a broader development of technology as well. Particularly in the case of the hydrogen ferries that will go to Orkney, it is part of the much broader set of work that is going on on Orkney using renewables and the whole energy system there. It is a part of it that will be part of the mix, and other things will generate the electricity, which will then generate the hydrogen, which will then support the ferries. It is looking at those things as part of the whole system. Similarly, as Jess Pepper was suggesting with transport, we have begun with where some of the, perhaps, relatively easy stuff is around hydrogen buses, local authority vehicle fleets, but we are broadening that work out now. We have a joint plan and development with Transport Scotland. We are looking at rail, looking at the opportunities in Scotland to hybrid technology again, or to hydrogen technology ultimately, same in heavy goods vehicle transport as well. We are looking at the infrastructure, we are looking at the opportunities, and we are looking at where, for example, there are, perhaps, constrained wind developments that might provide the energy to allow us to resource some of that down a transport corridor initially, which looks at where currently the electrification of the rail network has not happened, for instance. We are also recognising the point that there has to be multimodal as well as intermodal or new modes and that it has to be joined up in the whole system. Again, we are trying to work with our partners in the likes of Transport Scotland and also in the transport companies, in the bus companies, bus builders as well as the development and running companies. Colin Campbell With reference to the innovation and the global competition, clearly a lot of things will be selected out by global competition, but what we need to think about is what is authentic to Scotland in terms of our natural strengths, and many people have made that point. That is true of the Scottish science system that we have. We are world leading in science, and that is true of the Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes. To give you one example of that, we also need to think about how our natural assets play to those technological strengths. One of the things that we are really still very abundant in is renewable energy and water. Those are two of the natural assets that we still need for growing food. Water is going to be very scarce in the world, and a lot of food that is going to be grown in the world is going to have a high water cost. Scotland will have more rain in the future, and we are very good at growing food. It is how do we then compete internationally with that brand of a high-quality environment with a sustainable food production system? We need to think about how the combination of technology and natural assets actually fit together. I think that the question about the balance between private and public sector competition is not a really good one. To deliver what the objectives are of the climate change bill and the CCC report, it needs a vast amount of investment. It can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and arrive at how many hundreds of billions it is. However, if you are thinking about the balance between incentives and regulation, it has to be on the side of incentives in that we have to deliver large amounts of investment. There needs to be a positive framework for investment, whatever it is. I think that that is a bit of the lesson from the renewables and particularly the offshore wind sector in that a regulatory and commercial framework was developed over a number of years that was very supportive to that kind of investment. As a result, the costs came down and they have come down rapidly. That needs to be rolled out into the other target areas such as carbon capture and storage. Turning to that, one of the questions that has to be asked is not only about what is the most advantageous technology, but that actually depends on what you are using it for. Electrification will work well on some sectors such as small commercial vehicles. It is not going to work so good yet on other areas of energy use such as heavy freight, heating, industrial users and cement. You need a full range of technologies to achieve those reductions across the board, which is the news item of the CCC. If you go to a net zero, you cannot have sectors that are outside that framework. The answer to that is that it is not just about the positive incentives that are needed to deliver investment, but investors are also going to want to see a long-term framework for particular technologies that need to be applied in different circumstances. If you take CCCs, there are projects around the globe. There are about 20 or so projects, but most of those have been done on quite an opportunistic basis in particular circumstances. If we want to develop that as an industry in its own right, which it would need to be, there are quite a few legislative gaps at the moment around and those things need to be filled. A framework of legislation needs to develop to make that happen at scale. It is when you have it that something is happening at scale, that is when the cost reductions happen. Do you think that the message is getting across about fuel sovereignty being a big issue for the UK? I do not know what the numbers are. I think that we have produced about 60 per cent and it would be important. Is that the other way around? I think that that comes to the point that we are making the most of the industries that we have and the position that we find ourselves in. There is still a big consumer desire for gaseous fuels and fuels in liquid form. That will probably continue and change to some extent. That is a fact that has to be dealt with during the transition. We have to give consumers what they want to some extent and what they are used to. Our net imports of oil and gas are about 60 million tonnes of oil equivalent out of the total consumption of 150 million tonnes of oil equivalent. We are starting from the position where still 75 per cent of the primary energy used in the UK and in Scotland, too, is from oil and gas. We have to start from where we are. We have to make it most of the advantages that we have that come from that heritage. That has to be part of how the UK and Scotland, in particular, develops its net zero pathway. Although it will have lessons for other countries around the world, it will have to follow its own pathway to some degree as well. It is just a quick comment on innovation. With specific reference to the agricultural industry, I would say that the industry is innovative at the moment and adopts new technologies readily and we are supported in that by the research institutes, which we have a very strong base in Scotland. The thing that comes to my mind when you are raising the question about the relative weight of the private and the role of the state in driving innovation and whether it should be left to the market and so on, is that the innovation that the industry adopts at the moment is driven mainly by the market, by servicing what the market would like and efficiencies within the industry and so on. When we are talking about reducing emissions, we are getting into the realms of innovation being required for the delivery of public goods, where the market has less of a driver and less you can find a monetary mechanism to drive that private innovation. As you get more into the realms of delivery of public goods, there is an increasing role of the state to intervene in that delivery of the innovation. On top of that, it is the extension, it is the work with the industry, it is the advice and support to enable the spread of that innovation. I thank you, convener, and just in that regard, I again declare again an interest, but in terms of the delivery of public goods, I do want to ask other questions too, but in terms of restoration of peat bog and developing this idea earlier expressed of a land class, a new climate change mitigation land class, you say that the delivery of public goods is going to be hard and difficult to fund. It will either end up by being by individuals or by government. I am wondering if there is a new land class that perhaps the private sector perhaps pension funds or others might buy into sporting and sustaining some of the land that will bring such benefits in terms ultimately of carbon capture and storage. I wondered if you thought that that might be a reasonable idea of a question to you and maybe Colin Campbell in that regard, but please say exactly what you think. The idea that you can deliver public goods through private investment is highly attractive, because essentially if you are a land manager, if you are a farmer or crofter and you are running a business, at the moment what you are doing is generating income from selling what you have grown or reared. You are not necessarily generating income from the other things that you are delivering to society, so if you can find a way of putting a value on those other things so that you can then receive an income because you are delivering something that does have value to other people. That has been sought for a long time. Ideas along the lines of what you are talking about have been floated before. The sorts of things that I have in mind are things through the Woodland Carbon Code and the Peatland Code, which were specifically designed in order to try and create a mechanism that gave private investors in a corporate social responsibility market confidence that if they were investing in a particular type of land management that they were going to get a very clear and rigorously defined carbon outcome. It is great to have the ideas. I would probably need to look at the detail. The question that your idea raises straight away is whether or not just having a land class would underpin that private investment sufficiently enough. If you are delivering a certain outcome, the Woodland Carbon Code, for example, is much more sophisticated in the sense that it would say that if you are doing this activity then you are getting this carbon outcome and it is different for Woodland than it would be for Peatland, it might be different for biodiversity and climate and so on. The sophistication that might be required might need to be disaggregated. I think that it is quite feasible to have a land capability for carbon sequestration map of Scotland. We have land capability for agriculture and every farmer in the country is fully aware of that because their union dues are based on whether on class 1 land, which is the highest quality or class 7 land, so they are very familiar with that. We also have a land capability for forestry. Getting a national map, which would indicate the areas in which you most likely would be able to sequester carbon is entirely possible. We also have quite sophisticated models that predict how much carbon sequestration you would get by planting trees, for example, in certain areas. That is very different from saying that we are going to have 10,000 hectares of trees. It is actually saying that we are going to have x quantity of carbon. I think that all those things are possible and they provide instruments for people to use to trade in carbon. However, the whole area of carbon offsetting in farming is quite controversial in terms of the framing of it and how you implement it. However, the message that I quite often get from farmers is that they would like to see that. They would like to see getting credit for good carbon management on their farm and seeing a carbon level inventory, not a national inventory that is separated in different ways. They get quite frustrated in fact that they feel that they are doing all the right things but that they are not getting all the credit for doing all the right things. There are pitfalls and all that, but it is really worth exploring because we need to get everybody on board. One way of getting people on board is to show them an incentive in doing so. There is a lot more to be done in that area, but in terms of providing the scientific evidence and data, Scotland is very well placed. We have very good national land and soils data sets that can be used to try and develop the mechanisms for that type of approach. Thank you very much. I also wanted to ask about carbon capture and storage. What I am hearing around the room is a kind of degree of scepticism about this as being something. We are going to have a limited amount of money to invest as a country, as a Government, and yet that will require a significant amount of investment. Should we be focusing on other things since you are scepticism and experts on this? It will not be without justification, and I would like to bottom that out where you see that. Yes, thank you. I was being a bit sceptical about it. You would not want to be out on a limb in terms of pushing CCS technologies that were different from what was being put forward elsewhere in the world. I think that there is an element of all the countries that have to move together, maybe some a little bit ahead, but some a little bit behind. The technologies where we are absolutely clear that these are going to be cost-effective through the 2020s and beyond and probably more than cost-effective, there is a lot that we can do there. Things like making sure that the electric vehicle charging points are rolled out, that dynamic charging becomes possible so people can charge their car when electricity price is low and if necessary discharge the grid when the electricity price is high. Now that subsidies have been removed for onshore wind and solar, then making it as easy as possible for companies and utilities to sign power purchase agreements with new projects so that those can move ahead on the basis of a fixed electricity tariff. Things like what does Scotland do with its nuclear sites when they come up to the end of their lives. There are a number of options that could be cost-effective there perhaps. Those are practical issues for the 2020s. At the moment, I do not see what the answer is on decarbonising heat, for instance, is not entirely clear. There are a number of runners and riders and we are doing a lot of research on that at the moment. It is a little bit the same with CCS. We do not really know what the cost-effectiveness of it will be or what future carbon price might be and whether that might be enough to get some of it going or not. I put the emphasis a bit on what we know is going to be cost-effective in 2020s, trying to maximise that. I think that we would probably take a different slant on that. I would not say that we would disagree necessarily, but I think that the thing that the CCC report brings is the need to go to the big things that you can change more and to go to those quickly. That is the difference in going from a 80 per cent target to a net zero target. I would say that the emphasis now has to be on moving all of the potential solutions ahead and then seeing how they can apply in different circumstances for different uses of energy. We would see one of the messages from the CCC report that was quite unequivocal on this is that carbon capture and storage is not an option. It is an essential. We still would see it as one that has strong potential in a lot of areas, the first of which being industrial uses of heat and use in industrial sectors. We think that it probably has applications in several other energy uses. We will not find that out until we develop a programme on that and until that programme is developed at scale. I also would caution against the idea that there is a fixed pot of money. If we have the mentality that there is only so much to go around, we are not going to achieve net zero. The CCC report was pretty unequivocal about that and pretty frank about the costs that are involved. 1 to 2 per cent of GDP, whatever, whether that is Scotland's GDP or the rest of the UK, are not small sums. That has got to be recognised as part of this process. I am guessing that Stewart has a particular constituency issue around CCS. I wanted to come back to the very first remarks that Angus McRow made. To try and tease out his antipathy to CCS. I know of six technologies, which means that there is at least 50. In particular, the differentiation between pre-combustion and post-combustion, and our retrofitting old kit with post-combustion, which is clearly quite expensive and with a limited period in which you get your capital back, and pre-combustion, where you are essentially going to be focusing on building totally new facilities, where the efficiencies and everything are in control, and furthermore post-combustion, you have got Taylor. It is a one-off build each time. Where your comments addressed both those, because it does strike me that the pre-combustion new build approach leads to the prospect of economies of scale and redeployment of technologies. It was said that there are 20 CCS projects. I know of 18 in China alone, although only two of them are big and 16 of them are kind of trial, little ones. Were you making that differentiation or were you just being broad brush? Do not touch. So there is not any antipathy, is the first thing. It is just observation in terms of what I see. Our clients are the biggest players in energy worldwide, from the traditional side and the new side, if you like. CCS, as you say, there are pilot projects going on. There are quite a few things happening in China, some interesting things happening on industrial CCS. In terms of the technologies actually moving forward and becoming closer to being rolled out on a sort of wide scale anywhere, I do not really think that we are any further forward than we were 10 years ago. Maybe that will change in the 2020s, I do not know. Is that because the funding was withdrawn from the carbon capture and storage, you know, from the UK Government took that funding away? So, for example, in Stuart's constituency that Peterhead was involved in that programme. So, you know, I cannot remember how long ago that was. Five years? Five years. So, you know, I guess that if there is that consistency of funding, what you have said is that there is not much movement in 10 years, that might not be in the case. Maybe there needs to be the consistency in funding and then we might be able to address that. So, I think that policy is obviously part of the answer and in the UK there were setbacks with the programme being taken away. There is also around the world that have been some CCS projects that have not gone well and have gone way over budget and have rather sort of burned a few fingers. Do you forgive me? I just want to get back to the core of the question that I am trying to get the answer to. Are you seeing a difference in your economic analysis, because that is what your skill is, between the retrofitting CCS and new build or not? Or is there simply not enough information and analysis to give a meaningful answer? Well, I think that CCS becomes a serious option if we get a carbon price that is high enough, particularly one on a sort of wide scale internationally. The sort of signs of that happening are not good, to be honest, to mean okay, the EUE test carbon price is higher than it was, but it is still significantly below where it would need to be to make CCS a practical proposition whether it is pre-combustion or post-combustion. Unless that changes, we see the sort of advance of the technologies that are showing rapid reductions in cost and continue to do so as something that is going to be much more a feature of the 2020s than CCS, probably. Unless we get such a climate emergency that governments completely change the policies and increase very high carbon prices and all the rest of it. That leads us on to what we are talking about, the business positives that are out there, the wins that there is for the Scottish economy and all the sectors that you are all representing. There are opportunities there. I do not know whether we want to open that up, because it seems to me that we are talking off a lot of challenges. Of course it is a challenge, but there is also opportunity there as well. The necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Does anyone want to talk about what you think might be the opportunities for your area? Scotland may be to be—we have already talked about what we have got in a natural environment. Building on what I said earlier on the survey of the suppliers, another result from it was that they all were already planning for growth, or at least they had a plan in the drawer that they could pull out once the button is pressed on setting clear targets and policies. That is across the board, that is heating, installers, energy efficiency, insulation, delivery agents. They are ready to go and they are projecting significant huge growth and export potential for their businesses, which is very positive. Some of the challenges that can be turned into positives is that there are still some gaps in certain geographies in Scotland where skills need to be developed. There is a need for further apprenticeships. There is a need to bring more young people into the industry. There is an opportunity there for growth that could be supported through apprenticeships, training, skills development colleges and so on. That could be again accelerated. The good news is that they know that the market is already growing because customers are telling them—now customers are coming to them saying, I want a heat pump. Instead of saying, I want heat and give me a boiler, people know that they have seen one, they have friends that have one, that like them, so the market is shifting and attitudes are shifting. People are now—there is a recent survey that is due to be published soon from Citizens Advice Scotland that is showing that people are in favour of standards, energy performance standards, being regulated for housing. Some 62 per cent were in favour and their main reason was for the environment. That shows a shift in attitudes because other research that they have done a couple of years ago was a bit more cautious. We have an opportunity here to not only win the jobs but to move with this growing interest and concern that we have and turn it into those opportunities for emissions reductions and jobs and all those other benefits. Perhaps following up on the point about carbon capture and storage, we are working around understanding some of those economic arguments and some of the economic challenges that will be faced recognising that this is clearly a key component of our meeting these new and critical targets. We are working with both the production or customer end, if you will, whichever way you want to describe at the industrial biotechnology that needs to go to the communities, the energy intensive companies in Grainsmouth, for example, or in Teeside in the north of England and the identified clusters, and also with the likes of the oil and gas industry and the oil and gas authority as part of the decommissioning of offshore infrastructure, whether there is a repurposing of offshore infrastructure that can be done in the project of St Fergus is a good example. There is no question with the industry leadership that we were discussing with that the withdrawal of funding previously has induced a certain amount of skepticism about the commitment to doing this, but there is also a recognition that, as major corporate global companies, they are going to have to address this challenge. If we have the potential for infrastructure here, then we can do that work. There are pilot projects under way. It is the UK as well as the Scottish Government level and the European level as well. We have engaged with other countries on the other side of the North Sea and around the North Sea as well to understand the projects that they are working on, to try to bring all of that together, because we are going to have to address it at that sort of scale. There are big opportunities that are undoubtedly the big challenges, and the economics of it will need a lot of work, as will the incentivising, then, of how are you going to make producers recognise that this is a key part of decarbonising their process. It all needs to join up. At the moment, there are a number of different pieces of the picture being assembled and looked at, but it is to do in part that economic analysis as well, because we do recognise that it is going to have to be proven how it will work and will need public as well as private engagement and incentivisation to make it work. However, there is big opportunity in Scotland just now. There is a big opportunity within the North Sea Basin. There are also big opportunities because we have some very major energy-intensive companies who are important to the economy of the country. As part of the work that we are doing with the oil and gas sector, not just the decommissioning of technology, but the diversification of the industry base, there is some exceptional technology in there already, which can be applied across a range of other areas of technology in other sectors, but part of it will be addressing the opportunity and challenge around how we move to carbon capture use as well. That is a separate element to a certain extent of the industrial biotechnology piece, but also the storage aspect of it as well. In terms of the positives, we see huge positives in pursuing the net zero goal. At the moment, the renewable electricity sector already employs 16,000 people in Scotland and generates £5.5 billion in revenue. As we increase the amount of renewable electricity that we are generating in this country, we see that job number and that revenue going up. It is very important to bear in mind that a lot of those jobs are in remote and rural areas where they provide high-quality long-term employment in areas where there are a few other opportunities. Picking up on Elizabeth's point, we are very keen to see young people coming into our industry and we will actually be holding our Young People's Green Energy Awards on Thursday night to celebrate the level of skill and expertise that is entering our industry from extremely passionate young people. We see a very positive future. We also found in a recent survey that our members are already exporting expertise and knowledge to 73 different countries around the world. When we say that we are looking at a target of making a Scotland world leader in renewable energy, it is not just about meeting our own energy needs, it is also about Scotland becoming this beacon in the world of expertise and knowledge and making us the country that you come to if you want to do a renewable energy revolution of your own. John wants to come in briefly. Can I just ask him about the manufacturing opportunities? As far as they seem to have passed us by, we would like to capture some of those as well. This is something that we are extremely keen on. Our members have already met—if you bear with me, I will just check the dates for you. I have too many pieces of paper in front of me. I have already met to talk about how we make the most of the industrial opportunities that we have with the work that we have done with our members looking into the lifetime of income generation over onshore and offshore wind. What we are finding is that there is between 50 and 65 per cent domestic content, so that is jobs and work that are going to domestic companies. We do find that, when it comes to the big infrastructure projects, Scotland is not competing on the world scale like we would like to see it do. This is a lot to do with a long-term underinvestment in infrastructure that has been UK-wide. As we say, our members are working very hard to see how we could change that because we do not just want to compete on the knowledge and expertise side, we would like to see Scotland competing across the board on a global scale. While we might be playing catch-up in that regard, is there still an opportunity in your view for Scotland to do so? We work on climate change. We are always optimists on those things. Yes, there are opportunities with appropriate investment. It could be done, but the key will be the appropriate investment and how the money is found to do that. Mark Ruskell, on that theme— On reading the Scottish Renewable Submission, you suggested a clean power plan. I was just wondering if that was something that other stakeholders around the table were backing and how that might differ from what we have at the moment, which is obviously a mixture of devolved and reserved responsibilities and an energy strategy for Scotland. Is the idea of a clean power plan something that builds on that, or develops it, in which case, where should we be going next? What we are calling for with the clean energy plan is that we need to look very carefully at the science of what has come out of the CCC report about how many gigawatts of electricity we need to be generating and what the technology mix across that might be, how much do we expect to generate onshore, how much offshore. Then, working back from that, we need to look both at our policies and our planning. If we know how much energy we need to generate onshore, how much of that can we generate from repowering our existing wind farms, how many more new wind farms or other technologies would we need to roll out onshore to meet that target? How many shallow bottom and other sites will we need offshore to be able to meet that? Instead of doing what we have done at the moment, which is where can we find a site and how much electricity can we generate out of it? We look at how much electricity do we need and then how do we meet that target. Is that different to what we have within the energy strategy at the moment? Is it more of an approach rather than a natural plan? It is more of a refinement. Now we are looking at a new climate change target and a new goal and a climate emergency. We need to revisit that just to make sure that we are actually going to be able to hit the targets that we are setting for ourselves. The market has to change because the cost of electricity versus something like if you are looking at heating your home, your consumer is not going to go with electricity over gas to heat their home at the moment. Of course, we have also got the targets about electrification of vehicles and that is going to be a huge demand for electricity. How can we make that cost effective that electricity is not seen as the most expensive option for everything? That is going to be a key challenge in the just transition and we do not hide from that fact. As we have already said, we have heard that the cost of electric vehicles is likely to come down to make them more attractive. There are also other advantages to having electric vehicles in that they are battery storage. One of the key problems that we have on our transition to a renewable energy system is storing renewable energy can be a challenge, unlike coal, gas, oil, which can be stored in their native form before converting into electricity. We see that grid services are probably going to come into the mix as well as how this works and smart technology will be very important about people being able to draw electricity when it is that it is cheapest and put it back into the grid when it is that they can make the most out of it. Those will be key parts of the transition. In fact, that leads seamlessly on to my question for all the panel members about how they see with the 1.5, which is what we are focusing on today, obviously. I know that someone wants to intervene, never mind. It is very important that we hear from everybody on this committee about workers, businesses and communities. Everyone will be affected by moving to net zero by 2045. I value comments from people. For instance, we have already highlighted that the positive impact sector can have to supporting the transition. I very much hope and expect that from the perspective of your sector will be a just transition as well. It would be helpful to hear from everybody who has not yet made that contribution what that will be. I think that you are right to say that, from the question, you have to focus on the opportunity that comes from this activity. The flip side of the cost is the opportunity and investment that it will bring. Clearly, whatever the amounts involved, there is going to be a significant amount of that that will go to offshore investment. Whether that is offshore wind, CCS or other technologies, that is obviously a real advantage of the Scottish economy to have that expertise from a range of sectors. There are certainly some transferable skills that go from across different sectors, whether you are thinking in terms of project management, whether you are thinking in terms of safety. All of those are core competences, certainly of our sector and others too. Developing that as a result of additional investment has got to be beneficial. We are seeing that already particularly in our supply chain, having clients both in the oil and gas sector and in the renewable sector. Also, to a certain extent, companies investing across the different sectors. The floating offshore wind farm was developed by Equinol, which is one of our members, using their offshore expertise. I think that there is definitely a certain synergy and a locational benefit across, up and down and all the sea that will result from the transition. That has a regional locational element to it, which is advantageous across the board and different poles of development to the ones that you typically get. There are definitely some regional development benefits to come out of the transition process. Is it possible for you to tell the committee if your members, in view of 1.5, have shifted views in terms of where finance should be going in terms of fossil fuel and the transition itself? That is possibly something that I will get back to you on. We have a lot of members and they have different strategies and so on, but you will have seen in the press that certain companies adopting resolutions from their shareholders who have an important voice. That is a good reason not to divest from energy companies, by the way. This is an area where companies are certainly thinking very carefully in response to how they develop their overall strategies. They take this very seriously. Will that be valuable if you can get back to us then? Thank you. At NFU Scotland, we view the concept of just transition as extremely important. Partly that is because of some of the things that are proposed in terms of the potential impact on the industry. If we look at what the Committee on Climate Change proposed for agriculture, we see it in three bits, if you like. The industry has to adopt all the mitigation measures to reduce emissions. That is possible. There are also recommendations around dietary change, so that is a reduction in the consumption of beef, lamb and dairy by 20 per cent. That is a conservative estimate. Some will go much further. The thinking is that that reduction in consumption will mean that there is an intensification with a shift towards pigs and poultry, and that frees up land for land use change. You would have a 20 per cent shift from agricultural land into another use. The dietary change, in particular, potentially brings a quite big challenge to the industry now. If you think about what the contribution is to the agricultural output at the moment from beef, sheep and milk, you get to about 45 per cent of agricultural output. If you take a 20 per cent reduction, it starts to have a big impact. Some people say that there is accommodation there, but I think that we look at it from the perspective of our members. When you think about it from the perspective of individual businesses, you have lots of agricultural businesses that are not huge. They are all a predominance of SMEs. There is a fairly high degree of reliance on going farm support. If you start changing income, you start to put those businesses under greater and greater pressure. You start to get to a situation where you could think that it would not be beyond the realms of possibility where quite a lot of businesses would go out of business. That is people losing their livelihood, essentially losing their jobs. Some of the scenarios for dietary change are talking about 50 per cent reduction in consumption of beef, lamb and dairy. If you think about what that would mean in terms of those sectors, at the moment there are 67,000 people employed in agriculture. If you are going to reduce the consumption of particular products that are the mainstay of Scottish agriculture, that is a lot of people's jobs, potentially at risk. There are issues around dietary change. Clearly, we are not in the realms of determining that people have to do one thing or another and that industry has to adapt. There are opportunities here. According to the previous question, there are opportunities around focusing on supporting Scottish farmers and on focusing on quality. A great deal of care is required, but that is where just transition comes in. Ultimately, the changes that we are potentially looking at mean that people's livelihoods and jobs are at risk. There are consequences, potentially, of having to import more food, which is going to have an impact on our carbon footprint as a country, if we are not producing food locally and there is still a demand for, for example, certain proteins. Exactly. We do not want to get into a situation where we move down a direction of travel that has an impact on the industry in terms of reducing production if, at the same time, there is a demand that we are just importing products from elsewhere, because all that we are doing there is exporting our emissions. What would you like to see in relation to land use and particularly agriculture in terms of the support through a just transition or a just transition commission for people who contribute to things the way—as there is a policy change—what would you like to see happen? I think at the moment where we are is actually we don't have a very sophisticated understanding of the potential way that things could play out. There's quite a blunt narrative and this is developed in the last few years at an international level, which is focused on livestock are bad for the climate. If you eat less meat, then you're making contribution. That's a very generalised approach and understanding. It seems to just keep being perpetuated, and I think what we would like to see is much greater sophistication of analysis of, well, if you were to do this, then what are the options for change? In Scotland, many people on the ground have no other option, because the land is not capable of doing many other things, agriculturally. How would that play out and enable us to get into a position of knowing what we would need to do to support the industry? At the moment, I don't think that we are in that place. Colin Campbell Ben, there is a great need for a just transition in relation to the land use change. We clearly need land use change to have the transformative shift that we require to meet the climate change targets. However, land is something that takes a long time to develop to its full productivity and to maintain it that way. Livestock has clearly learned a lot of pressure, particularly from trees, but there is transition land uses that we could look at. Look at agroforestry, where you have space trees, sheep can graze in between. There's actually benefit to the sheep in terms of the energetics, because they have shelter in the spring and the autumn time. The better energetic balance obviously reduces greenhouse gas emissions. The big issue is about how do farmers transition to being foresters? If you go to other countries such as Sweden, there are farmers during the spring, summer and autumn, and there are foresters in the winter time. However, we train people to be farmers or foresters. We don't train people to be land use managers. There's a lot of transition that we need to do around the culture and the methods and skills and knowledge that people need to have transition-type land uses in the future. The losses of jobs and agriculture are also quite serious for managing our landscapes. Farmers are not just farmers, they actually manage our landscapes and the ecosystem services that we get from our land. We need to think very carefully about the consequences of any land abandonment, for example, that might occur. There's a huge topic in terms of the just transition for the agricultural sector in terms of land use. I'll connect back to the question about economy and jobs. Obviously, I outlined the opportunities that we have if we invest in them in buses, trains and ferries. We need to look at the whole system, and that is across everything. For example, we need to be thinking about in the economy how we work, where we work and working to think about avoid, shift and improve the forms of travel that we need. For example, in rail, we think about modal shift from car to bus and rail and active travel, but actually it may be from air to rail as well, and that might be a more efficient way of working. Thinking not just about the jobs within the sector, which are hugely important and there's an opportunity there, but about how the whole economy functions in terms of its efficiencies, its resilience, there's going to be issues in terms of infrastructure and our wellbeing as well. This is where the transition needs to be just in terms of jobs, in terms of the economy, but for everyone we keep hearing the words enabling, and in the last session people were talking about people knowing what's right for their place, and sometimes we think just in big chunks. Actually there's lots of little chunks and never has there been an appetite for mobilising people to be engaged and to change their behaviour to make a difference than ever before. So there's real opportunities in travel, for example, lots of the journeys that we make are very little journeys and actually we could all be making huge differences in them. We see that cutting across the sector and if we can enable people to make those changes and to be part of the solution as a nation, put it all on the table and figure out what we need to do collectively, then that is good for our public health as well. People in the previous session were talking about folk feeling overwhelmed and daunted by the challenge here, but actually what we know and public health consultants will tell you is that once people feel that there's something to buy into, that they can be part of the solution, then that's a really compelling vision to go for in something that can motivate and make people feel better, feel happier and healthier. Whether it's those who are elderly or the children and the young people who are engaged in this debate, often there at the margins of these services, investing in our bus system would hugely help the 14-year-old who might like to go from our rural community to another part of the community to do a Saturday job, but she can't because there's no bus that runs that day or the elderly folk who depend upon that connectivity to get out and about and be functioning, that will invest in the local economy but it'll also have wide-reaching benefits. We know that communities that are better connected, people feel that there's less need, they can be at their home longer, so there's a reduction in the costs on health and social care for example, so there's a resilience there which we can be building within our community and for me and Transform was recognising that there's where we miss things like active travel and those opportunities for that kind of compelling vision. The UK advice was more about the big chunks and carbon captains and storage rather than all the little chunks which are going to make such a huge difference. You raised an important issue which I guess leads into quite a lot of sectors is that there's small easy wins based on a change in perception. One thing you've mentioned is that people actually want to do things but there's little things standing in their way, so you're talking about active travel, safety is an issue. I want to bring in Mark Simpson because I'm aware of the fact that freight isn't just on roads, it's on rail as well. Is there not an easy win there in that rail freight is underused? To be blunt, no, because 90 per cent of freight is gone by road, is road travel, you're not going to change that at all. At its best, you'll get about 5 per cent of the trucks off the road on to rail. The reason being, rail is suitable for things like whisky, if you get the gauge right, which isn't the case across all of Scotland's network, timber, things like that, so it's bulk goods. The other thing to think about is to maybe give you some figures to help build the picture. The FT estimates that if you look at a town with a population of about 100,000 people in it, you're moving an average of 4,500 tonnes of good every day. If you break that down, that's 187 tonnes being picked up every hour or dropped off within the city. If you take Glasgow or Edinburgh first, we're looking at around about 21,600 tonnes a day, which is 900 tonnes an hour. If you look at the broad spectrum, it's important to point out that that's got nothing to do with vans, this is all the trucks, so the heavier end. If you average that out at, say, 10 tonnes as a payload, to give you an example, a 24-ton truck only has a 10-ton payload. It can't carry 24 tonnes, so that's an average of 90 HDVs that are in the city every hour. It's nothing to do with parcel delivery. It's everything else. Parcel delivery is a really, really small element of it, and I think that's where people think freight is just parcels being delivered from Amazon. That's not what it is. It's everything else. It's the bricks, it's the wood, it's the coffee, it's the milk, it's the clothes, it's absolutely everything. I think that thinking about that amount of freight going into simply the city of Edinburgh, you're not going to shift that all into a train. The way to think about it is that the city is a consumer, so the city has all sorts of different demands for all sorts of different products to be brought into the city at different times of the day. It massively changes when things like the festival happen. The uplift is huge because of the number of extra people that are in the city, and it's about absolutely where it's possible to put some freight on trains, and we would absolutely support that, and we have members that are actively looking at that. There are some constraints with regards weight, because once it gets to its destination, it inevitably has to go by road to the final mile that we talk about, and it's about making it easy for that container to come off the back of a train onto the back of a truck and move that to its final destination, which ultimately would be a distribution centre. There's an element that can be done, but we need to be very cautious about the fact that our road infrastructure is vital to our economy and the way that we move goods around this country is by road. There are definitely limited opportunities, but it's about making that infrastructure as reliable as possible and putting the best cleanest vehicles on it. Is there any maritime opportunities when much of the food and other products arrive by containers? That is being explored. We had a consultation with a company recently that is re-opening the Recith to Holland route. The key thing for me when I heard that presentation was that it's got 10 times the capacity. The reason why the Recith to Africa didn't work was because we couldn't get enough trucks on it. I think that it could only take seven or eight trucks at a time. You're now looking at up to 100 trucks could go on that one crossing, so if it's not a time-sensitive product, absolutely no problem at all. Something like fishing, which should be up in Mr Stevenson's constituency, is all about just in time. It's got to get there quickly, so there's no other option. You've got to take it by road south as quickly as you possibly can and sell it up to its marketplace. Putting that on a ship won't work. Putting whisky on a ship, getting it across to America or wherever, absolutely works. I'd ask you, from the perspective of your organisation, you're looking at the model that has been raised in this committee previously about consolidation hubs outside cities and then smaller, possibly electric vehicles going into the cities themselves, which has been funded by EU money, which I hardly dare mention today, but has. Have you got comments on that? I think that an urban consolidation centre will work in some scenarios, but you need to be quite clear about what it is that an urban consolidation centre is. Freight and logistics by its very definition is all about efficiency and the freight is already consolidated onto the back of the biggest truck so that it can make one journey to do all the deliveries, so if you add that additional link into the supply chain, there's ultimately additional costs. I absolutely foresee no problem with parcels to a point with probably working urban consolidation and absolutely put them on the back of an electric van. But be aware that, as I said earlier, a 24-ton truck can carry 10 tonnes. If you replace that with vans, you need 10 vans to then go into the city. The biggest climate problem is congestion as far as transport is concerned. The stop-start nature and what you want is a vehicle to be able to run at a pace slow and steady through the city, get to its point, drop off and move on. That's not the same argument, is it? It's not, but I think that there are other emissions apart from just tailpipes. Of the tyres? Yes, okay. With the tyres and brakes and things like that. Have that discussion at a later date? I just wondered, since we're talking about transport, I wondered to what extent we can get a benefit by extending the life of our equipment because there's a big embedded carbon cost in building a lorry, building a truck and so on and so forth. I just think of my personal experience, where I now run an eight-year-old car, which in its life has never broken down. My depreciation is a... You realise that? Sorry? You've just jinxed that, you realise that? Well, no, no, no, no, no. Depreciation is £1,000 a year. In 2005, my depreciation was £5,000 a year. But more to the point that tells you something about the carbon footprint and using things. It is directed at the FTA, but it's a much more general question about using things for longer to make the embedded carbon be distributed over more effort and more benefit. The members of the FTA will have different uses for different types of vehicles, and it will very much depend on the mileage that the vehicle is doing and what terrain it is doing it alone. If it's doing milk runs, what we call milk runs, so short, regular journeys, absolutely you will get a longer life out of the vehicle. The industry as a whole is moving very much towards Euro 6. We estimate by 2020 about 50 per cent of vehicles will be on Euro 6, which is the cleanest option there is for diesel. Absolutely, we're now looking at the industry, we're looking at alternative fuel options, but there is no one stand-out option for that yet, so absolutely I would agree with Mr Stevenson that once we understand what that option is and understand the life span of a vehicle, because obviously with all organisations that run heavy goods procurement and life of vehicle is very, very important and ultimately what they will get when they sell that vehicle on. I think it's important to realise that unless you now have a Euro 5 vehicle, you're going to get a lot less money for that because nobody's going to want to buy it from you, so it's all about Euro 6. I was just going to quickly say, I think this is one area for example where there's a huge win to make, but we need to look creatively at what all the options are. There's not going to be one size that fits everything, so we need to look creatively at it and also we can look to elsewhere, so in the Netherlands for example they're putting together, I think, in statute right now, a zero emissions network for freight and looking at what the potential is there, so we can provide more information on that if that's of interest to the committee. Yes, on the question about using things longer, there's an interesting example being done in Remfrewshire Council where they are combining budgets of say the retrofit build and maintenance and repair and they're looking at their housing stock and actually finding that it will be more cost effective to do a deep retrofit, so bringing these buildings as far up to net zero as they can now and rather than tearing them down, looking for a new land, planning permission, you know, all of that entails let alone the embodied carbon emissions that's lost and that's the route they're going to take because they've decided that that is actually cost effective over the longer term and so that's an example of how you can take that approach, you know, by using a deep retrofit and if I can segue on to the quick wins, I think, you know, this is so important in terms of this state, you know, we are in a state of climate emergency and you can use the quick wins to give comfort, give signals to say, yes, we are, you know, we're on this, there are some no-brainers that we can get on with, but at the same time, you know, we're all going to work together on longer term plans, longer term strategy and there, I'm sure, all of us could come up with, you know, a little top three of quick wins that could be done today, put in place today and send those signals like, you know, with housing, new build regulations. They're already saying, Philip Hammond is already saying that for the rest of the UK, are we going to be left behind? You know, why should we be connecting new homes to the gas grid? And, you know, that's just one example. Why are we funding replacement oil and LPG boilers for the fuel poor? We should be putting them on to renewable heat and accepting that there's going to be an additional, there will be an additional cost involved. And repeat what I've said before, when your engineer, nearest engineer, is more than two hours travel away, there's a huge disincentive to change your technology, because we were going to do it until we discovered that. So, there may be examples, but I do think our government programmes, government money, should be investing in low-carbon technologies and not perpetuating technologies that we know are yesterdays. So, there are those examples of some quick wins and a quick win for yourselves, I believe, would be, as we have proposed, a target, putting in place a target in this bill of an EPCC, BANC by 2030 for the vast majority of homes. So, you know, if we're in an emergency, we should be, it should look like, not that we're all running around panicked, but it should look like there is considered action being taken to reverse or repurpose policies. We should be using discretionary funds to implement projects that we no need to go ahead or research. It should look like a full mobilisation effort. Yes, the climate change plan will be revised, but that's not enough in my view. We should really be treating this as an emergency and giving people that comfort and those signals to show, you know, this is now the direction of travel and it will be accelerating. So, get on board. Mark Ruskell. I think it's leading on from that. I'd appreciate quick views around the table about the kind of infrastructure that we need to deliver a low carbon economy. In particular, I go back to the previous panel where we talked about locking in high carbon emissions perhaps through the wrong type of infrastructure that's being invested in. So, I think, you know, we've heard an example perhaps there of, you know, private infrastructure, public infrastructure and housing, but that's a kind of national, adds up to a national infrastructure in a way, but are there other examples of where we should be investing differently or maybe we've got the balance right at the moment? I don't know. Anybody? Yes. On the key infrastructure that will really make a difference, Elizabeth has already touched on it, that heat networks are exceptionally common in Europe, particularly in places like Denmark. We need to be putting in place the planning policies now. We acknowledge that the new heat networks that go in will probably not be powered by renewable energy, they probably will be gas-powered, but once the network is in, retrospectively going back and changing the fuel source to a renewable source is much easier. If we wait until we've got the renewable source before we put in the heat networks, it will be too late. The other really important piece of infrastructure that we should consider is repowering the wind farms that we already have. A lot of the heavy lifting around them has been done, the grid connections have been put in, the substations have been put in, the access has been put into them. As a wind farm reaches the end of its operational life, which is around 20 to 25 years, you take the turbines down and repowering involves putting new, modern, more efficient ones up. The modern, more efficient turbines are generally taller than the ones that exist, so you will see them more, but you can put in fewer turbines and get out either the same amount of electricity or more from the same site. I'm picking up on the embodied carbon and recycling. What we're also seeing in Scotland is real pioneering work being done around how we now recycle the parts from our wind turbines, so again, the embodied energy that's being used in our low-carbon generating technologies is itself being decarbonised. For agricultural land use, there are a lot of new technologies that rely on having the internet of things available in all parts of the country at the right speeds. There's a lot of robotics, artificial intelligence methods that are coming along that will mean that our systems are more efficient and produce less greenhouse gas emissions, but that will depend on that wireless infrastructure being ready to use in many remote parts of the country. The other thing about the land use is the green infrastructure. I suspect that that's not what you're referring to, but we can think about our natural assets, about getting the green infrastructure right as well and the natural assets that are in that green infrastructure. One of the new ways that we're thinking about agriculture is how we redesign diversity back into the system. That means having multiple varieties of crops or different crops or intercropping, making sure that you've got weeds at the margins of the field that can attract the right pollinators and predators that prevent you from having to apply so much chemical herbicides, etc. There's a lot of ways that we can think about infrastructure and redesigning and putting diversity back into our green infrastructure is a big one. Jess Pepper? I've talked about the good stuff. A recent spice publication highlighted that, in terms of our pipeline spend, having reduced the amount that was being spent on high carbon infrastructure, the pipeline spend demonstrates that we're heading towards locking in more high carbon infrastructure into the future, which is a worrying trend. Clearly, we're in a climate emergency and we need to be reviewing that. I borrowed from a climate striker, I know a model of what the problem is on transport. Each one of those duplo blocks, if you're familiar, represents 1 million tonnes of carbon CO2 equivalent. The yellow blocks, the very bottom one, is all the public transport and bikes and trains and all. This top one is air, so welcome the decision on air passenger duty. The yellow is road traffic. One of the alarming things in drafting this was for me, and it was being brought to my attention by these strikers, that we are currently pulling down woodland and moving around high carbon soils and agricultural soils in order to build new roads. That's where the bulk of our investment has been going and that's where the bulk of our planning has been going. The roads that are being built sometimes are not even subject to an assessment on climate change and the impacts that, when you do your strategic environmental assessment generally, you scope in terms of climate or you rule in what's important to scope on and what's not important to scope on. The A9 dualling programme, for example, didn't scope on climate and that's going to target a lot of woodland, thousands of hectares and a lot of high carbon soils, peatlands, which are being moved around. In terms of what we need to reassess and reconsider in a climate emergency, our roadbuilding programme would be one of them. There's a great case for investing in repair and there's an important case in investing in what needs to be done for safety, but in terms of what we need to be thinking about as the whole system and how we make it accessible to everyone, electric vehicles, as I've said, will be part of the solution and we should definitely take the steer from the advice that we lock into statute, that ambition on transitioning to electric vehicles, but we do need to think carefully about what the whole system does for everyone because not everybody will have access to an electric vehicle or be able to invest in an electric vehicle. I think on infrastructure there are the issues that come up are kind of chicken and egg issues to some extent, so and that goes across a lot of different alternative technologies actually. So with electric vehicles you have the infrastructure of charging with use of hydrogen infrastructure to use for transport potentially, also converting the gas networks to use hydrogen or allowing different specifications of gas to be used in the network and finally on CCS. You're probably aware that there's a CCS advisory group sitting which will produce its report in July and interestingly there they envisage your kind of disaggregated model. So with carbon capture being one part of the value chain transport and storage being a different part and again you've got a chicken and egg issue there because if you lose your you know that you won't build your storage unless you think people are going to capture and you won't build your capture unless the storage is available. So there are these kind of infrastructure issues when when doing a modal shift or a structural shift that those are the sort of questions that go to this point of you know where are the dividing roles between the market and the government with all of this and so I think that's an important insight actually from again from the CCC report and all of the work that goes with energy transition in that the infrastructure side of things is the one and even down to kind of market design as well how they have electricity market functions that was all rehalled, overhauled as part of developing renewables you know other segments of the of the market you know might need to have that kind of those kind of changes as part of the policies that go with the setting of targets. Hydrogen has been mentioned a lot of times in passing and I guess that oil and gas industries maybe got a role to play if hydrogen is say the replacement fuel for say the gas grid or it's the replacement fuel for the UHTVs in the future. I wanted to ask a question one of the submissions that came in I think it's from Angus McRown he said hydrogen is potentially part of the answer on residential industrial heat and indeed in long haul heavy trucks but this is a bit highlighted but it would have to be produced using electrolysis not fossil fuel cracking could you explain why you say that? We come back to this CCS thing that I'm supposed to have. Is that the reason why because you don't think this CCS? Well if you're going to produce hydrogen by fossil means then you you have the co2 to deal with so either you just let it go or you have to store it but I'm slightly circumscribed in what I can say because we are literally about to publish a whole stream of stuff on hydrogen and and the sort of future economics of things like electrolysis and so on so I can't sort of leak that but yeah I mean I think electrolysis is interesting because I mean the two main ingredients of electrolysis are water and electricity and Scotland potentially is you know Saudi Arabia water and you know potentially plentiful supplies of renewable electricity which could be made reliable around the clock with batteries or by using hydrogen infrastructure itself so it's a potentially interesting area for Scotland I mean I'd sort of council a bit of caution that we don't we don't yet know exactly what's going to happen with electrolysis over the next 10 years and what people like us say about future costs will have some impact but I think it's an interesting area to watch. So there's a case of two different technologies whichever gets their first big the answer to hydrogen? Yeah without getting into the battle of the technologies but you can do steam methane reformation today and you and turn it into hydrogen you also obviously you then have to you know have a process for capturing the carbon and storing it which is is not an insignificant challenge but I think the those will go at different paths but again I would go back to my point is you know we don't have to choose today we actually have to try all of these things and get them off the ground at scale and then it will work itself out over time and then but the situation we are today is that if you want to develop that develop the hydrogen economy quickly it actually has to be off the back of methane and methane reformation because we don't have the we will in the future have reliable surpluses of renewable electricity with which to do electrolysis and that will definitely be needed but there's a sort of sequencing that you know we would envisage happening which probably has the methane reformation going first and then you have to take it from there but they're both challenging areas I would say so I wouldn't like to say which one is you know better or worse than the others but you know we're in a city with the the the imperative of getting to net zero means these all have to be tried and tried seriously I would say Angus MacDonald sorry Andy MacDonald Angus is over there Angus usually sits there so that's even more confusing so yeah I just is I'll pick up on that point first I mean we are obviously in the midst of that debate about electrolysis and steam methane recovery and which is longer term going to be the solution that we we get to for scale we do some economic we did some economic analysis within my team we do if we were a foresighting group and part of the reason that we're currently looking at extending the work that we're doing within hydrogen just now into heavy transport is because at the moment we feel that in scotland's case is about where we can do now in terms of scale if we get to a point where we're injecting hydrogen into the gas grid then the dynamics change the the economic exchange but for the moment the opportunity in scotland is around that you know there's heavy transport opportunities and because that's what we've got now and picking at will's point we need to be testing improving that now because it's going to be part of the solution wherever the fuel eventually comes from so we need to be doing that now to the broader error question about the the impact and how we avoid having some of the captures on your question mark the what some of the work that we're doing with a lot of partners in government in utilities community groups and others just now around local energy systems is partly looking to try and understand what the right solutions are for different places we did some work on typologies which looked at what an island community would do or need what would be important for a rural community that's off grid what an urban community or an industrial estate or an industrial complex might do the needs of those different areas are different and if we're looking just now at changing the way our energy system works it's an opportunity just now to try and capture those and find the best solutions for different communities and the best and most advantageous way of bringing a group of technologies together around that so it may not be about just the grid bringing electricity in anymore clearly isn't so if you look at some of the stuff in Orkney just now while they're piloting some of these projects using renewable electricity that's generated through emacs testing of marine devices using some of that through electrolysis to produce hydrogen which has been used in council vehicles looking at grid management across the islands looking at how the networks work across a group of islands all of those things are piloting for the future and we're trying to take some of that understanding and share it in other countries in Denmark and Canada and other places where they have similar communities just now to understand you know can we test those things further can we test those ideas out because that's part of the global solution but it's also part of a very local solution for those communities okay in the final 10 minutes we've got two members with questions can I ask Claudia and John to both ask your questions together and then we'll put it out to everyone and you can signal to me whether you want to answer Claudia thank you our convener has already highlighted the issues some around the opportunities in relation to net zero by 2045 and could I ask very specifically if any of the panel members want to make any comment on investment both in research but also or and also in in commercial companies and the public sector as well this might relate to pension funds and divestment and reinvestment in relation to the relationship that companies have with shareholders and how companies can actually affect change as well as the shareholders themselves and also finally what Mark Carney highlighted what seems a very long time ago now about stranded assets so I just wonder that this has obviously got to be a brief response but just any comments on five minutes please and John mine was a sort of big infrastructure product ties into what claudia said but mr mcrone talked about Saudi Arabia of water and self-evidently with water tables falling in england and groundwater level falling as well and reservoir levels falling should we is now the time for someone not so who would afford it but to be looking at a pipeline to export water from Scotland oh and I have to declare an interest in that regard as well I have a small company in that regard which is absolutely dormant I have to say but is that is that something that in a strategic sense for the whole of the United Kingdom is an opportunity and when it becomes a critical need it will be too late then to say oh I wish we'd done that 10 years ago whereas the length of time it takes for these kind of projects should we be thinking about that now would any of our guests like to take any of those questions and give our thoughts in the last few minutes nobody yes I'll go to me like Watson first I'm afraid I can't speak to the export of water the water and the electricity generally don't mix so well so it's not exporting water is not something my members do but picking up on the investment opportunities Scotland is regularly seen as one of the top countries in the world for renewable investments when you know we look at what's happening in offshore wind we are seeing billions invested in the north sea so yes there are amazing opportunities for investment and this again is one of the reasons why we are so welcoming of the net zero target and what we expect and hope will follow which is a very supportive policy environment because as I've already said around innovation the same is true for investment where their stability where there's an ambitious target investment will generally follow because people know that when they make an investment there's a long-term future for it so we are extremely optimistic about the investment. There's a concern obviously this week about bifap for instance I don't want to go into any details we haven't got long but I mean in terms of the big contracts for Scottish workers can you comment on that too? Yes as I alluded to earlier we had the offshore wind summit on the 2nd of May when a great number of our offshore wind members did actually meet with Mr Mackay and subsequently a letter was sent on the 16th of May to the economy energy and fair work committee setting out what we're looking to do on that. As I've already said our members really want to work with Scottish companies but they're stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment. Offshore developments are funded through the contracts for difference process out of Westminster which pushes for the lowest possible price which is again forces people to look globally for where they can find suppliers who can do that. What we want to see as I've already said is we want to see the Scottish infrastructure side of things being able to compete on a global market not just for the projects that we do in Scotland but for projects all the way around the world and as a set out in Mr Mackay's letter to the committee we have come up with a list of actions to be done that we hope would make that a reality. I'm just going to address the point about investment, divestment etc. We would not see things in such black and white terms in terms of energy production, investment, divestment. I think that we have to recognise that there are other energy policy goals around. Access to energy that's one of the UN sustainable development goals. We would argue that that has a value in its own right and we're not talking about black and white here when we're talking about where companies put their money. The other thing that we would say is that all companies are different, they all have their own strategies. Being involved in a company as a shareholder gives you the right to go along and ask about stranded assets and that kind of question. That's a value in retaining a stake in a company and that gives you a voice. We do not think that divesting from particular sectors or particular companies is a good idea unless for a commercial reason and your questions are not answered about their strategy then that's fine. Divesting from companies? I did use the word reinvestment as well. I'm not being defensive about that. No, I understand. The value that, as an institutional shareholder, that gives you the right to question, the strategy of that company, that's really valuable. If I was involved in such an exercise I would counsel against taking yourself out of the tent. You've got a voice as a shareholder and particularly as an institutional shareholder about those kind of commercial questions. Finally, on the investment side, as I alluded to earlier, the big changes that have happened will need to happen. There's a setting of the institutional framework around those that takes you from the example project to the first of the kind project at scale to the state of affairs where those are part of normality. That's where the Government and Policy role comes in and that's the role that Government's played in the renewable electricity sector. Those are the questions that then need to be asked when we get to the implementation of the policies that are there to deliver the targets and that's the important next step in all of this. My biggest concern regarding investment, particularly in EIIs, is trying to remain competitive in the UK. I think that there's been a big opportunity missed when looking just at territorial emissions. If we move to a consumption-based emissions system, you give your industry a little bit more certainty that you're keen to attract their investment while they decarbonise and not just all our carbon budgets at the moment could actually be met through deindustrialisation, which isn't good for the economy at all. If we move to a consumption-based emissions reporting, we might attract more investment in the UK and it would be interesting to see whether we could actually repatriate some of the industries that we might have lost and bring some more of those consumption emissions back under our control, which I think would be better for the environment, it would be great for the economy and it would send great signals to industry that we're wanted in the UK and in Scotland. That's a good point, by the way, but the way of bringing the pressure that investors are putting to bear on companies together with the opportunities for Scotland is I think that companies are really treating sustainability far more seriously than they ever have been up to now and we're seeing that with the work that we're doing and the sort of response to that and it's sort of going down the supply chain as well so it's not just sort of head office of Walmart or whatever it's everybody they deal with and so on and that's happening on a global basis and what Scotland can offer is very cheap renewable energy so if these companies are wanting to source 100% of their electricity from renewables by a particular date 2023 or whatever then the sort of cleanest way to do it and be sure that you're actually enabling new projects to be built is by signing power purchase agreements with new renewable energy projects and this could be onshore or offshore wind in Scotland so I think that there's a sort of opportunity there for Scotland to to sort of take advantage of its natural resources and become part of that. Landon Macdonald I'm sorry just a couple of relative small pieces of both jigsaws I guess we haven't been asked to help construct a pipeline yet but the response for a responsibility for our part of the hydro nation project at a Scottish level within Scottish enterprises within my team as well and we are seeing a lot of interest around technologies to do with improving water quality and developments which are exportable, tradable and are being taken to some parts of the world where they have a significant impact and the other was just from a public sector perspective around some of the investment some of the projects that we've worked on through and with communities and with some of the early stage innovative technologies have obviously been supported through the renewable energy investment fund and the now energy investment fund and through the Scottish Investment Bank and my colleagues there we're working with just now in terms of trying to make some some cases toward the the work of the new Scottish National Investment Bank which clearly may be at a significantly greater scale but within its low carbon mission which we hope it's going to be focused on we're looking at whether they they may be able to extend that reach into other areas with more capital. I keep a rapidly running out of time I want to take under initially very quickly and then Jess Peppern we're afraid we're going to have to round things up so Andrew Amidlis. Thank you it's just on the issue of investment and I hope I'm not too far off from the sort of the topic that you're intending I just wanted to make the point that there's various forms of investment needed specifically with regard to farming the first one with private investors and I'm talking about SMEs and clearly it's a different conversation but with SMEs they need clarity if they're going to invest in their businesses in the context of the policy context that they find themselves at the moment they need clarity and on the direction of travel now there are opportunities and they and people will be seeking to identify and sort of invest in those opportunities but they need sort of clear direction of travel so that they know where their businesses are expected to go that applies to in the food chain with people needing to invest in supporting the industry they need confidence that there's going to be an ongoing market and then finally public investment is critical especially and it relates back to the issue on public goods the role of the state against private investment the role of the state in the delivery of public goods is really critically important and investing in advice in sort of infrastructure within the industry it doesn't necessarily mean I'm not necessarily talking about just handing out money it's about helping people invest through soft loans things like that there's a whole range of things that are going to be done and just paper finally as quick as I can really just to go back to where we started with we need we know where we're wanting to go now and that's great but we need certainty in terms of how we're going to get there so that folk can invest in it and have confidence in it and can map out how they're going to contribute to that and that may mean that we may need something more than just policy because policy hasn't always worked in the past there may be things which could go into a statutory framework which is more about the house so the climate change plan was quite sectoral before actually if we could achieve something that gives the sectors the certainty they need but also achieve some level of integration then that would be because that's where you get the synergies and you know your soils are important but they're important across the board and all sorts of from different angles and it may be that we need somebody to champion that we maybe we need a climate commissioner or a commission to oversee and make those connections and encourage the sectors where there's a bit of sluggishness or there's a new creative connection to be made and be kind to Colin Campbell because you're from my neck and you wanted to come in briefly. I'll try and be as brief as I can but on the pipeline I can't answer the question fully but I can tell you there's about 160 billion cubic metres of rainfalls in Scotland but it varies and it can be 100 billion sometimes so there's a lot of variation so we need to be very careful about what we do with our water despite the fact that yesterday's rain was tomorrow's whisking and on funding in particular obviously the research is a vital part of our infrastructure and the science is a vital part of infrastructure and we have had a lot of cuts in our research over the last 10 years and it's austerity and not been in a protected budget but I'd like to think a climate crisis would mean more money for research going forward. Okay thank you very much for everyone for their time today that includes the committee's business in public today at its next meeting on the 4th of June the committee will be taking further evidence in relation to the Scottish Government budget and the committee will reconvene in private session at 2.30 this afternoon to consider the evidence that we heard in the bill this morning. The meeting is now suspended and I ask that the public gallery be cleared. Thank you very much to everyone.