National Assembly for Wales

Hello. Chloe Wenman, Marine Conservation Society, representing Wales Environment Link.

Hi there. Annie Smith, RSPB Cymru. Also here representing Wales Environment Link.

Good morning, everybody. Jonathan Davies, senior ecologist at Bannau Brycheiniog. 

Diolch. Well, I'd actually like to start by just wishing everybody a happy World Oceans Day. So, I look forward to discussing the role that the ocean can play in reversing biodiversity decline today.

COP15, well, it was talked about as nature's Paris moment, wasn't it? I think there's a lot to be said there. Could it have gone further? Yes, possibly. That's the nature of international agreements, isn't it? You reach the base level. But, we were really pleased with what was decided. We're talking today, of course, about domestic implementation; it's useless if we can't implement it. Welsh Government's made a really good start here with the biodiversity deep-dive recommendations, and we were really pleased to be involved there.

The key thing that you'll hear us talking about today is our ask for a nature positive Bill, and again we were really pleased to see the commitment to a White Paper this year on that. We can go into this a little bit more later, but essentially we're asking for legally binding nature recovery targets and an independent environmental governance body. The Minister herself has recognised that the main challenge here is finance, and I'd like to refer here to our 'Pathways to 2030' report, which we submitted as written evidence, which goes into habitat level recommendations and ballpark figures on what needs to be invested.

In terms of a summary of my key asks for the ocean—that's mainly what I'm here to talk about—recognition for the ocean is probably No. 1 there. Welsh seas are 35 per cent larger than the land mass. It's huge, and that needs recognition. You'll hear me talk a lot about marine spatial planning today; that's our No. 1 ask for Welsh sea biodiversity. We think it can make a huge difference.

Other things, really quickly, on the marine side: quality not quantity for marine protected areas. We have protected 30 per cent of our seas already, but they're not properly protected, are they? So, there are some actions we can do there. And that's it, really. Targets within the Bill—we'll go on to that later, but really to emphasise that we need these as a way of driving action, not just for their own sake. 

And the final thing I'd like to just note is that the COP15 agreement really highlighted the role of communities, and again the Minister has recognised this, and I'd like to really hammer that home, that underneath all of this target setting and everything, we really need societal change, behavioural change—we need to bring the people along with us. So, I'll leave it there.

Diolch. Chloe's covered so much, there's not much for me to add. I agree with the sort of overarching comments about the global agreement. But the important thing, I guess, to stress, is that there's a really ambitious global mission in there to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030, so that we see recovery to healthy, thriving ecosystems that benefit people and nature by 2050.

You asked about specificity, and I think that's one of the things that could have been improved on, the kind of detail of some of the targets. But among the critical points for us is that there are specific targets in there on species, so a recognition that we've got to address species recovery as part of the package. So, increasing species abundance and reducing extinction risk are clearly there in the framework. The 30x30 target is obviously one that's been talked about a lot and it was the focus of the deep dive. It sounds quite specific, but there's a lot that comes under that in terms of understanding how to deliver it. So, I think there's plenty of work to do to deliver it.

I would just echo Chloe's comments that what we have learnt over the decades is that these global agreements on their own don't drive the accountability and the action that we need to actually meet the goals. We need those legally binding targets in legislation, so that the Convention on Biological Diversity becomes the business of the whole of Government, across sectors and society, as Chloe said. So, legally binding targets, in a parallel framework to the climate change framework, are critical to make that happen, we believe.

Thank you very much. I'm sure colleagues will be asking more in-depth questions around that as we progress. Jonathan, can I turn to you for some initial comments, please?

Thank you. Yes. We adopted nature positive, actually, as the nature mission target for the recently launched management plan for the national parks, so that's certainly something that we endorse and we want to contribute to. Obviously the one that stands out a lot for us and the designated landscapes is the 30 per cent target—30 per cent of land and seascapes. I won't get it right if I try and remember the exact wording of the target, but Wales is close to 30 per cent of all land protected in designated landscapes. But, of course, we know that there are significant areas of land in the designated landscape and national parks and the areas of outstanding natural beauty that are not significantly better than land outside, and, in some cases, maybe even worse. So, that seems like a really obvious opportunity for Wales to really improve the way nature recovery takes place within the designated landscapes, so that as much of that 30 per cent as possible is recognised as being protected for nature.

There are other targets that seem to get a lot less recognition. There are 23 targets, aren't there, under the whole CBD agreement, the COP15 agreement, and some that I think probably could get more attention and that would really help nature recovery, certainly within the national parks and designated landscapes. The target of 10 on agriculture stands out. We don't talk about the CBD process when we're talking about the sustainable farming scheme, and yet 80 per cent of all the land in the national park is managed by farmers. There's a lot we can do, actually, to leverage the SFS, within the national park, to make sure that designated landscapes are delivering more for nature than anywhere else and really leads the way, a really good exemplar in that area. I'll stop there. There are other things that'll come up later in the meeting, I think. Thanks.

Thank you very much. Can I turn to Joyce Watson to lead us on the next two questions, please?

Thank you, and I'm just going to refer you to my register of interests, because I'm a member of  the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. So, I'm going to ask about nature recovery targets and how nature positive should be represented in Welsh legislation.

Thank you. Thank you, Joyce. Nature positive is a kind of description of that global goal that I just described, so we need to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, so bend that curve and then see substantive recovery by 2050. So, we would want to see in legislation those goals—2030, halt and reverse biodiversity loss, 2050, recovery—and then some specific duties to set, through regulations, binding targets based on different measures of biodiversity.

So, key measures include species abundance, species extinction risk and also habitat quality and extent, including protected areas, extent and condition, linking back to the 30x30 target. So, we'd expect the detailed targets to sit in secondary legislation, but for the primary legislation to be very clear about what was needed and what those targets needed to do. We'd then expect a regular system for reporting on progress against the targets and, critically, for the primary legislation to require the interim targets be set, so we don't just want to look at 2030 and 2050; we want to look at points between, so that Governments—. The point of having legally binding targets is to lock in commitment, isn't it, so successive Governments are driving in the same direction. And we don't want the option to be there for action to be pushed to the last five years; we need to see progress all the way through. So, a legally binding requirement for interim targets to be set is really critical.

The Environment (Wales) Act 2016 has established a policy setting and an evidence reporting cycle so that—. It might be possible to enhance that through the nature targets framework to make those key vehicles in that cycle, potentially. And I think we also talk about, don't we, the need for independent environmental governance, and the role of an independent watchdog is really critical in helping the Senedd and society as a whole to scrutinise the Government as to its progress, whether it's the actions that it's committed to, to show how it's going to meet those targets, whether it's a natural resources policy or another vehicle, whether that's adequate, likely to be sufficient, and how then both delivery and progress have been at the end of the relevant period. So, I think those roles are all really important. 

Can I—? In terms of what is the relevant time period, how do you see that being arrived at—through discussion to set that, or—? 

The critical thing, I guess, is having legally binding targets. If you think of the impact of the climate change targets, it's really clear that Government is answerable to that, isn't it? If there's a piece of advice they don't follow, or, as we've seen, the Climate Change Committee says progress has been inadequate, then we need to see a response to that, and that plays out in the Senedd, also in the court of public opinion. So, reporting needs to be regular enough, so that it's not only kept alive as an issue, but also so that progress can be tracked—you can make adjustments, if needed, kind of thing. 

So, I think there is discussion to be had around that. I think there's a role—. I would say there's a role for the five-year cycle that's established in the environment Act, where we have evidence updated towards the end of the Senedd and the policy actions set out at the beginning. So, the Westminster Environment Act that was passed in 2021 has a requirement for an annual progress report, and I think we'd need to see a statement of that kind about how progress is going towards the targets. So, I think there's a combination of levels, probably.

Thank you. Chloe. 

Jonathan has his hand up to come in, if I may bring him in. 

Thanks again. We adopted nature positive by 2030, as I said earlier, as the headline goal for nature recovery for the national park in our management plan. And for us, what we're focusing on is habitats—making sure that we stabilise or improve the extent and particularly the condition of different habitats within the park. To do that, the way we conceptualise that is we say that if we're going to be nature positive by 2030, it means, in 2030, nature should be—and I'll do this with my hands on the camera here—at the same level as it is when we start, which is now, this year, which means that if nature is currently in decline, we have to reverse the decline and be on an upward trajectory in 2030. And then the question about, 'What's the future goal?', well, that's a lovely debate for 2030—'What's the potential when we get beyond neutrality?' But even setting that as a goal is very ambitious.

When we were looking at it and debating whether to adopt that, we looked at target 15.3 under the sustainable development goal, which is for land degradation neutrality, which isn't discussed much in the UK, but it follows essentially the same principle and it was adopted by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, so one of the sister conventions to the CBD. And they've done quite a lot of work to develop a framework for that target, which I think could be worth looking at and seeing if that can inform a similar nature positive target here.

Thank you. 

And the lessons from England—have we got any lessons from England in terms of bringing forward domestic biodiversity targets?

Yes. Because the Environment Act 2021 has taken that step of creating legally binding biodiversity targets, that’s definitely a really important model to look at. The model is similar to what I described in terms of having headline commitments to target setting on the face of the Act, with the targets themselves following in legislation. And they do have a flagship species recovery target on the face of the Bill. What’s missing from that Act are legally binding interim targets, so there is no requirement to set targets at a shorter time frame—. I’ve totally lost my thread. 

The one other thing—I know you’ve got stuff to say—was that a thing to look at is the time frames within that. So, the Act was passed, I think, in November 2021, with a requirement that regulations setting out the targets be laid in Parliament in October 2022. The UK Government missed that target by a couple of months, but still, within a little more than a year of the Act being passed, the targets had been set in law. So I do have a concern about the potential to build in further protracted time periods between the primary legislation and the regulations. I think we should follow the example of that Westminster Act and stick to short time periods. As Chloe said, it’s great to hear that there’s a White Paper on the way this year, but we really need to know urgently that we will get legislation soon enough that the Senedd can pass it, and pass regulations to set us up going forward. I think a critical bit of that is making sure that we don’t tackle everything in stages, but in developing what the legislation looks like there’s also work going on about what the actual targets look like, so that we’re ahead of the game in terms of the need for regulations. 

I agree with a lot of what Annie said. I was going to say some of that, too. I think there are also some lessons in terms of specific targets that we're missing. So, for example, marine—the marine target is that 70 per cent of designated features in the marine protected areas network are in favourable condition by 2042. So, that's very MPA focused. There's nothing about marine species there. Obviously, MPAs are hugely important, but they can't be the be-all and end-all of how we restore biodiversity in the sea, so we would like to see some thinking go into marine-specific targets. I know that the Office for Environmental Protection suggested a target for the achievement of good environmental status more generally for the England targets, and that was dismissed, so potentially some more discussion on that. There was also no overall target on river quality in the English targets. There were targets, I think, on sources of pollution, but no overall river quality targets. So, yes, some suggestions there on something—. I don't know, Annie, if there were some terrestrial—?

I think, actually, it's a really important point that, on the terrestrial side, there’s a legally binding species abundance target, but not one related to terrestrial protected areas. So they’ve sort of done the opposite approach, and actually we want to have a comprehensive approach to this and see the land, freshwater and sea are addressed in target setting, but also that those critical measures of species, abundance and extinction risk, habitat, extent and condition, including the protected sites, which is critical to that 30x30 target, are covered. 

Thank you. Happy to move on?

Yes.

Can I bring Huw in, then, please?

Thank you, Chair. Can I just do a quick follow-up on the questioning there? Do you see this as being one piece of legislation coming forward that encompasses the governance and the targets and the biodiversity and nature recovery, or two separate pieces? What are you thoughts at the moment?

One piece, I think, because they are closely related, in that the governance body will have a key role in scrutiny of the Government over nature recovery targets. It will need to have an equivalent role in terms of scrutiny around air quality targets and water quality as well, which do currently sit in different pieces of legislation, don't they? 

But your preference would be one, though, even it were to amend other pieces of legislation, such as the environment Act, such as the current air quality and soundscapes Bill going through: one piece of legislation that dealt with nature recovery and environmental governance.

Yes.

Brilliant. The second thing is, as a short follow-up: have you given any thought at all to—I know this seems a flip question—the question of the title of such a Bill? The reason that I ask this is because you can set it out in principles on the face of the Bill and so on, but if you call another Bill 'the environmental governance Bill', or this that and the other—. But if you call a Bill 'nature recovery', 'nature positive' or something of that ilk, it sets that out very clearly from the word go. So, have you—? Okay, sorry. If you haven't thought about that, maybe you would want to think about that in advocating how the Bill should be entitled. Right. Okay.

Can I turn to the issue of the biodiversity deep dive? How do you see your involvement in the implementation of the biodiversity deep dive recommendations? You have put some praise on the honesty and the analysis that came out of that deep dive. What about the implementation? Chloe.

Wales Environment Link is grateful to actually have been invited to sit on two expert groups to implement. So, we have been invited to sit on the nature recovery areas and other effective conservation measures group, and the monitoring group. So, we are grateful for that and look forward to being involved. 

Aside from that, there are various streams of work that are going to be happening to implement this. On the marine side, we have the Wales Coasts and Seas Partnership, which used to be WMAAG, and there is some important work happening through there, for example through the sustainable investment group, which is currently looking at a potential environmental enhancement fund. So, that sits neatly within the implementation. Do you have any thoughts on that?

We really welcome the deep dive as a process and the recommendations that have been clearly committed to. Lots of those were not brand new things. Some of them were more new, but some of them are really things that the Welsh Government and the nature conservation sector had acknowledged and highlighted as priorities—like making our protected sites network better, bigger and more joined up, and supporting the national parks to deliver more for nature.

As Chloe said, we have got those high-level recommendations, which need to be translated into detailed action plans. Those expert groups that Chloe mentioned, as well as existing groups, like the coasts and seas partnership and the nature recovery action plan implementation group, are also involved in that. WEL is part of those processes. I think that there is an emphasis in the deep dive commitments around this team Wales approach. I think that it's important that, across the sectors, we are contributing our expertise and wherewithal, and looking at where we can collaborate on actions.  

The deep dive is focused on 30x30. A lot of it goes kind of more broad than that, doesn't it? It looks at land management, marine management more broadly, and the need for nature targets and so on. The point of saying that is that it's going be close to what Wales's nature recovery action plan is. It's going to be a really key element of that.

Going back to the pathways report that WEL published and that we shared ahead of this session, a critical thing, I think, about the nature recovery action plan is having a costed action plan. In our pathways report, we've identified what we think are really key actions across habitats, and tried to think about what that means, what do you need to be able to do those, and there's room for discussion and debate around some of the figures, or even the 'how', but that's the sort of conversation we need. Because a lot of the deep dive commitments highlighted the need to properly resource NRW to do these functions of enforcement and of SSSI management and monitoring, for example. That's absolutely critical. Those are examples of actions in our report where part of the answer is increasing the workforce available to do that.

Just reflecting on NRW, I know they're shortly to launch—. No. I've missed it. In fact, it was yesterday, wasn't it, that they launched their corporate strategy. And the emphasis in that corporate strategy is 'come back to nature' in a way that's really welcome. There's a strong emphasis on protected areas and species and tackling pollution. But we identified that they need a boost in investment and a boost in teams to be able to enforce pollution regs and to be able to be on the ground providing monitoring of national parks—sorry, protected areas—and stuff. I was going to say the same applies to the national parks. I'm sure Jonathan will say more, but having the tools and means to deliver these ambitions is really critical.

We've discussed our pathways report with the Welsh Government, who have welcomed it, but said, 'You're looking at £160 million a year beyond—', even assuming the rural budget is transferred into these nature-positive actions. We haven't got that, but unless we've got a costed plan, which is a cross-Government plan—.That's the whole point of the CBD. It can't be seen as the biodiversity team, or the climate change department or even the climate change and rural affairs department. It's the whole of Government. What's the discussion there? How do we resource this? Some of it will have to come from private finance. Some of it, if we've got a costed plan, that helps us as charities to go and raise money against, but unless we're honest about what the need is we're not going to deliver it. So, that's a real critical message, I would say.

Thank you. If I can bring Jonathan in, please. 

Thanks. We were well involved, as designated landscapes, in the deep dive and we're active in most of the working groups. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of those groups. I think they could be really informative. It's definitely influenced our current management plan. So, we're starting to see how it translates into action now through the delivery of the management plan. I'd say it's particularly helping us to scale up our ambition towards both larger-scale and longer term impacts for nature recovery, helping us develop plans really at the scale of the park, and work with a wider range of partners, and particularly engage more strongly with the main landowners—land managers—who are the farmers and the farming community. 

Just two quick things to highlight, two challenges that we're facing: one is harnessing existing data to improve decision making. So, it's not really about generating new data, although people are always saying, 'We need more data'. But, actually, the truth is there's a lot of data already available. We need to make better use of it. We need to make better use of earth observation data, such as that that's developed by Living Wales in Aberystwyth. There are systems like ERAP. I was at an ERAP conference in Cardiff a couple of weeks ago. They've got great data sets, great survey systems. Maybe with a little bit of tweaking—. We don't need to reinvent the wheel there, but we need to deploy it to help inform nature recovery, because there's a really big evidence gap there that we're facing.

The second thing is that we still need resources, really, for developing these nature recovery plans at the scale that's needed, and plans that fit within the current legislation, because there's an awful lot of navigating the legislative landscape to get things done, and to start working with larger groupings of land managers within the designated landscapes to deliver nature recovery. That needs human resources, a lot of time. A lot of it is negotiation. We think of conservation as a science-driven endeavour, but the truth is it's a negotiation. You end up doing conservation where you can and where landowners and land managers are willing to do it with you. The evidence is useful, but you have to spend an awful a lot of time on that negotiation with land managers and stakeholders. I think that's where resources are really scarce, but it's that long-term process that underpins conservation.

Thank you, Jonathan. Can I bring Janet in, please?

Thank you, Chair. In terms of progress made by the national park authorities in implementing the deep dive, what do you think are the fundamental barriers for you to be able to progress on this?

I mentioned the two that were already in my mind. One of them is the data—not the data, the information, the analysis. We say, 'We need nature recovery'; we've set that as a target—nature recovery. What exactly is nature recovery? No two people are going to agree on that. We still need much stronger evidence to say, 'Well, where are we right now, and what are we actually going to fix first?' We've got really scarce resources, so we need to be really judicious in the way we use those resources and make smart decisions to use them where they can have the biggest impact. That definitely requires an injection of effort to use the data that's available. We can't wait to gather new data. We'll need to set up monitoring systems to track progress, that's what we were talking about in the previous question. But, right now, we need to understand more clearly what our starting point is.

And then, yes, I think the other one that I mentioned earlier in this consultation was the need to work with the primary land managers in the designated landscapes, so that's farmers, right? The reason I'm not there in person today, and I apologise for that, is that I was up until very late last night at a meeting with our farming stars in the national park, and it's really inspiring what farmers are doing right now. But they're still the minority, and there are things like the sustainable farming scheme looming on the horizon, but we're not quite sure when it's going to come and we're not quite sure how the designated landscapes can benefit from that, and yet, that seems to be such a huge opportunity. It'll be a really missed opportunity if we don't make sure that we've got the mechanisms and the resources in place to ensure that farmers within designated landscapes are facilitated to participate in that scheme, and also, that we identify the options in there that make the biggest contribution to nature recovery, because there's a very wide range of options that are going to be available. We know that from Glastir. You can identify those that will really contribute to the goals of the national park and then actively promote them to farmers and other land managers.

Do you believe that, since the announcement of the nature recovery emergency, Welsh Government are fundamentally increasing the—? Would you say we've got more data now than we had when it was announced? And, No. 2, are we, as a committee or Members of the Senedd, pulling out, 'Come on, what is this nature recovery?' Should we be scrutinising Government more for them to present to us exactly what they mean, as you rightly pointed out?

I can't really answer the first one well enough—. I'd say that data—. The obvious one is remote sensing data, satellite data, which is obviously improving all the time. Satellite technology is improving, and, obviously, the longer you have data, the better time series you have to look at. I don't think data is the barrier, if I'm honest. That's what I'm seeing right now. Actually, we're swamped with data, and if you add more data, you add more to what you're drowning in. What we need is analysis of data, and that's what I think is lacking.

There are universities doing this, but it's always very innovative, very cutting-edge. We need tried and tested analyses that we can deploy regularly to inform decision making. That's where I see there's a significant gap. We can spend a lot of time arguing and debating over what indicators or what methodologies, but, at a certain point in time, we've got to draw a line in the sand, saying, 'Well, we're going to go with this. It's the best we've got now, and we need to use it regularly, so that we can really track progress and inform decision making'.

Thank you. And then, Chloe, similar questions to you: what progress do you think has been made in terms of strategic planning for marine biodiversity—and hello, Chloe, by the way, the last time I saw you, we were on a beach doing a clean—in the context of the deep dive, and what are your barriers, Chloe?

Thanks, Janet. As you know, we see marine spatial planning in a strategic way as, really, the bedrock of effective marine management—forgive the pun. [Laughter.] And it was great to see it given prominence in the deep-dive recommendations. The sea has a carrying capacity, and as we develop more and it gets busier, there is a real risk that nature is going to be squeezed. And it is worth noting that, at the current rate of MCZ designation, compared to the rate and pace of development, that makes that risk of nature-squeeze even more of a risk.

So, we need marine planning to step in and safeguard some areas for nature. So, we're asking for marine planning to be more spatial, strategic and holistic. Spatial in terms of directing development to the least ecologically sensitive areas from the start, before we get into consenting issues down the line. It can benefit developers in that way, too. Holistic in terms of looking at cumulative impacts right from the start across sectors. And strategic in terms of giving different users of the sea planning weight, rather than the first-come, first served development-heavy system that we have right now. So, having that hierarchy of decision making to give different biodiversity targets as well as development targets prominence.

So, as you know, we've been calling this ask for a marine development plan, using the language that's used on land. Obviously, we don't want to copy the planning system on land, but there are some things there that we argue should be implemented in the marine realm, like development control policies.

Progress: so, we really welcomed the ministerial statement back in March to progress strategic spatial marine planning, and since then, Welsh Government have commenced a two-year mapping for sustainable development programme, so we really welcome this again. We've been involved in—. It's in very early stages, and we are involved in it through the marine planning stakeholder reference group. And I believe the idea is to build on the strategic resource and sector locational guidance work that's already happened, but to really look at that sort of issue of the carrying capacity of the sea and how we can weigh up and balance biodiversity with development. So, we really welcome that.

The key challenge and barrier, as you asked, Janet, in my view, is resource. It always comes back to resource, doesn't it? The marine planning team in Welsh Government is small compared to the enormity of what they have to do, so I would argue that it needs significant resourcing and investment. If we agree that the marine environment has a huge role to play in restoring Wales's biodiversity, and marine planning is the best way to get there, then, surely it makes sense that this needs a huge amount more resource. And also to be a shared priority across departments; this isn't just nature, this needs to cover fishing, development—so, more cohesion across Government as well, I would argue.

Thank you.

Just to—

No, Janet. Sorry, I'm afraid that Huw's indicated he has a supplementary.

Okay. I can't see that, you see.

No, no. If I can bring Huw in, please.

Very briefly. And don't give me a full answer; it would be good if you could write to us on it. But linked to do what you're saying, I think the committee would be interested in knowing from bolting down these issues on biodiversity, in marine mapping, what is the baseline that you start from, in terms of this classic conundrum of, 'Do we actually define what is good in terms of nature, as opposed to what it currently is?'

Secondly, on the mapping, I'm really interested in the quality of these areas and the diversity of the mapped areas, so as well as the balance of mapping for where development is appropriate, or where mixed uses can take place—fishing alongside conservation—are we going to see highly protected areas, and should we see them, and if so, where are they? We've only got one in Wales at the moment around Skomer, and that's not like a no-take zone around there. So, the management of those areas, but finally, the issue you mentioned, if you can write to us on, which is the issue of funding of the management plans for those areas, and whether you have some emerging ideas on how that could work, and whether there should be—we'll touch on this a bit later, Chair, but issues of contributions from developers, fisheries, et cetera, et cetera, in order to help fund the conservation of the assets that they rely on for sustainable exploitation. So, rather than answer it, I'm putting those to you.

Noted. Thanks.

Thank you. I'm also conscious that we have half an hour. If we can move on just to the next question, and then I'll return to you, Janet. If I can just bring Jenny in and then we'll return to Janet.

Thank you. I just want to move us on to regenerative land management, and obviously, we've got to align all our policies. So, in your paper, you say that all the aspirations and priorities for the natural environment can be met through the existing £300 million—and thank you for your detailed budget, if you like, of £273 million for environmental land management. Could you just say a little bit about the cost and scope of pilots that you want to promote at this stage?

I think the cost estimated for pilots is low because they're very focused, but the point is about developing, understanding ahead of the full uptake of the scheme about the role it can play, for example, in species recovery where you need a landscape-scale collaborative approach—how's that going to work? Those are still things I think that need to be developed. So, I think we would see those as landscape-scale projects that help to build evidence and build confidence in the scheme when it's rolled out.

Okay, but the land is exhausted. We're chucking more and more phosphorus on it in order to try and maintain productivity. What are the sort of pilots we need to do to demonstrate that there are alternative ways of producing food without wrecking the environment?

So, I think that's a really good point. I think that needs to be explored. I don't have a full answer, but I—

Okay, fine. I'm happy to receive that in writing. Can I just ask Jonathan though—? Obviously, the national parks have considerably more levers than outside national parks. Eighty per cent of your parks are managed by farmers. What are the reasons for why you already don't have all those farmers doing exemplary regenerative land management?

[Inaudible.]—respond to your previous question—

His microphone is—

Sorry, if I can just stop you for a moment. We've got a bit of distortion on your mike. Can you just please try and restart so that we can see—?

Yes. How am I now? Still the same?

It's a bit better, but there is a problem with the mike.

It's a bit better, but can you just try once more just to see and if not, we'll take a short technical break. 

All right. This is me trying again. Any better?

Yes, it seems to be working, thank you. It was obviously a small glitch. 

Keep going. So, you talked earlier about all these exemplary farmers you've just given awards to. How come it's not travelling to the rest of your farmers?

We had a very interesting discussion with farmers yesterday. We didn't give awards to them, but we had a consultation with our, if you like, farming stars yesterday—farmers who are doing interesting work and collaborating with the park.

In response to your first question, I think there's more and more understanding of the kinds of farming practices that are relatively more sympathetic to nature, more compatible with nature recovery: field management that requires less application of phosphate, for example; management practices that stabilise soil and avoid loss of soil and run-off into rivers; practices that are less harmful to biodiversity. I'm not an expert. We haven't discussed this as part of our consultation on designated landscapes for this particular piece of work, but it is something that we look at frequently. 

And I think the sustainable farming scheme—. And even Glastir now, there are plenty of options in there that—you look at that long range of options in 'Glastir Advanced', and think, 'Well, there's a whole bunch of things that we should've really promoted within the parks, and that would have had quite a big impact.' You say we have more levers than most places—I don't know if that's true, to be honest. We have the national park authority—that's the lever; that's the only real mechanism that we have. And each park does things slightly differently. I know Eryri and Pembrokeshire, for example, have done more with farmers than we have historically, and that's something that we're catching up on in Bannau Brycheiniog. But I think that's something that we have to take very seriously.

We have to have farm advisers as part of the team whose job is to liaise constantly with farmers. I think the innovative farmers that are right now really showing the way forward, doing the most innovative stuff, doing the stuff that you can see that it works—we have a job to generate evidence to show that that is making a meaningful contribution to nature recovery, which means different metrics from the usual conservation metrics, because it's a different kind of contribution to biodiversity, and then we have to do more to give confidence to the maybe quite large number of farmers that are maybe sitting on the fence, waiting to see if it works. Because every farmer we speak to, even our stars yesterday, they're like, 'The bottom line is we're businesses. We can't take practices on board, we can't do things, that are going to risk the future of our business.' And so, we have to show that those innovators are being successful and then we have to provide support, advice, incentives, to other farmers to follow in their footsteps. I think that we're in a good place now to do that, but I'm not sure that the national parks do, or the designated landscapes do, actually have the levers, and I think we need to get those levers. I think if we got them, that would be really transformative.

Thank you.

We do urgently need this evidence, because the sustainable farming scheme—we've just got to make sure we get it right in terms of biodiversity. So, if there's anything more that you're able to provide us with in written evidence subsequently, that would be useful.

Thank you very much. If I can move on, Janet, we're back to you, please.

Thank you, Chair. How do you think—? This is to everybody. How do you feel the momentum can be kept, following the deep-dive work, in terms of its implementation, and how would the panel like to see the nature recovery action plan revised following the COP15 agreements?

Thank you. Who would like to go first, here? Annie.

I'm happy to. Thank you. I'm just going to be cheeky and say I completely agree, Jenny, that there's a long way to go in developing the SFS. There's a sort of verbal commitment and an undertaking to develop the explanatory notes to emphasise that nature restoration is one of the objectives embedded in this, so the 10 per cent proposal for semi-natural habitats on farms is a really positive contribution at the landscape scale, to helping those common species remain common and increase—you know, bend that curve. But looking at the role of the scheme in supporting farmers to deliver species recovery, protected areas, objectives, et cetera, is still to be done.

Chair, can I just ask Annie—? I just want to be frank and clear on this. The SFS, following the commitments that the Minister has given about what will follow in regulations and the explanatory memorandum, would you describe this as—and I am putting the words in your mouth, but you can rephrase it anyway—it's make or break; if we get the SFS wrong, we are screwed on biodiversity?

Absolutely. It's the biggest—. If the Welsh Government is going to commit, as it has, by signing up to COP15 to turn around biodiversity decline, it's the biggest land use in Wales, the main driver of biodiversity loss over the decades.

Thanks.

Thank you.

The NRAP—thank you, Janet, for the question. Obviously, there's a new framework of targets and a mission, so there will be a need to update the NRAP, because that's our formal plan under the COP. I think the critical difference we need to see from last time is that, as I said before, it needs to be a costed plan that is seen as a plan for the whole Government. I don't think that—. In spite of having, in previous iterations, recognised that different departments need to act to integrate biodiversity into different things, I don't think it has previously been embraced as a plan for Government and, 'How can we afford this? How are we going to do this?' If you look—. Going back to our pathways report, it's clear from all of those actions that there are multiple benefits to doing this. Restoring nature means we've got nature-based solutions to help us adapt to climate change, to help reduce our emissions, to make our communities healthier et cetera, et cetera. There are multiple benefits, so it needs to be a cross-Government discussion, and there have been really exciting discussions in recent months about the concept of a nature service for Wales, linking the need to restore nature, which needs a workforce to do it, right, with developing jobs and skills in the sector. So, I think there are really exciting discussions to be had there. So, that would be my main—. That would be my main plug.

Thank you very much. Can I bring in Jonathan, and then Chloe?

Thanks again. Just in response to the question I think Mark raised then, regarding biodiversity, nature recovery and the sustainable farming scheme, you've got to remember that there are two distinct ways that farming contributes to nature recovery. Habitat protection on farms, essentially taking land out of farming, is really important—there's no doubt about that. But there's also a contribution to be made through sustainable farming practices that protect biodiversity through farming, on the farm, in the fields, in the soil. I think that allows us to have quite a significant impact on nature recovery at a really substantial scale. If you think of farming practices that stabilise soil or protect water quality, store carbon, they're significant and they're achievable on a big scale, but I think they're also important—. I was really struck last night with how distressed the farming community is at the way they're being portrayed, as people become more environmentally conscious—you know, 'Farmers are really the bad guys here.' And farmers are doing fantastic things and are more in tune with nature, often, than anybody else, and there's a real risk of losing them, the way conversations are going right now, and I think that that focus on biodiversity that is protected through sustainable farming is the entry point to the conversation with farmers. They know this. They know this better than anybody. They also know when they're adopting practices that are undermining the resilience of farming by destroying nature on farms, and I think if we can really get that into the conversation and show how things like regenerative farming contribute to our environmental goals, then we unlock that partnership.

Thank you. Chloe.

I'll be concise, because I know we're getting short on time. NRAP—the big thing here is costed, and our pathways report gives a start to how to do that. I'd also add it's quite light on marine detail, and I know this has been discussed before, but it's increasingly important that we look particularly at the coastal zone, and the overlap there.

Momentum—obviously, the key thing here is the targets. In the paper, we'd urge that that's brought forward as soon as possible in the bit with the Bill. But I'd also say there are things that we don't have to wait for to do. We can do some things right now, and, in the marine realm, I've talked about planning, but I'd also mention the marine conservation zone designation. That's ready to go. We're in the pre-consultation phase at the moment, which we're involved in. So, we'd urge that that progresses quickly.

I'd also here mention the assessing Welsh fisheries activities work, which I know the committee is aware of. I know that we're waiting for the assessments to be completed there, but I'd argue that, actually, the high-risk assessments have been completed already, and we could have a consultation on that straight away without waiting for all the assessments to be completed. I'll leave it there, so we can continue.

Thank you very much. I'm very keen that we do get to Delyth Jewell's questions. Can I ask that the next few questions are brief, and also if I can also ask for brevity with responses? Can I turn now, please, to Huw?

Yes, thanks, Chair. So, could I ask to what extent the nature networks fund is delivering towards the resilience of the national site network, and whether that national site network looks similar in strength to the Natura 2000 network?

So, I think there might be two questions in that. So, the success of the nature networks fund in helping to build that resilience—I think it's early days. We've seen some big projects funded, which is great. I think commitments to multi-year funding and to targeting funding around strengthening those networks and addressing issues with management of protected areas as kind of key to those networks are positive, and I know that part of the allocation of that has been for NRW to actually set up management agreements, which is badly needed. So, I'd say that's positive, but I don't think we've had long enough to see results or to see how it's working.

On the national sites network, I don't have any evidence of weakening of approach. I would say that what we specifically don't have is a kind of independent environmental governance that actually is there to provide challenge or to address concerns if there were to be cases where that approach did seem to be weakening or the legislation were not being robustly applied. But Welsh Government has repeatedly stated its commitment to upholding standards, so I have no impression that that has changed.

Thank you. Jenny, is it okay if we move on?

Yes. I wanted to pursue how public and private investment can be refocused following the COP15 agreement. On the one hand, Jonathan, you're arguing that more money should be spent around designated landscapes, because you argue that they're better able to contribute to nature recovery, but on the other hand there are social justice issues that most of the population doesn't live in areas around national parks, and they too need to see nature recovery. So, I think there's a tension there around that. So, perhaps I could come to you first, Jonathan.

Yes. I appreciate that this is a massive question, and that we are quite short on time as well—

Okay, all right. But I want to challenge you on this idea that designated landscape areas should get more money than other areas.

Jonathan.

Yes. Well, I think the designated landscapes are just ideally placed to really be the exemplars; I don't think the long-term goal is to abandon other areas outside of designated landscapes. But they have an immensely high amenity value. We have 5 million visitors a year to Bannau Brycheiniog alone; we have many of the most deprived areas of Wales on our doorstep, and provide really important access to nature, and we know the mental health benefits that provides. So, I think there are many reasons. Like you say, it's a really big discussion; I can't really do justice to it here.

Okay. Fair enough.

But I would like—. Could I answer the first part of your question? Very briefly, I think that an important thing related to this is using public finance to unlock the private finance, and one way we can do that is to get better cost-benefit analysis and a better understanding of the investment pathways that link sustainable management of land and water with all of this multitude of benefits—climate benefits, biodiversity benefits, benefits to water quality and water supply, reduction in drought and flood risk. These all come from the same set of interventions with the same set of land managers, and that creates a complexity in connecting private investors who might be interested in one or other of those services with groupings of land managers that can provide those services. So, you need these aggregators. So, I think that's where public money could be really well used, to facilitate that private investment.

Okay. Clearly, corporate Britain probably wants to be seen to be doing the right thing by nature—this is a cuddly thing these days. So, how do we ensure that—? Whether it's for restitution for damaging things they're doing elsewhere, how do we get better at getting private investment into nature recovery?

I don't think that offset is the only solution here. An obvious starting point is looking at a public service like water supply. So, we already have the megacatchment project with Dŵr Cymru. Dŵr Cymru recognises that it gets more than 50 per cent of all of its water from rain that falls in y Bannau. The provision of water, the quality of the water, is hugely important, and I think that there are all sorts of ways that we could look at connecting beneficiaries and investors with the protection of those services. But my point is that the individual services don't always sell it. The value—the contribution to climate change mitigation or the contribution to water on its own might not stand up, but when you stack up all these services, which come as a suite from the same package of intervention with the landscape, they start to become more attractive.

Okay. Thank you. And Annie, briefly.

I agree with that. I think that water companies have a really key role. And the peatland code and other carbon-based codes, where you can deliver those with built-in biodiversity standards—and that's where the Government could intervene and help to create standards and expectations—and where companies might meet corporate responsibility goals and things by providing biodiversity-rich peatland, rather than only doing the minimum to store the carbon, if you see what I mean. And the RSPB has experience, through projects, which I'll share in a briefing after the session.

But you mentioned offsets, and I agree, that's not what it's all about. We have recently had a planning policy consultation, looking at the issue of net benefit for biodiversity through planning, through development and, just very briefly, our feedback to that was positive—that that should be part of the system. We feel there is a need for clarity in approach, so some sort of metric, something that makes it understandable and manageable for developers. But also, probably, legislation that underpins it, because it feels like placing all the weight on planning policy and planning officers to implement is challenging and it's not necessarily going to drive the same consistency.

Thank you. Chloe, do you have any brief comments?

Yes. Annie's said a lot of what I was going to say, but, just very briefly, Jenny, you alluded to the danger of greenwashing there, and I think that's something we really need to keep in mind. I mentioned it earlier, but I'd point, as an example of the way we need to look at this, to the work that the Wales Coasts and Seas Partnership are doing on setting up an environmental enhancement fund to enable, for example, developers to pay into a fund that would then independently administer grants, for example, through the Wales Council for Voluntary Action, to then direct funds through an evidence hierarchy into evidence collection or other needs for the environment. Scotland has an equivalent—the Scottish marine environmental enhancement fund.

I'd then, really quickly as well, just bring this back to marine planning, predictably. It's things like this that will provide certainty for investors, which is needed, and that's an example of the public investment, then, triggering private investment.

Thank you.

Thank you. May I ask, would the panellists—are you able to stay an additional five minutes, just since we were a little late starting? Is that okay, just so we can try and get through the rest of the questions? Thank you very much. Can I just turn briefly to Joyce for your question and then I'll bring in Delyth? 

Okay. Do you think that the environment and rural affairs monitoring and modelling programme is fit for purpose in terms of monitoring biodiversity and also understanding the drivers?

I think, to be as brief as possible, it's a good programme, but there are gaps. So, just thinking of monitoring Glastir as an example, the focus for biodiversity made use of data collected from standard species surveys like the breeding bird survey, which are reliably carried out by thousands of volunteers, and are a reliable data source. They tell us about common species in the countryside, whereas Glastir, some of the options that farmers could take up were about specific species that were rare and vulnerable, like lapwing on farms, for example, and the monitoring and reporting didn't address whether those species particularly were being helped by the scheme. So, I think that there's a really important point that monitoring in terms of species recovery needs to be built into where the sustainable farming scheme is going—sort of into the collaborative landscape-scale levels, and looking at key issues like species recovery. Monitoring needs to be built into that, because it doesn't happen automatically. These species are too rare to be addressed through those widespread schemes. Also, it doesn't do the protected sites monitoring—that's what NRW does, and that's very under-resourced. We've seen the first report in 15 years recently with a lot of gaps in knowledge, so that needs to be better resourced and delivered. 

And also, just to reflect, one of the groups under the deep dive is on monitoring and how we do it. We're looking at understanding what's going on in bigger areas. We've got about 10 per cent protected areas on land at the moment. Thirty per cent is a massive change, however that's—. Some more designated sites, some other effective area-based measures that could come from this nature-based solutions angle. But we need to understand how to monitor how habitats are improving on a bigger scale over time—at what point do you need to monitor species versus water table depth, that sort of thing. There are lots of different elements to that. So, that's an important area that's developing.  

Thank you. I can see Jonathan has indicated. If I can bring you in. 

Thanks. Yes, I'm there. I endorse everything that Annie said there, and the only other addition would be to say that what the environment and rural affairs monitoring and modelling programme is currently producing isn't tailored for designated landscapes, but it could be. We just need to make sure that we get whatever tweaks in the necessary methodology, and a willingness to do the analyses that are required for us. So, it was set up to monitor Glastir. It produces and generates a lot of data, but it's the way that data is interpreted and analysed that helps us to make decisions. So, since it's there, as I said earlier, I wouldn't necessarily reinvent the wheel, but it's certainly a platform that could be built on. 

Thank you very much. 

Diolch, Cadeirydd. I wanted to ask you about how the Environment (Wales) Act 2016 is being implemented, and specifically first, please, section 6 of that, which requires public authorities to maintain and enhance biodiversity to promote ecosystem resilience. Do you think that that is being done sufficiently? If not, how could that be improved, please?  

Diolch, Delyth. Shall I start with that? I can't comment on how many reports have been filed or how effective the individual actions are. I think the main thing I wanted to say, really, was that section 6 is an important duty, but it's the context it sits within that is limiting. I think Welsh Government is trying to make people think of that as a bigger duty than, 'Oh, we'll put up some bird boxes here, or whatever', you know, 'How do we integrate biodiversity and build resilience in our functions?' But it's not a massively strong or exacting duty. 

So, just a reflection on the—. The Welsh Government's section 6 report, for example, does report on a load of positive actions that are important for biodiversity, but it doesn't give a measure of how they're tackling the drivers of loss, what state things are in, or whether they are the absolute priorities. So, I think the biggest thing, again, comes back to the need to think about what 'good' looks like, what do we need to do by when, and that target framework that will give a critical lens then for Government to think about whether it's doing enough, but also whether it’s pulling all the levers to support, require and enable other bodies to deliver all that’s needed.

Thank you. Chloe, did you want to come in?

A lot of what Annie’s said, to be honest. The one thing I’d add is, as far as I’m aware, the Environment (Wales) Act hasn’t been subject to post-legislative scrutiny, and that could potentially be something to look at here in terms of the implementation of section 6. I’ll leave it there.

Always helpful to have a recommendation for the committee as well. Thank you. Delyth, do you have a short question?

I think that Jonathan—

Oh, sorry—Jonathan's raised his hand. Apologies. Jonathan.

Yes, I raised it belatedly. But, only very briefly, several points were raised in the consultations with the designated landscapes about this conversation today around policy alignment, and simplifying processes, NRW's role in consenting work, having more of a collegiate relationship where organisations that have a shared goal can fast-track actions, and also look at national and local level policy clashes. There are a whole bunch that were brought to my attention. I won't go into them here, but it's really worth having a review nationally of legislation, where they actually conflict, because that throws up many barriers to progress.

Thank you. And the—

Delyth, apologies—Annie has indicated that she wants to come back in.

I'm so sorry, Delyth. I wanted to really endorse that point. Actually, that’s something I’ve been desperate to make sure I get in. These conflicts do exist. We talk about obvious ones between development and nature protection, but in other sorts of land management, like woodland planting, which is driven by targets, woodland management, the way we deploy nature-based solutions, et cetera—there are risks to biodiversity delivery inherent in these things as well, and a lack of join-up, really. If these are all priorities, how do we do it all effectively rather than just always prioritising the one we’re most interested in? I think that is a really critical thing that this whole process—talking about the nature recovery action plan and the deep dive, et cetera—needs to wrestle with. 

Thank you very much. I'm afraid, Delyth, we're into our final two minutes here now. Would you be happy, if we do have remaining questions—I know you've also submitted evidence—if we were to write to you for some additional information? Could I just ask—? Annie, you mentioned you were keen to mention that. I'm just going to give each of you, perhaps, an opportunity if there's anything you want to emphasise to us very briefly at the end now. If I start with you, Chloe—if there are any thoughts you want to leave us with this morning. 

Unsurprisingly, my main ask is more resource for marine planning. That's the No. 1 thing we need to do for the marine environment, in our view, at the moment. As I said, quality not quantity for marine protected areas. I mentioned assessing Welsh fishing activities. I think we can get a consultation out on the high-risk assessments before finishing all the assessments. New marine conservation zones—I'm pleased that that's happening, and would emphasise that we need to get that done. And management measures, effective management measures, off the bat with those. There's no point designating new ones without getting the management measures in place from the beginning.

And aside from that, a nature-positive Bill—urgent legislation needed, please. A costed NRAP, which Annie mentioned. Let's look at different financial models. We're looking at this in marine, and that can potentially be replicated elsewhere. And as I said at the beginning, which we haven't really talked about, but I think it's really important: let's remember people. They're the people who are going to be implementing all this. I know there has been discussion about farmers, there are also fishers, and I think that's extremely important. I'll leave it there. 

Thank you. Jonathan.

Yes, I assume you'll have received the note that we put together. 

Yes. 

We made 11 recommendations in it. I don't want to repeat those. I do hope you'll get a chance to read it. But yes, one headline message from us would be, really, don't miss this opportunity with the sustainable farming scheme. Use the designated landscapes as an opportunity, almost like a—everyone hates the word 'laboratory'—as a laboratory where we can really go above and beyond, both with delivering the sustainable farming scheme and, in parallel with that, implementing measures that are even more ambitious, because that will pave the way for whatever comes after the sustainable farming scheme.

Thank you. Annie.

Thank you. So, trying not to repeat what people have said and just extending on my original point, a strategic approach around land use and how we are dealing with those priorities—peatland, woodland, species recovery, et cetera—is really important. A costed cross-Government nature recovery action plan and it has to be owned by the whole of Government, not only the environment department. Then, yes, it's urgent that we get progress on legislation and legally binding targets and don't extend the process over more years. We have to act swiftly and leave a really strong legacy from this Senedd, which declared a nature emergency, to make sure that we are delivering on that global agreement. 

Hi. My name's Tim Pagella. I'm an agroforestry researcher at Bangor University. 

I'm Katie Medcalf. I'm environment director of Environment Systems, which is a consultancy that looks at environment and agriculture, considering how we can use data and modelling and mapping to the best effort of Wales.  

My name is Richard Unsworth. I'm associate professor at Swansea University and also chief scientific officer at Project Seagrass, and my background is marine ecology and restoration. 

The COP agreement, I think, has—as with any international agreement—many vagarities, and it provides a lot of room for interpretation by individual nations as to what they will actually conduct. As we know with environmental management around the world, it's all very well creating designations, rules and regulations, and policy around that if you actually follow those rules and you follow them through. But, as we well know, in the UK and globally, and specifically in Wales, we have designations that are very good, but they're not adhered to. They're not adhered to, they're not invested in, they're not resulting in environmental improvement. So, signing up to the COP agreement is fantastic, it's great to see that ambition, but, in terms of our commitment as a Welsh nation, we need to think about realistic conservation goals from a marine and a terrestrial perspective. When we say we're going to protect something, we need to protect that, enhance it and improve it and not just think about it as a headline figure, but actually transferring those goals into reality. As a nation, our history of conservation doesn't suggest that we're going to turn those goals into a reality, and that's what we really need to do. That's bigger than anything.

Thank you. The same question to Katie, then, please.

Because our system in Wales is so degraded, and because climate change is happening at such a fast rate, I echo Richard's point in that we need to protect and enhance the best of what we have. So, we need to ensure that our protected sites are in good ecological condition and actually have the ability to manage, maintain and monitor those into the future, as well as the 30x30 target, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

With about 10 per cent protected at the moment, it's going to be a big ask, and I think we need to take a holistic look at it. It's not just Government's responsibility, but it's a whole-society responsibility. It would be great if the Government did bits that industry weren't going to do. So, industry is picking up biodiversity and carbon credits, and, incidentally, they cannot be separate. They've got to be both. If you're planting for carbon, it should be expected that you would be planting for biodiversity, rather than big areas of forest, which is a commercial crop, getting funding. We need to make sure that they too join together.

I think it's really important that the environment is placed at the forefront of the design process in terms of development, and not seen as an add-on or something to be mitigated against. At the moment, people do their design and then they come in and do the environmental impact assessment, the environmental bit, and they say, 'Oh no, we've got some bats, we'll have to mitigate'. No, the environment can give us things. If you put it at the forefront of the design process, you can get a hedgerow that you leave in place to be stopping flooding a street below. There are things that we can do at that level. So, I wholeheartedly endorse the COP15, but I think we need to look very much wider at how we as Wales as a whole meet it.

Thank you. As a follow-up to that, you talk about meeting it, do you think we should be going beyond it? Is there potential for that?

I think we've got a real challenge, because, in effect, we've got, perhaps, six years after this year goes past to meet a really ambitious target. I think it would be, in a way, good, to set our sights beyond it, but I think, more importantly, we have to look at the target in a different way and we have to think how we can meet—how can we use an outcomes approach, how can we use every creative way of doing it to get there? In standard sort of monitoring and evaluation terms, you get the data, then you get the information, then you get the outputs and that's where we stop at the moment; we stop at outputs. We stop at, 'We've designated this many sites'. But in this new ambition, we've got to move to outcomes: 'It worked, it didn't work, why didn't it work,' we've got to go. And then, the impact: Wales is now a less degraded country.

Thank you. And Joyce has a further—

I raised the issue in Plenary about the way that planning works at the moment, and if there's a site going to be developed, the first thing they do is come in, bulldoze it and take everything out. And I mentioned hedges, particularly, so I'm keen to ask you the question: is it time now to look at what's there, in situ, as a planning gain? We know about planning gains, 106s, but I'm not aware that they actually apply to the environmental enhancement, or degradation. Would that be a way forward in this area?

I think it's essential, Joyce. I think. For so long, the environment's been regarded as a pain, something to be mitigated against, and people haven't realised the value of it. I think the biodiversity benefit, rules coming out of NRW, and the diversity, extent, condition, connectivity and aspects approach, where they're suggesting that you need professional opinion about the environment, are great, but we also need to embed it right at the start of the EIA process, right at the design stage. So, interestingly enough, across the border, we're working with colleagues to embed ecosystem services and biodiversity right at the beginning, and that's having positive benefits for the design, particularly when we model climate change as well. So, we know this valley's going to be much wetter, or this plain is going to be much drier, so designing for what we've got now is no use.

Can I ask, could you send us some of that?

Yes.

Thank you very much. Tim, if I can ask you the initial question then.

Yes, okay. I think the way that I'd frame it is—I agree with what Katie was saying in that, in terms of our immediate goals, it's ambitious enough. I think a theme you might hear from me a lot today is about delivery, and I think part of the challenge with what we've been presented there is how we prioritise those goals in relation to what activity we carry out here in Wales, and I think that's always—. So, in some senses, it's a scaling challenge; it's how we take a very broad, global-level aspiration and scale it down to something that we can deliver here in Wales, and actually look at how we—again, echoing what Katie was saying—how we then operationalise that so that we actually deliver outcomes for those things.

So, in my particular background, I'm particularly focused on trees, and I guess looking at the broader farmed landscape and where the gains that we can make there. I'm an agroforester, I'm really interested in looking at hedgerows and trees and tree cover. There are aspirations within those agreements around shifts to agroecology, and again, that's echoed within some of our farming community. And it's really just about how we, I guess, in some senses, capture the energy here in Wales, and the direction of travel so that we can make those gains immediately and prioritise action to get to those outcomes that we want to achieve.

So, I think in answer to your basic question, I think, yes, for the time being, they are. They're good, and they're possibly even beyond our capacity to deliver at present.

Thank you. What do you think we should be focused on, then, in terms of being able to implement those? What are some of the barriers, then, that you think we need to overcome?

Okay. I did allude to this in my paper, and you'll have to forgive me, because obviously I'm taking my particular perspective on this, so I'm not a legislation expert. I come from a development background. A lot of the work I do in Africa is around big-scale restoration projects, so, to me, the changes that we need to make are on the ground or in the sea, but I'll speak to the ground, because that's what I know best. A lot of this is about hearts and minds, and getting people on board if we want—. So, the real change will happen within the farming community. The real changes will be happening on the ground. And I see Government and local institutions playing a really valuable role in supporting that. In both cases, we need to see behaviour change to adapt to new ways of working, and I think we're slow to that. And that's where I see some of the major barriers. So, I think there are things that we do here in Wales that are actually world-class—we're very good. Some of the monitoring questions that might come up later—we're excellent at that. But there are things that we don't monitor at all, like behaviour change. Find me any data on how our farmers are behaving and what’s guiding their current thinking. You’ll hear it from the unions and you’ll here it vocally from people, but actually on the ground, we don’t have good data. There’s a lot of energy around tree planting, for example, but I don’t see that captured anywhere, and we need to be able to build on that energy in order to get more trees in the ground if that’s our aspiration, and make sure we don’t put trees in the wrong place.

Thank you, that's really helpful. Joyce, can we bring you in?

I'm going to talk about nature recovery targets and how nature positive should be represented in Welsh legislation.

I feel that we need clearer targets, because it’s only when you start to get those clear lines in the sand that people are working towards, then it creates a genuine imperative to act and to do things. It’s very difficult, based on current knowledge, to specifically say, in the ocean, that we should plant x amount of saltmarsh or seagrass or kelp or oysters, but we need to create some sort of realistic target that both brings investment into it and also helps actors on the ground to deliver things. And once you’ve got an overall target then there’s an imperative for the licensing to assist for stakeholders and organisations involved to make a commitment to support that project.

At the moment, nature recovery in Wales, particularly from an ocean perspective, is a bottom-up process. And it’s great because of that and, as an organisation, I’m very much involved with that bottom-up approach. But I don’t feel that the Government, with the regulators in NRW, have the resources to help drive that from a top-down perspective as well. So, I think it needs to meet, in terms of improving, in the middle. And having those targets means that, actually, it creates an imperative upon Natural Resources Wales to actually achieve and deliver on particular elements, which they’re not doing. And that doesn’t mean it’s all about the existing pot of money that is present within Natural Resources Wales, but it’s also to think about external funding that can actually support that vision. We, as an organisation, are tapping into that interest of philanthropy of business to want to invest. And I think, if Government bought into that vision, there’d be a much more realistic vision of delivering nature recovery.

Who would like to come in? Katie or Tim?

I'm not an expert in legislation, so I make that caveat right at the beginning. But I think the thing for me, again—and this is a key message that I was trying to communicate with the evidence I provided—is also just about the importance of understanding the context. And with things like legislation and with things like Government guidance, we have a tendency towards being generic and providing Welsh-level legislation for this, when a lot of what we’re doing, within Wales, will be incredibly context-sensitive. We need to be very careful, when creating prescriptive legislation, that we are cognisant of that diversity. I sometimes think that we simplify things. But I would immediately caution that because I’m not a legislation expert—that's just my immediate response to that one. 

Thank you. And Katie.

I think, as well as the need to mainstream nature protection and make it everybody's business, we need to actually consider nature-based solutions within the nature recovery target and applaud and celebrate them where they happen. And they need to be monitored and planned and put in the right place. Do you need an example of what I'm talking about? So, if you've got, like we have in many counties in Wales, a river system that's suffering from phosphorus pollution, you can plant hedgerows across slopes where people are putting fertiliser on them, and the roots of the hedgerows take up the phosphorus, and you can plant reed beds, which will also absorb the phosphorus, so that you've got a very much reduced or nil problem when it gets to the river. These are solutions that people are already thinking about how to implement in the landscape. We need to use the nature recovery targets to include this. It needs to be inclusive. And then I would really echo Tim's point on making sure that nature recovery is both at the all-of-Wales scale, because we definitely need all-of-Wales targets, but then at the local authority, which it undoubtedly does cover, but then at the very minor level as well—you know, the hill part of a farm, or maybe even a common in a city. All of these need to have the support of the nature recovery targets. I think it would be really good to celebrate these different scales, and maybe have an award system or work out some way of the Welsh Government supporting, as well as legislation, in leading the way in behaviour, and just communication and celebrating things. Don't belittle the chance of a gold award for the best nature-based solution or the best thing put in a park. These things can be very powerful.

Thank you. Richard.

I just wanted to say, adding to the comments about nature recovery targets, that currently, we have a large area of our coastal sea in Wales held within two particular designations—special areas of conservation and also the intertidal under-SSSI orders. Within their remit, they don't really prescribe for biodiversity improvement. There is no real strong targets or narrative within those designations to push restoration. There are individual officers within those areas that have picked up the vision to try and improve, but it's not within their set-up and their designation to really think about that. In many ways, they're also looking back to false baselines—'A moment in 1995 when we assessed something'—and that moment in 1995 is frankly not a great moment to look at the world from. Although, yes, there are these concerns and hesitations around any level of target, something needs to change within those designations, whether it is a target or a vision, but we need to stop looking back to baselines that are unsuitable and think about real ambition that can actually take us towards these 30x30 goals, because looking back at a baseline is not that.

Thank you. Katie.

Just one more idea I had that might do something, and that's ensuring that environmental accounts are part of the Welsh Government account books. Are they at the moment? If they are, I apologise. Environmental accounts consider the environment in an equal way, as a balance sheet. The only danger here is that the environment needs to be valued as an asset, rather than as a commercial trading. But actually, having the accounts in numerical form against the other accounts gives people who have no environmental understanding a way of realising what's happening and realising what's going on with the targets, and might then help us spread the word and get the environment to be everybody's business.

Thank you. I know Janet was keen to come in with a supplementary here, and then I'll return to Joyce.

We've heard, in terms of Welsh legislation and these nature targets and everything—. This morning, we took evidence, and it was whether we're taking too much data, or not enough. Do you believe that we've taken more data in since the nature recovery emergency was announced? And, as was also stressed, and it's something I agree with, what does nature recovery look like? What will legislation look like? Do we really understand, and do Welsh Government know, what parameters they're going to be working within?

That's quite a massive question.

Always.

I'm just going to talk about restoration, because I do quite a bit of that, and I think, even with the way that it was framed in the current legislation, we talk about conservation goals, nature goals, ecosystem service provision. So, these are actually different targets, and trying to achieve ecosystem service outcomes or nature benefits to people, which is stipulated in the COP agreements, does mean that we have to make some decisions around the functionality that different types of restoration can deliver. We talk in Wales about the intrinsic value of nature, but there are certain types of actions—I'm thinking about tree cover, for example—where the placement and the type of trees that you're working with deliver different types of public good and different types of benefits. So, to me, we have to be very clear. And, again, this goes back to what I was saying earlier about context and context sensitivity. If you're working with an ecosystem services framework, then the units of ecosystem services are human well-being. So, we need to be thinking very carefully about where the need for that is, in terms of our human well-being needs within Wales, and make sure that, where we're carrying out restoration action, we are delivering the right type of change to feed into those deliverables.

We talk about data, and we've got tonnes of certain types of data, and we have fundamental problems with having others. So, well-being metrics, for example, are very challenging to gather, and being able to link the placement of trees or woodlands here for certain types of ecosystems is challenging. It's academically challenging. And I think we need to be a little bit humble about that, or show some humility. But I don't think science has all the answers, and we're working, almost in all cases, in some senses, in very data-sparse environments, and my personal preference is that we accept that and proceed on a learning basis where we experiment and document what works well, and build up a best practice. But I don't think we have it right now, and I think anybody who suggests that we do is, in my opinion, probably—. Well, I could probably have a reasonable argument with them.

Thank you. Richard or Katie, do you have anything to add?

Yes, I can add in. I completely agree with Tim's view that we're working in a data-limited environment. From a marine perspective, that is way worse than the terrestrial environment. We don't know where habitats exist. They're not well mapped. There are fundamental gaps in just the basic knowledge of how deep is the ocean in particular areas. There's a lot of basic information we just don't have at any realistic scale. So, making decisions at a large scale is challenging. I do think we need to improve that, but we also need to be open minded to other sources of information. The use of local ecological knowledge is a particular example of that. As an organisation, we've benefited from that. We've just come back from some surveys of seagrass restoration we're doing in north Wales, and the site that is most successful is based on information from a councillor, Iwan Edgar, from Pwllheli. His local ecological knowledge pointed us in that direction. There's a lot to be seen from looking beyond quantitative scientific data to incorporate other understanding that exists there. But, certainly, we need to improve our data use and collection in the marine environment, because we struggle. There are huge gaps.

Thank you. Katie.

I think people, in general, do know what good ecological condition should be, because it's been well set out, and the biodiversity deep-dive recommendations are a good vision, but it's a very general vision, and, again, I think we need to do this scaled vision—different things for different people. Interestingly enough, we've worked on a project in Scotland where data that's been stuck in an internal system has been digitised and made available and sorted out using the new artificial intelligence technology that's coming on, and I think there's a challenge here. Welsh Government could support such innovative things. For years and years, we've known that there's environmental data locked up in organisations like the BSBI—the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland. Sorry, I'm so used to the acronyms that it's really hard to remember them. They've got lots of excellent records about keystone species that indicate environmental health, but they can't release them because they've been gathered under a confidentiality licence. This isn't something that could be easily solved, because the National Biodiversity Network and the record centres have been trying to solve it for years, but is it a way that an innovation grant, for innovative solutions to look at these problems, might be issued? Is there a way to go beyond what we normally think of as the environment's parameters, and into other people's parameters, to solve some of these problems and help us realise our vision? I don't know if I've answered your question. 

Thank you. Joyce or Janet, do you have any follow-up on this section before we move on?

Are there any lessons from England in terms of bringing forward domestic biodiversity targets? Indeed, are there any lessons we could learn from England on this?

Katie's keen to come in first.

Everybody in England loves biodiversity net gain because it's got a tool, and you can sit down on your planning site and you can work out whether you've got biodiversity net gain or not. That's great in a way, but there is a real danger that it's looking at biodiversity in the old-school way, as something to be mitigated, and I think NRW's aspirations to bring this DECCA framework—diversity, extent, condition, connectedness and resilience—through would actually put Wales in the leadership role, but in order for it to work we must have good guidance; we must have best practice. People, especially in development and planning, can't work off just professional opinion with nothing to back it up. So, I think, yes, we can take the best of England, but we can also do one better. I do think it's really interesting to see whether the outcomes-based approach of the planning legislation in England at the moment comes to fruition, and if that is a positive, because it's encouraging good design, or if it is perhaps a negative.

Before I bring you in, Richard—I know you've indicated—Janet just had a supplementary, I think.

Yes, and thank you, Dr Katie, because you brought up the agency in NRW, and my question to you is—. We know how overstretched NRW is, they have huge responsibilities and a very high lack of staff, if you like, and capacity. Do you think that NRW's aspiration is deliverable in terms of the resources required?

No. They need more resource. Their aspirations and what their job remit is is great, but they have such big workloads that they're not able to engage early enough in the process to ensure these things happen. I think, again, maybe we need to start looking outside the box, maybe we need to be looking at the professional biodiversity organisations in Wales. The Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management love writing guidance. Maybe we could start involving others in helping move these things forward quicker.

Thank you. And thanks for your patience, Richard—if I can bring you in.

I just wanted to go back the whole concept of a nature recovery in the ocean, which is a difficult thing for most people to imagine. I think that's the challenge with ocean conservation. People can understand a forest being planted and that we can bring back meadows and terrestrial biodiversity. They understand it. But I think the challenge here is that the link is very different where people don't really understand what it takes to bring back an oyster reef. Once upon a time, there were 3,000 people going out on a boat every day in Swansea bay, just to collect oysters, and that no longer exists. We had the herrings of the Llŷn peninsula being consumed by the hoi polloi of Manchester, who saw them for their sweetness and delicate taste, and those things are just almost forgotten about. We can see how we've lost particular forests in a terrestrial realm, but we can't see it in a marine sense. And therefore, trying to actually envisage what nature recovery actually looks like in an ocean is a challenge, because if I say that we're going to plant a hectare of seagrass or we're going to do something similar with saltmarsh, people don't get what that means. Because, actually, that's a tiny amount of the absolute devastation that we've caused in our ocean and coastal environment, and we're in such a difficult place in the ocean that, actually, any of these targets are really difficult to aspire to. And therefore, it's not just difficult at a scientific level, it's that ability for politicians, the general public and funders to actually grasp what it really means. There needs to be more discussion around that and more realism as to where the state of our ocean in Wales is at.

Thank you. Tim, do you have anything to add?

I guess what I was going to say is, 'Why England?' There are other places as well. I do a lot of work in the global south, where we spend a huge amount of time doing lots of work at very large scale on restoration, all around ecosystem services, all around biodiversity. I often think that we need to be a little bit more broad. The only thing I really disagreed with in relation to the COP thing was that they were saying that we need to go north-south, we need to be providing greater support to the global south; I think we can learn a huge amount from the global south. In my life, I take the lessons I learn there and I bring them back here. Maybe I'm slightly more towards the implementation of those targets rather than setting those targets, but I don't know whether I would go to England.

Thank you, Tim. Can we move on? Huw, are you happy to lead us through the next section, please?

Yes, indeed. Just to say, it took me back to a book I read, it must have been more than a decade ago, by Professor Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea, and where we started from and where we've got to and how we have to work with the science to get back there.

Chair, I don't know if you can indulge me for a moment. How do you translate that issue, whether it's in woodlands and biodiverse woodlands, or seas and biodiverse seas into—? I'm not asking for the specific wording: do you think it's important that, as we look at legislation, that idea of abundance and diversity is somehow captured within it? So, I'm away from COP now and highfalutin stuff—that somehow the terminology, the language, the statements, the objectives, based on the discussions that we've just had, should somehow be captured, so that it's not starting from sad states of where we are now; it's starting from what good really looks like.

Just quickly, the reason I like distinguishing between ecosystem services and conservation is because conservation requires us to think about that baseline quite clearly. From a tree-cover perspective, you go back 9,000 years, and much of Wales will be tree cover, but, obviously, that's not realistic in terms of where we want to go now. But from an ecosystem services perspective, in some senses, it's more simple because we just need to think about what current delivery looks like relative to potential. And so, you can layer anything on top of that and say, 'Look, if we change it to this or change it to that, we get this blend of ecosystem service and this set of delivery'. 

Going back again to what we were saying, I don't think the prescriptions necessarily exist, again because of this context sensitivity. I generally work around principles rather than prescriptions, and then learning alongside that. That's my interpretation of that. When we look at farmers in Wales right now, I know loads who are doing all sorts of wonderful things on their farms. They're not really telling anybody about it, but they're doing it; we don't track that, but they are creating prescriptions that work, and they move across the spectrum. They reflect the personalities of the people who are doing that. 

So, I guess I find it quite hard to systemise that, although I think the way that I would respond is that I think there's valuable learning going on there that we're probably not getting. And so, that probably doesn't answer it quite the way you wanted it to. I'd love to be able to do it, but I don't see how I can do that.  

Thank you. Richard. 

I endorse what Tim was saying around the vision of ecosystem services. No-one will really understand when I talk about little worms and little gammarid shrimp in the ocean, because it's beyond their understanding of marine life, but they understand fisheries. They understand that, actually, we want to maintain a food source from our oceans, and that's ultimately a type of ecosystem service delivery from our ocean. But to be able to do that, it needs to be underpinned by those worms and those little shrimp. So, it doesn't matter in terms of people's understanding of those little beasties, but what matters is, actually, we need to bring back a food source from our oceans. We need to create jobs from that. 

When we had the marine conservation zone debacle back in, I think, 2013, it was always cast as this view of looking after biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. But actually, it should have been about supporting our oceans so they deliver those services, so they actually support our fisheries so that they can not just support but improve, and result in massively large ecosystem service delivery from our oceans, whether that's in terms of keeping our water clean, or whether it's actually making some of our beaches cleaner. It's about that sort of thinking. 

Sorry, we've gone off on a right diversion now, Chair; I'm really sorry. 

But you have instigated both Katie and Tim to want to come in. Very briefly, because we've got half an hour remaining for the session. Thank you. 

I just wanted to wrap that up in some sort of business terminology. The impact we want is an environment that works for the people of Wales in terms of ecosystem services; the outputs we want are those ecosystem services. The outcomes are healthy biodiversity. So, yes, we can't just set a vision at outputs. That's not good enough. We have to set our vision at impact. We have to write that sentence that says, 'Wales will have a healthy, functioning ecosystem in its land and sea, and this means', and then work back. 

Thank you. Tim. 

I would kick myself if I didn't talk about soil. We talk about the trees—the trees are valuable because they help what happens in the soil. Most of our ecosystem services are derived from what's happening in the soil. Soil biodiversity we know very little about. Again, we start to come into the same sort of challenges that Richard's talking about for the ocean when we start—

Sorry, I'd better move on to the question I was supposed to ask. All this is really interesting and I want to go back over the last half an hour, but I can't. In terms of the deep dive, can you tell me something about how we keep the momentum going on that and what your involvement is in taking forward the recommendations, implementing these, getting the detail you've been describing? 

Obviously, the three of us have actually fed into the procedure. We weren't put on a leash in any way, I don't think, so we feel very happy we were speaking our minds. I'm very delivery focused, so one of the things, again, that I talked about in the paper that I submitted was that we need a theory of change that takes those deliverables and actually looks at that. So, we've got everything in theory—we need to look at how we operationalise that. So I'm kind of struck: when you've got eight different options, which one do you prioritise? Where’s the emphasis? Which one’s going to deliver the biggest bang for the buck? And my feeling is that it all just goes on in a siloed sense, and we need ways to pull it together. In a development sense, we would do that by using a theory of change, which I tried to set out in my paper, that makes very clear the assumptions that underpin the change logic, and allows us to explore different pathways to achieve things. 

Katie.

Yes, I'm sitting on the monitoring and evaluation part of the action plan that’s being created, so definitely very keen to see that built in at every level. But I’d also like to say that, to actually move the deep dive forward, we need cross-sectoral support of it. Again, it can’t just be environmentalists’ issue, it’s got to be everybody’s issue.

Sorry—and this is not just cross-governmental, but cross-sectoral. 

No, cross-sectoral. So, an example is that there’s a lot of pollution coming out from—well, mostly dairy farms, but perhaps all farms with cattle, spreading farmyard manure on the surface, and there’s perfect, wonderful research going on that can inject FYM, but it’s completely out of reach of most farmers. That’s not an environment problem. Maybe it’s not even an agriculture problem. Maybe it’s an innovation grant problem, but we need to start to see that people are solving these problems, but in completely different sectors. And if we could somehow draw that together, then I’ve got celebration and learning about good practice, engagement and encouragement of professional bodies, and others. Funding: I’ve got the NRW funding question there. And the grand challenge, I think, is not going to be solved by one Government department, one organisation. It’s going to be solved by people who are innovative, coming together to look in creative ways, and I think that would be something that we could do.

Thank you. Richard. 

The deep dive was a great process, and I was pleased to be part of it, and I think the ambition it creates is a great starting point. As a marine scientist, I was one of the few representatives in that deep dive from a marine perspective, and it's a general challenge that exists within thinking around biodiversity, that most biodiversity experts come from a terrestrial perspective, and therefore, it always feels like the marine environment is tagged on as an afterthought. I don't think that that was the intention, but that's the reality of how it's set up. I think, in terms of a marine ambition in it, it's limited to the concept of marine conservation zones, which is something we should have done 20 years ago, not thinking about now. It feels like we're starting to catch up rather than thinking about true ambition. And marine conservation zones are there to stop degradation, not actually to really realistically result in nature recovery. So, from a marine perspective—

Sorry—marine conservation zones can be used for nature recovery, depending on their management and their status and—

They could be, yes, but generally, they're set up as a process to keep impacts to a minimum, whether that’s dredging, whether it’s fisheries. But they could be used as a tool for nature recovery, but they’re not being seen in that context. And therefore, I think we need, as an outcome from that, to create a bigger thought of what, actually, a marine conservation zone means. Because in most definitions, it doesn’t really mean what you’re talking about—an area that’s going to result in enhanced biodiversity. It’s just an area where we stop the degradation and allow some level of recovery to happen.

Thank you. Jenny, are we okay to move on, please, to your questions?

Yes, thank you. So, the Welsh Government's already said it's going to establish legally binding biodiversity targets, but clearly, we need to ensure that we've got those targets right. So, Tim, your paper is very interesting on ensuring that we're setting the right targets, otherwise we just get kickback. This idea of 10 per cent tree cover on all farms, you rightly point out, has met with a lot of resistance by some farmers. And you are both arguing—both Katie and Tim—for a sort of landscape approach, so that you get the whole picture. I have got that. So, what makes you think that the Welsh Government will be resistant to that? Is it just because we are not adapting our behaviour sufficiently? 

I work in the global environment, so I am working all over the world. Everywhere I go, no-one does it right. So, basically, what I am saying is that what I'm seeing around—. I'm a systems scientist. So, one of the principles of that is that scale isn't a zoom. You don't just press the zoom on your map and zoom in; it's about understanding that, at different scales of observation, different properties of systems emerge. So, it's very important that—. We often focus on what farmers know, or we focus on what Government needs, and very commonly—globally and in Wales—there's a missing middle, where what is happening up here or down here—. So, we talk about top-down or bottom-up: you need both, and you need someone who is trained and is operating at that landscape scale.

When we put a 10 per cent figure on tree cover for farmers, on the ground, they don't understand the rationale for why there's a 10 per cent figure. We understand that because it fits into a national target, but it doesn't meet a local understanding of what they need. If you push that target up to a landscape and give the farmers some options about how they achieve that at scale, they will push the tree cover to the areas where we need it for the delivery of ecosystems services. They have a buy-in to do it.

I used an example of rivers overheating and the need for repairing of the tree cover up in the headwaters, and that's exactly the sort of thing that we need. You say that to a farmer, and you say that the fishing downstream is going to die, and the traditional things that you love and manage are going to go unless we put that shedding in place, they are right behind it. You will get the behaviours you need, but that means that you have to take a landscape-scale perspective. I have been doing this in Wales for 20 years. I have said it for 20 years, and it doesn't happen.

That sounds as if the well-being of future generations Act never existed, and we have got collaboration baked into that.

We have got it baked in. I see what you mean. But do we practice participatory research or participatory action in Wales? Again, I'm coming from the global south, where every single thing I do would be entirely participatory. We would be working with local—.

I would say that a lot of the challenges in Wales that we have are around making changes around cultural norms. So, there are a lot of things that are feeding into the decisions that farmers make, and we need to be participatory in the way that we approach that. The water framework directive was meant to be participatory; I didn't see any evidence of that whatsoever in the delivery of that. This is a personal opinion: I think that the legislation is right, but I don't think that we deliver against it.

Okay, thank you.

If I may bring in—. Apologies, Jenny. Huw was keen to come in quickly.

I'm just very intrigued with what you're saying. I get your argument—don't take this in the wrong way—from your theoretical, systems-based analysis, but we know that there are some good examples of best practice of spatial land management with some farmers in England and Wales, but they are few and far between. So, what's the answer to this? If we have got cosy collaboration going on here and there, and some willingness to do it, as we look at post-Brexit financial incentives with the sustainable farming scheme, do we need to further incentivise landscape-wide, catchment-wide, rather than farm by farm, plot by plot, field by field? So, we can actually say, 'Well, there are a dozen farmers, or there are 20 or 30 farmers within this landscape. They need to work together to find that the financial incentives flow through'.

I think that Katie's very keen to respond to that. Apologies.

But, what do we want—I mean, from the system? So, if you want the delivery of public goods, those public goods manifest at landscape scale. So, if you want flood risk benefits, you can't work like a shotgun effect across a landscape; you have to have co-ordinating activity with farmers to deliver that. So, yes, if you are in an area that you have prioritised for water, then you will need to work collaboratively, or in a co-ordinated sense, at scale. Now, farmers won't necessarily collaborate—30 farmers collaborating together is a big ask. You know, 'My neighbour is my enemy'. So, there are traditional reasons why some farmers wouldn't necessarily collaborate around certain areas, but if you create—. It's almost like co-investment.  

Apologies. We have got a number of questions to get through as well, so if I can ask for any comments to be brief. Katie.

I think the facilitation fund in England and the work that they're doing is definitely worth you looking at, because that is bringing groups of people together to do these actions at landscape scale, and it is working, and they're monitoring it using a people approach. The other—

Thank you.

Can I just—? One tiny—

Okay, quickly.

No, carry on. Carry on.

Why doesn't this nature networks fund work like the facilitation fund you're talking about in England?

I think the facilitation fund is based on a facilitator being available to go and talk to all the landowners about why it should work, and then getting the landowners to join if they want to, and then, the early adopters join, they see all the benefits, everyone comes along after them. I really don't know much about how the scheme in Wales is working at the moment, sorry. 

Okay, don't worry. We'll move on from that, but—

Richard wanted to make a quick comment.

I have a very quick point about subsidies and financial support. There's a fundamental difference between terrestrial and marine biodiversity improvement in that the resources extractors, be them the farmers, have a framework that allows them to improve the natural environment, and whether that's a good or bad system, I'm not a terrestrial ecologist, but there's a framework there. Fishermen are subsidised to have better and bigger nets; they're not subsidised to actually improve the environment, and I think there needs to be a better view of how we harvest things from the ocean that actually brings fishermen into the biodiversity realm to see the benefits of actually supporting it. As long as you have that disconnect, you'll never get there without efficient conservation.

Okay. So, this was supposed to be one of the benefits of leaving the EU, but, actually, we don't have the levers to control it, so—

We do inshore.

We do inshore, indeed. But—

We always have.

—if they're fishing offshore, the fish don't—

Yes, but inshore is a huge part of the fishing fleet, and that's where there are benefits and nature recovery could happen to a huge degree.

Okay. I suppose the most urgent thing for us is that we are setting the right targets and that we're not rewarding people who are just making the climate and nature emergencies worse. So, the sustainable farming scheme has got to be purposed to delivering on what that says on the tin, which is that we will support public goods, which, hopefully, will enable you to make a living at the same time. Why, for example, do you think that dairy farmers who are polluting need to have grants to clear up the mess they're making?

Because they cannot possibly afford—

Well, then, don't go into that business.

They're already in that business.

That's just like saying the oil industry can't afford to clean up the mess they make.

Yes, but—. This isn't my subject of expertise, but I believe that fair price for produce should actually include the ability for them to access some of this innovation. But accessing innovation isn't something that your normal businessperson does, it's something your entrepreneurs do that then they drag everyone else with them. That's why I'm suggesting that we need these innovative grants around it, or competitions, or whatever you're going to do—

Okay, so—

Jenny.

—because dairy farmers aren't paid enough. I get that. The supermarkets are just screwing them. But it's complicated, isn't it—

It is.

—because we've got to somehow safeguard our nature and reverse the appalling trends.

I think one of the things that I find a tiny bit frustrating is that—I work with farmers and trees. A dairy farmer in Wales is working on very tight margins, as we've discussed. So, it's quite hard for them to modify their systems. So, I'd be looking to encourage dairy farmers in Wales to put shade in and things—

Sure. A no-brainer.

Yes, and you can—

Thank you. I'm just conscious that we're going into specifics with dairy farming now, and I know it's one element, but I am also keen that we move on shortly. So, if you have a final question—

Okay. Well, my final question would be around how we can see both public and private investments in nature's recovery so that we deliver on the COP15 agreement. Katie.

I see the private investment as a very growing and vibrant industry. The carbon code is on version 2 now; people are signing up to it, for peat and woodland. I think there's enough of a push with private investors that we can leave that. We can guide it and celebrate it, but we can leave that. What isn't there yet is a way for private investment to become involved in protecting and maintaining what's there, because of this subject of additionality. To be under the code, you have to make more of something, so that people who support it buy the credits for that 'more' you've created.

But our biggest need, for sea and land, is to protect our existing good blanket bogs. If we don't get them wet enough within the next 10 years, they're gone, with enough carbon per year emitted to match the size of San Francisco or something. We've got to leave the private investors to do what they're good at, and concentrate Government money on what they can't do, and I would say that for the farming scheme as well: to support the private investors and enable that, which I believe they're doing—I don't know; obviously, I'm not a policy expert, so don't know about it in that detail—but Government perhaps to do what only Government can do.

And I had an idea, again, that maybe it's not even Government supporting that SSSI, but having a scheme where local businesses who want to have green credentials could actually support that SSSI themselves by making a little bit of an investment. So, we're looking outside the box again; we're doing things in non-traditional ways to meet this target, which is extremely challenging.

Thank you. Either Richard or Tim.

Just very quickly, I think private investment wants to deliver against very clear targets, and I just made my point earlier when I said I don't know if we have prescriptive answers for everything. So, if people want to invest in carbon, there's a high risk around that. If people want to invest in things, I think there are risks there, and I would say that, at the other end of the scale, as I mentioned before, we've got large numbers of people who invest quite a lot of their own personal income into doing these things, and we don't recognise that at the other end of the scale. And I think farmers often feel that they are doing good things that we don't capture, and I think there is a certain amount of truth in that.

Thank you. 

Diolch, Cadeirydd. Moving away from the private sector to look at public authorities firstly, please: in terms of the 2016 Act, section 6 is about a duty on public authorities to maintain and enhance biodiversity, and to promote ecosystem resilience. Do you think that that is working effectively, and if not, how do you think it could be improved?

And if I can add an extra part of a question to that: how do you think that the work the public authorities are doing, or could be doing under this, could be involving the public more, or getting public buy-in?

Katie, would you like to—

I must make it clear that I have not worked for a public body. I'm not an expert on local authorities, but I have worked with local authorities who are passionate about it, and who take this commitment seriously and have done really good best practice, and I can give you examples afterwards. But I'd like to move on to the things that seem to me to be blockers, and often environmental organisations work in silos. We need to make sure that work done in environment, in planning departments, is recognised and endorsed by other departments. I'm not sure if providing, again, environmental accounts at a local authority level would help everyone understand those, but I think that's something worth looking at.

And nature-based solutions are highlighted and local authorities are using them, but I think there could be more done to reward best practice and highlight things that work and help local authorities learn from each other. And the reporting framework seems to lack the idea that nature can work for the good for these bodies, that the Act seems to be very much about mitigation and saving, but not about creating and making it better.

Thank you. Richard.

It would be wonderful to have councils involved with biodiversity and nature recovery from a marine perspective. They’re largely absent from that discussion. Some of that relates to limited remit around—. But it just strikes me that there’s no ambition. Pembrokeshire County Council were very happy to take credit for the seagrass restoration work we were doing in west Wales, but had, in reality, nothing to do with it whatsoever. And, I think that’s the sort of broader problem—that it’s not really part of their remit, but they like it going on.

But I think the ability for local people to be involved with marine conservation, marine restoration, exists, and in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had volunteers from north Wales out on Pen Llŷn helping us monitor seagrass that we planted back in February. There is a lot of opportunity there and there’s a huge untapped resource, with people desperate to do something, where they see just a dark future for our planet, and they want to actually act. And it’s lovely to see. We’ve had a huge response in doing this sort of work, and I see it in all sorts of terrestrial biodiversity around.

There is a big role for the general public to support that work, because a lot of it, in terms of nature recovery, is a lot of hands-on work that actually needs many people. And I can’t remember the term that people have used, but there have been discussions that were raised a little in the biodiversity deep dive about the concept of a green army, but like a—. I can’t remember the concept, but trying to actually create an incentive for younger people, perhaps people with challenges in terms of employment, giving them new opportunities through green jobs, basically. And it’s a very interventionist type of Government approach, but actually there are a lot of opportunities for young people to become skilled in these fields, and there are big gaps in the expertise present. So, actually, there’s a huge opportunity there for people to get involved. But it would be nice to have local councils as part of that debate in a marine perspective, because we know that they do have a lot of involvement in terrestrial ecology and biodiversity, but they don’t do it in a marine sense.

Thank you, that's really helpful. Tim.

Just very quickly, I guess. My feeling is, when I talk to my students about any of this stuff, I start by describing to them what a 'wicked problem' is. So, wicked problems are without solution—in fact, formulating the problem itself is a problem. So, I think one of the things that I get a little bit concerned about across the board—and it won't just be limited to councils—is that we don’t have the solutions for most of the stuff going forward. We’re still trying to find out what works and find a way forward. So, these are inherently interdisciplinary problems. They require us to work across, and work with, a wide range of actors.

I think, fundamentally, getting that participation right is really important and we start bringing people together. I would worry about people doing things in isolation, and I would hope that, where we were doing things, we were monitoring or learning from those processes to work out what works well and what doesn’t. But I think we need to be slightly careful, because these are very challenging things that we’re asking people to do. I think there are, not risks—. But, fundamentally, I fully agree with the need for better participation and to bring people in, but we need people who can do that—that’s a skillset; I don’t think we have that skillset.

Thank you. That's really, really helpful and something for us to consider as well, because it's something empowering for many in our communities as well. Delyth, do you have a final question you'd like to ask? We have five minutes remaining of this session. I'm afraid I think we could go on much, much longer.

Yes, thank you. Briefly then, looking to section 7 of this Act with the priority species and habitats lists and the review that's been undertaken, do you have any views on that and how it's progressing, please?

Just one quick view: I think we need to add a habitat that is small copses or blocks of native, or largely native, trees in our towns and cities. They ought to be protected, because those are spaces that are really highly regarded by the population.

Thank you. Richard or Tim, do you have anything—?

Sorry, I don't have any involvement with that review, and I'm not clear on what it's aiming.

Can we move on just to one final question then? Joyce, if I can bring you in, since we do have five minutes.

The environment and rural affairs monitoring and modelling programme—is it fit for purpose in terms of monitoring biodiversity and understanding the drivers, in your opinion?

Can I go? I think the current scheme is excellent, good science, and I think it's absolutely fundamentally important that the long-term monitoring of these squares in Wales that have gone on for decades now is continued, because that's hard science and we need the results. But, I feel that the monitoring scheme at the moment is very siloed. They do an experiment on soil erosion, they do an experiment on whatever, and it lacks that systems, agile and adaptive focus that we need to know, 'What does that mean for Wales? What does that mean for the outcomes and the impacts?' As far as I'm concerned, I can't see any outcomes and impacts monitoring at all in there. What does it mean? What do all these things happening mean for us? I think that's something that we could really put in. The other big lack, of course, is the importance of networks. Ecological networks are stressed in the biodiversity deep dive. There's nothing monitoring, at that larger scale, what is working and what isn't working. So, absolutely great, what it's doing, but I think with this new way of working, we need to add those two, outcomes and impacts.

Tim, if I can bring you in.

It's diagnostics versus delivery. In conversation with colleagues, we can get, in ever more detail, how bad things are getting, and we can catch that in higher and higher resolution. What we need to be working towards now is delivery of solutions towards those things, which requires a very different set of data. So, for me, I think what they do is perfect, and they've done it for a number of years and we've got valuable data sets from that. We need to be understanding the drivers, so looking at the behaviour changes that lead to the degradation situations that we have now. I don't think that gets captured particularly well. And more importantly now, learning about solutions and looking at the impact of changes that will almost always be ones us humans are making on those systems. So, I think these are ecological things, and they're not socioecological, and I would like a little bit more of the socio integrated into—. I don't know whether that sits within ERAMMP or alongside ERAMMP, but it seems to me that would by my feeling, that there is a gap. Ecologists don't like working with humans. [Laughter.]

Thank you. Richard.

I'm not explicitly sure how that framework works with the marine environment. Most of the marine environmental monitoring is set under either the habitats directive or water framework directive structures. It's very, very separate. I agree with Tim's point here in that we're just monitoring the death of a system sometimes, but sometimes we don't use the data we collect to really understand what's driving it. For example, I know that we monitor seagrass all around Wales and it's great, there's a long-term data set, but no-one actually tries to understand what that data is really showing us. Is it that this habitat is being affected by water quality, or is it just actually the climatic natural inter-annual variability that's causing changes? We don't know. People don't use our data that we've got to its maximum.

Tim's other point about thinking about solutions, I think that's a really important point. Milford Haven waterway is a great example, where it's a nitrate-vulnerable zone. There are all sorts of water quality issues there. We monitor the habitats that are present, but we don't really understand where there is a threshold. Actually, what is the threshold where we can't actually put any more nitrate in there without going to another level of environmental degradation? That's about solutions—data that can drive solutions. It's not what we're trying to get at; we're just trying to understand its degradation. Maybe there is a point that we could push back the nitrate levels in Milford Haven waterway that is actually achievable, and that can result in a significant amount of improvement. Maybe we can't get it back to how it was at some point, but we can get it back to something that's valuable. And that's data and science that we're not currently trying to obtain—we're thinking about monitoring the change and the death.

Members, if we can just turn to agenda item 4, please, and just the papers to note. Jenny.

Under papers to note, I'd like to highlight 4.3, where Bethan Sayed, on behalf of Climate Change Cymru, has written to us about the importance of an energy-efficiency scheme. Public money is tight. I note that Lord Deben is calling for that every house builder that has built more than 100 houses should pay, every year, to pay for the retrofitting that they're dumping onto the people who buy these inadequate houses. So, good support from Lord Deben, who's about to retire, sadly, as the chair of the Climate Change Committee. And in relation to 4.4, if I may—. Lord Deben's also calling for really significant money to be paid by ExxonMobil, in particular. But, I think, in relation to Ffos-y-Fran, the opencast coal mine, this is a massive failure of governance across the piece, because, back in 2014, the Welsh Government warned that the restoration account, the escrow account, was only £15 million. That's nearly 10 years ago. It's still only £15 million, and now that the bill for clearing up—. This was supposed to be a restoration project in the first place. Instead, somebody decided it was going to be an opencast mining project. Who put a stop to that? And it's now £75 million. This is a really major governance issue, and I suggest we need to do a short inquiry into this matter.

Thank you. Delyth has indicated that she'd like to come in.

Diolch, Cadeirydd. Yes, on 4.4 as well, I would echo what Jenny has said. I think that this is of serious significance, not just for the area, but the implications for what could happen elsewhere. I would certainly support us having a short inquiry on it.

Thank you. Members, any other comments you wish to note on either of those papers, 4.1 to 4.5? No.