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As I said, that would mean that every amendment that was needed, no matter how minor, would have to be made through primary legislation. The legislative vehicle for that might be a bill that would take a couple of years to implement. We have been talking about this bill for the past few years and only now are we putting it through the Parliament. It is about agility.

We are looking at the unworkability and disproportionality of that—

The power could be used only if Scottish ministers considered that using it would be in accordance with all the purposes that I have mentioned: maintaining and advancing standards in relation to restoring, enhancing or managing the natural environment; facilitating progress towards any statutory target relating to the environment, climate or biodiversity that applies in Scotland; ensuring consistency and compatibility with other legal regimes; and taking account of technologies and changes. Those are the safeguards that are in the bill. The power could not be used in a nefarious way.

They are very compelling, but I am willing to look at whether additional safeguards need to be put in place, because I would not want the power to be used as a loophole by any future Government. I think that those safeguards are robust.

Obviously, the DPLR did its inquiry. I think that I have set out some tangible examples of how the power could be used, both in the policy memorandum and in some of the examples that I have given today. Updating regulations on forestry EIAs could allow for more effective enforcement when breaches of environmental impact assessment consent conditions are discovered, which would allow greater alignment with the Forestry and Land Management (Scotland) Act 2018.

However, we cannot predict every circumstance that will require the use of the power. Having to be agile is in—I was going to say, “the very nature of nature”—the very nature of biodiversity and environmental protection. It is important that, when we develop legislation, we consider future proofing, especially in matters of the climate and nature crises, in which we have to be agile. We could be required to act urgently and decisively to address new and emerging threats. At the moment, every minor change to the EIA regime and habitats regulations can be made only through primary legislation. That does not allow us that flexibility and agility or that dynamic approach.

We are in a critical situation with climate and nature crises. We need the ability to be fleet of foot. I want to ensure that the bill has the correct balance between implementing the policy provisions and having suitable engagement and appropriate parliamentary scrutiny. As I mentioned before, in a parliamentary democracy, Governments cannot just do what they want; they have to be able to put policy through Parliament, like I am doing now.

The uses of the power will have to go through the Parliament. It will have to be scrutinised and the Parliament will say yes or no to the uses of the power. That is an important part of the jigsaw. We are worried—I know that I am—about emerging political discourse around the denial of the nature crisis and the need for net zero. I am very alive to that, and we have seen it in other countries. However, there are safeguards in the bill and there is rationale for taking the power—it is for nature positivity.

I am willing to speak to anybody who thinks that there could be further safeguards in place, but, fundamentally, a parliamentary democracy is the gatekeeper to the use of the power.

Certain elements of what Mercedes Villalba talks about, such as the release of non-native game birds, are not covered in the bill. We wanted to keep the targets and the habitats regulations as the main part of the bill, and we do not have any plans to do anything on the release of non-native game birds. However, the target topics allow us the capacity to deal with invasive non-native species more generally, both at the moment and in the future, as the targets are set.

The bill is not prescriptive to that level of detail on actions. It provides the ability to set targets, which can be quite broad in nature and under which actions can sit. Invasive non-native species will have an impact on the health of a habitat or an ecosystem. That is why the PAG advised us to have those broad target topics. What you ask about is not ruled out; it is just not specified in the legislation.

First, biodiversity loss and climate change are inextricably linked and we must have protections and mitigations for them both. In every situation, decisions have to be made that take into account various pieces of evidence on environmental impact. The consent application processes are robust for offshore and onshore wind, but I think that we will be making them even more robust, particularly when there are consultations about things such as community engagement and the benefits that are associated with developments. Those consultations will become stronger as time goes on, because we need to be able to see that developments of any sort will not damage the environment and also that they put things back into the environment. For example, developers have taken action to restore peatland, and offshore wind developers are helping us with data collection on seabirds and fish species. Much of that is voluntary at the moment, but much more will become mandatory in that space—that is the trajectory.

One of the interesting things in relation to my portfolio is the restriction on how money that is associated with developments can be used for nature restoration. As a hypothetical example, let us say that funding has come from a wind farm as a result of its impact on the seabed. I cannot necessarily use that money for other mitigations in nature that would have a material impact on sea health, so it is very restrictive. However, things are adapting and changing, and I think that they are getting stronger.

You mentioned energy, so I will talk about what is happening in that space. The Scottish ministers have the power to amend the Habitats (Scotland) Regulations 1994 within the parameters that are set out in the UK Energy Act 2003 in respect of offshore wind activities only. However, that power does not allow for amendments to the regulations in respect of emerging technologies. A number of colleagues who represent the islands are at the committee today, including those who represent the Orkney Islands. The UK legislation does not allow for any flexibility with respect to the roll-out of our nascent wind and tidal energy technologies. That is because those technologies are not yet on the horizon for the UK Government—they are being developed in Orkney and in the waters off the Highlands of Scotland. We are aiming to plug a gap and give parity to other nascent technologies so that we can have flexibility. Rather than having flexibility in respect of one power generation sector, it is agnostic in respect of the means of power generation.

As a particular example, let us take wave technology. Scotland could lead on that once it becomes commercially viable, so I would not want to stymie it at all. At the same time, the protections in the bill, which are robust, will ensure that flexibility is not given for anyone to do anything that they want in our marine environment. We have to do something to reduce our impact on climate change, which is the biggest impact to our biodiversity.

I am willing to explore that. If committee members do not feel that the protections that we are putting in place are robust enough we can talk about that, because this is the first stage of the bill process. However, I do not believe that a non-regression clause would be particularly workable or that it would enable us to respond to each case as it comes before us.

Statutory targets are not a silver bullet. As I said in my opening statement, it is important to keep successive Governments’ eyes on the ball by requiring them to meet the targets and take the actions that underpin the targets.

The committee will know intimately the range of workstreams that we have designed to provide policy and action, because that is what there must be. If we just have targets, we will not achieve anything, but, if targets are statutory, that means that there has to be reporting associated with meeting them.

The targets cannot exist in isolation. They are underpinned by the strategic framework, which was published in November last year and includes the biodiversity strategy, which sets out the goal to be nature positive by 2030 and to have sustainability restored and regenerated by 2045. There are also six-year rolling delivery plans, which will have cross-sectoral action.

Plans exist in other Government portfolios as well. Mairi Gougeon has been taking on work under the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024, including the whole-farm plan and work with the agriculture reform implementation oversight board, or ARIOB, and she has been implementing policies from the fisheries management strategy in the marine environment. We are also doing work across the marine protected areas network, for example. There is also the budgeting that is associated with those things, such as the nature restoration fund in this year’s budget, and other historical pieces of work that have been done to hold planners and those who make planning decisions accountable, such as national planning framework 4. There is a raft of policy areas and duties on public bodies—councils, for example—that will underpin this work.

It will not be easy. I am setting out that, by 2045, we will have regenerated and restored biodiversity. That is only 20 years away, so there is an urgency, and we have got to the point where we need statutory targets. Statutory targets hold to account not just Government but Parliament, public bodies and future Governments. Biodiversity is far too serious a matter for us to leave it to chance or place hope in policies alone. As the convener rightly said, the “State of Nature 2023” report did not make good reading, which is why urgency must be associated with the actions that are set out in the bill.

The targets will be set out in secondary legislation should the bill pass. We are at the end of a parliamentary term, and the chances are that there will not be time to enact secondary legislation before the next session. It will be quite sobering for the new Parliament in 2026 that a bill has been passed which sets out in law a requirement to have statutory targets. The Parliament will have to discuss what those targets should look like, and it will be able to look in a granular way at each specific target and assess how far we can go on it. Some agility will be associated with the ability to scrutinise targets as well as to set them out.

Additional targets might end up being associated with the bill as it passes through the process. I do not know how the bill will evolve—that is the beauty of parliamentary work. I keep going back to the fact that the bill will allow us to respond in an agile manner. It will allow targets to change or be ramped up should there be particular pressures or changes in technology, or if new data sets or evidence were to become available. We might need to say that we will do more on a particular target in response to a “State of Nature” report, for example.

A great deal of work is being done by our academic institutions and by the Government with the likes of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, other public bodies and NatureScot to gather more data that will allow the Parliament and the Government to make decisions quickly and in an agile manner.

I recognise that some stakeholders, and people who have given evidence to the committee, have expressed that there is potential for a narrow interpretation. I will take you through how the topics were arrived at. They were recommended in expert scientific advice that was provided by the biodiversity programme advisory group—for brevity, I will call it PAG from now on.

The group comprised a panel of experts and was chaired by the Government’s chief scientific adviser for environment, natural resources and agriculture. It advised on all three elements of the strategic framework for biodiversity, and the bill includes the group’s recommended topics for which we must have specific targets. The bill also contains the power to add other topics. What stakeholders say on that aspect is interesting, and it will be interesting to see, in future years, whether we require to add other topics.

On the particular topic that you mentioned, which is the status of threatened species, we felt that it was important that it was the status of species, not the rarity, that had to be considered. That effectively meant that it would cover more than just rare species, including species that are under threat now and those with declining populations, which might not be classified as rare but are under threat. We might be seeing a threat to their existence, or they might have restricted genetic diversity. They might be under threat because of impacts on their habitat or food chain. There might be impacts from other factors, such as has happened with avian influenza whereby pathogens have devastated particular species.

We wanted to ensure that we had—and PAG advised us to have—a broader definition, because we did not want to exclude certain species. We do not want species to get to the point at which they are rare; we want to be able to intervene at the point where we see threats to them. That is why there is a broader definition.