Professor Yvonne Buckley:

The first part of the Deputy’s questions was on whether climate adaptation, biodiversity and solutions should be specified in section 3. I do not have that section in front of me, so I am going to not answer right now.

The second part of his question had two parts. One was on how alternative technologies for renewable energy may impact on biodiversity, so how things like offshore and onshore wind farms and the development of those on inappropriate soils - for example, on carbon rich soils or drained carbon rich soils - could impact on biodiversity and may be inappropriate in terms of carbon emissions into the atmosphere as well. The appropriate siting of both onshore and offshore renewable energy installations is very important. Actions to enhance or actions consistent with a biodiversity action plan being implemented on onshore and offshore renewable energy facilities would be very important.

On change in land use, moving from agricultural land use to a wind farm is a change in land use. Whenever we change land use we need to think about the carbon that is omitted from that land use change. We also need to think about how we can build biodiversity and incubate solutions into the change in land use to make it better for biodiversity.

We need to be able to put in place actions that reduce the impact of wind turbines on biodiversity, bird strikes and things like that. Therefore, additional technology may be needed to reduce those impacts.

Appropriate siting, biodiversity enhancements on site and the mitigation of the known impacts that renewable energy installations have is important but so too is looking for new impacts as we develop larger scale renewable energy in the form of solar and wind. New impacts may arise as well so we need to keep an eye on all of those.

On the idea behind explicitly referencing the national biodiversity action plan in the Bill, everything in the Bill must take account of the effects of actions, either mitigation or adaptation, on biodiversity. Rather than specifying everything that may have some relevance for biodiversity, keeping in mind our duty to protect biodiversity whenever new developments are being put in place is the most important thing for us to do.

The Deputy’s question has another part about adaptation plans, for which I have a similar answer. Nature based solutions should be considered as part of adaptation responses to climate action. Nationally based solutions have a part to play in things like flood mitigation. The combination of nature based solutions and technological solutions should definitely be considered. It is not an either-or situation as there are opportunities where we can use both. We are going to have to use both. Nature based solutions definitely deserve a much larger place than they currently get at local level. One of the problems is that we often look at short-term small special scale solutions for a particular part of a river - for example, to reduce a flooding impact when we should be looking at a whole river catchment and what kinds of nature based solutions can be put in upstream from the problem to reduce and slow the flow and to enable flood plains to be utilised. Things like that would reduce the need for hard engineering at particular pinch points.