Professor Yvonne Buckley:

The first part of the question was around trade-offs and how sharp and common are the trade-offs between climate action and how those actions impact on biodiversity. There will be trade-offs throughout the system. There will be some places where it is inappropriate to site a wind farm or a solar farm because of the impacts on biodiversity. One of our challenges is trying to figure out where in the landscape to put these different land uses. We must examine where the best place is and where we will get the lowest amount of trade-offs between biodiversity and climate action. This could be framed as a dynamic optimisation problem. If a wind farm is put in a certain area, we must examine how that impacts on where we put forestry or other land uses that may have positive or negative effects on biodiversity. The Deputy gave an example of monocultures, namely Sitka spruce versus a diverse native species mix for woodland. If we are purely planting for CO2, those trade-offs may not be so sharp. We may choose the native woodland because the CO2 will stay in that system, particularly if we are talking about the long term. How long the CO2 stays in the system completely depends on the use of the wood products at the end. If the wood will be used just for pulp then all that CO2 will be lost straight away, whereas the native woodland will store the CO2 long term. Having CO2 budgets in place and having timelines for those will help to guide those solutions. There is no doubt the native woodland would be far preferable as a means of CO2 sequestration and storage with biodiversity benefits than wall-to-wall Sitka spruce, particularly on some soil types.

There will be trade-offs. We will not always have easy solutions but being aware of those trade-offs enables the Government to make decisions on where easy wins for CO2 and biodiversity can be found and where more difficult situations arise. It is then up to decision makers to decide what kind of trade-offs they are willing to accept. If we do not consider the impacts on biodiversity, however, we could go blindly into climate actions that have negative effects that are not accounted for and that limit our opportunities to put in place nature-based solutions in the future. It is important for it to be on the table and for biodiversity to be visible and a part of the decision-making process. We need to be able to model those trade-offs in order to understand and to go in with our eyes open on what kinds of trade-offs we are willing to accept.

The second part of the question was on emissions from land uses. I am not sure I fully understood the question. There are emissions from land use which are unaccounted for and when those come on the balance sheet, they will lead to higher emissions nationally. We need to be reducing those emissions.

We need to be doing things like rewetting peatlands to reduce emissions from those land uses. How that is accounted for is a separate problem I am not going to get into. Emissions are emissions, and should be reduced regardless of where they arise.