I’m very happy to support this motion, as is the Welsh Conservative party. Can I thank Plaid Cymru for tabling it this afternoon?

The Paris agreement, as we’ve noted, is very important. It will ensure, we hope, that we keep the temperature increase below 2 degrees centigrade and aim for a reduction of 1.5 degrees—that’s very, very ambitious and many people feel that those sorts of increases are already locked in. So, it does call for emissions to peak as soon as possible and rapid reductions thereafter. It’s very important that, as a devolved administration, as the legislature here, we examine the Executive’s priorities and commitments and what they’re identifying in their draft budget and ask these sorts of questions about how we’re going to be doing our bit to ensure that sort of progress is delivered.

I’d like to concentrate on things that affect particularly in Wales. Obviously, it’s an international agreement and there’s a lot of stuff about the partnership we lead with the developing world, which I think is very apposite—but perhaps for another day. We need partnerships with active citizens and NGOs. I really think this is crucial to the whole debate. Without citizens agreeing with the choices and urging us to make some of the choices—like, perhaps, not always having car parks in city centres and improving public transport and active travel in all sorts of ways—and also the NGOs playing that scrutiny role and coming up with best practice and developing new ideas as well. That’s clearly very, very important.

I notice that the Paris agreement does refer to cities having a key role to play in reducing emissions. I think we need a revolution in urban design, frankly, and how we live in our cities. We can turn that to our great advantage, and it does mean that we put people, particularly children, first and not motorised transport and other technologies like air conditioning, even in a climate like ours, in all sorts of buildings now. These things have to be revisited and challenged.

I was very pleased that Theresa May used her maiden speech at the UN to promise the UK’s ratification of the Paris agreement by the end of the year, and other Governments have moved ahead as well, with even more pace in some cases, so that, I do believe, the Paris agreement will become formal in terms of its enforcement on Friday. So, I think we should remember that on Friday. Key to what the states parties are promising is to have nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, and that they get reviewed every five years to make them more ambitious. I think it’s going to be very important that the devolved administrations are part of that process, and if the Minister’s got any information on that and how we will be participating in the UK’s NDC, I’d very much like to hear it.

Can I just conclude by reminding everyone how serious the current situation is? There are now levels of carbon dioxide amounting to 400 parts per million in the atmosphere: that’s 40 per cent higher than pre-industrial levels. This is measurable. This is something that cannot be refuted. There are people that question the effect of that increase on the atmosphere, of course, though I have to say, it’s overwhelmingly plausible now that that is the main contributor to the rapid increase in temperature that we’ve seen. In the last four years, more than a trillion tons of ice have been lost from the Iceland ice sheet. That would fill 400 million Olympic swimming pools. There is also now a clear danger of feedback loops developing that will accelerate the loss of ice from the Arctic. Meltwater, for example, can penetrate to the bedrock, lubricate the base and quicken the movement of glaciers. This has been called by one person ‘meltwater cannibalism’, and it is really quite a shocking thought. At the end of the last ice age, Llywydd, sea levels rose by more than a foot a decade. We don’t have as much ice as they had then, but the consequences of Arctic ice going, some of which—a fair bit in Greenland is obviously on land, and a lot of ice is on land in the Antarctic—and whilst floating ice won’t actually affect sea levels, this will, and we could be facing the rapid need to adapt to what is already locked into the system. But we should now be doing as much as possible to prevent any worse damage than is now inevitable.