Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. Discussing the weather is something that we as Welsh people delight in doing and, of course, 2018 has been of huge pleasure to many people when it comes to the weather. We recall the snow and cold weather at the beginning of the year, the endless rain of the spring, one of the hottest summers on record, and storm Callum in the autumn bringing a month’s worth of rain in two days. Across the world, the story is the same, with increasing examples of extreme weather, among other signs that the climate is changing.

A few weeks ago, a report by the IPCC was published, and this wasn't just another report to make some cheap headlines, but the high point of work that saw input from thousands of climate scientists from across the globe. The message in that report is entirely clear: time is running out. Time is running out to make the changes to our way of life, how we produce and use energy, how we travel around this earth, how we build and warm our homes, how we use our natural resources. Because the trajectory that we’re on in terms of global warming means that unless we change our ways then the implications will be damaging and extreme—not just more flooding, but whole states disappearing underwater because of increases in sea level; not just more drought, but more starvation on an international level; widespread disappearance of species and an environment that is far more challenging to life on this earth.

The conclusion of the report, of course, is that Governments do have to take urgent action on a far-reaching level by 2030 in order to limit global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius. There’s no doubt now, in my view, that this is the greatest challenge facing humanity. We all recall the discussion at the UN convention on climate change in Paris in 2015 that we had to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius and that efforts should be made to limit it to 1.5 degrees. What the IPCC report tells us now is that global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. Any element of warming beyond that would bring risks of long-term and irreversible changes, with whole ecosystems being lost.

What this report doesn’t do to the same extent, of course, is to outline exactly what each of us needs to achieve in order to deliver the necessary change. It’s a matter for wider society, of course, and we as politicians have a key role in creating that other environment—the policy environment and the funding environment that will facilitate much of the change that needs to be seen.

Our motion today notes that the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee here at the Assembly has come to the conclusion that the Government is likely to fail to reach its targets for reducing carbon emissions by 2020. The purpose of this motion, therefore, is to call on the Welsh Government to outline what major steps it will take in response to the IPCC report. We of course are taking the opportunity to outline some of the things that we as a party feel should be done—not everything; it falls a long way short of that—as part of the transformation that is required in the face of these climate change challenges. They include, of course, action in terms of energy, transportation, housing, and some of the sectors that contribute most to carbon emissions.

We need to tackle energy from both directions, of course—first of all, we need to reduce the usage of energy and then increase the amount of energy produced from renewable sources. The sustainability committee of the last Assembly, in its report 'A Smarter Energy Future for Wales', called for creating annual targets to reduce the demand for energy, and it’s disappointing that that hasn’t seen a positive response. It also called for more help for people to use energy more efficiently, and I will expand upon that in just a moment.