But we have it demonstrated in front of us that active travel, the ability to use our streets as more than just a place to put your car, really does improve physical and mental health. Increasing woodlands, biodiversity and access to the natural environment absolutely has a beneficial effect on mental health, and if you feel that you are able to improve your natural environment, it has an even greater effect on increasing mental health.

One of the things I'm just going to sneak in as a personal experience here is: some of you will know that I had breast cancer early on in my political career, and I went to the Maggie's centre in Swansea quite a lot; it was really helpful there. What they have, of course, is a garden woodland outside them, and you are able to work on that garden and woodland and enhance it, and it really does make you feel better; there's absolutely no doubt about it. Even facing some big personal challenges it can make you feel better. It also helps men to talk to each other when they're doing gardening as well, which I thought was an added benefit; the Men's Sheds movement was part of that. So, all of these things really do make a difference.

We will have multiple benefits from those things as well. It improves people's mental health and well-being, but also, getting people out of cars for short journeys, travelling in a way which improves their health, is ambitious. We've all had a love affair with the car over the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, but we all know that it produces multiple benefits—cleaner air, less congested roads, improved mental well-being, busier local shops. So, our ambitious agenda to make sure that we have 30 per cent of people working remotely—and that doesn't mean just from home; that means in their local communities, in hubs and so on—will really help a whole series of agendas there.

We've seen projects delivering sustainable models for health and well-being. There are walking groups, for example in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority's west Wales Let's Walk initiative. I know some of you have been involved in that and are participating in the debate. There's work with GP practices and other community settings across Wales, making sure that the medical practice has—I'm reluctant to use the term 'social prescribing', but is engaged with making people connected to their local communities and access to the countryside as part of the well-being initiative. The Outdoor Partnership's Opening Doors to the Outdoors project, for example, brings together health professionals with outdoor activities experts to increase physical activity levels, improve mental and physical health, linking local community clubs with mental health teams, enabling patients to lead independent, long-term active lifestyles because of their greater connection to their community and the natural world that surrounds them. 

We have to have a truly green and blue recovery. We've got to enhance our biodiversity, underpin our economy, improve our environment and aid our health and well-being. Heledd, I think, mentioned the flooding most. We're very well aware of those kinds of climate problems that we have coming ahead of us. What we've got to do is make ourselves more resilient to that. We have to make our lifestyles more resilient. We have to make sure that our climate doesn't get any worse, and we have to make sure that we have all the strategies in place to ensure that people are safe and well in their own homes and can take advantage of that. I don't think that it would be a good thing for me to pretend, talking to you now, that we are unlikely to have a dramatic flood over the next winter here in Wales. Sadly, I think there is every likelihood that we will. We've come out of the last 14 months or so with the wettest February last year, and the hottest May; this year the coldest February and the wettest May. The climate has had a profound effect on the way we live our lives just in the last 14 months, never mind over the rest of the world. 

During the youth climate summit yesterday, one of the contributors called the small island nations who are most affected by climate change globally—they don't like being called that, apparently, we were told last night; they like to be called 'big ocean countries' not 'small island countries'. I thought that was a lovely way of thinking about it, because it makes you really realise the extreme importance of the ocean to communities right across the world, and Wales, of course, is no exception to that. So, looking again at our marine conservation zones, the way that we help our small sustainable fisheries, our inshore fisheries and so on, is an excellent way of encouraging people to take part in enhancing our biodiversity and our decarbonisation goals. 

I think I've done a little bit of a canter through all of the issues. What we want to do, in short, is safeguard our environment, build a green economy, provide sustainable homes, and create the well-being of future generations place-making communities that enhance our mental health and well-being, but also our community cohesion—our sense of ourselves and our country and our nation. And we can absolutely do that.

The First Minister, in setting up this new portfolio, has asked me to put the environment, biodiversity loss and climate change at the heart of everything we do as a Government—not just my own portfolio. By bringing together responsibilities for housing, transport, planning, energy and the environment, we can tackle the dangers of climate change and enhance our natural assets to the full, we can build the green, sustainable future for Wales we all hope to see. But we can't do that alone as a Government; we must take the people of Wales with us, we must take all of you with us, we must take as many people as possible with us, and take our businesses, our corporations and our global responsibility really very seriously.

I'm going to go back and indulge myself for the last two minutes of my contribution by saying that you will all know as well that I have long talked about enhancing, protecting and creating woodlands as one of my big drivers—making sustainable homes out of Welsh timber, making sure the supply chains are sustainable, that our farmers and agricultural industries can contribute to them, and in doing so, enhance the biodiversity and the natural beauty of Wales. So, we will have a national forest programme, to create the network of woodlands running the entire length of the country, but we will also be creating a sustainable timber industry to go alongside that.

My colleague Lee Waters is listening in to this debate as well. He will be taking a lead in looking immediately at what we need to do to remove the barriers to being able to achieve some of those ambitions, and bringing back to the floor of the Senedd what we will want to ask all of you to participate in, to make those things a reality. Some of you will know some of the barriers on the ground already. So, we will be looking to work across party lines, with all of you, to make sure that we are able to remove those barriers and build the woodlands in Wales that we want, and I know that you all want them as well.

We'll be able to protect our network of areas of outstanding natural beauty, sites of special scientific interest, protected nature sites, special areas of conservation rivers, and all those sorts of things. But I want to go further than that. We want to put restoration programmes in place. We want to restore our river valleys. We want to make sure that projects like the Pumlumon project, up above Machynlleth, which some of you I'm sure will be familiar with—restoring the sphagnum moss bogs at the top of the River Severn to help us prevent the terrible flooding that we've seen in our rivers, so that we get good river catchment restoration all the way through Wales.

There's an enormous amount to do to improve our environment, protect our endangered species, and provide spaces for emotional enrichment as we do it. There is nothing better for your mental health than knowing that you have made a substantial difference personally and in your community to the surroundings that you have, and that you've been able to be involved and engaged in that way. So, I can assure you, Delyth, that we're really grateful for you to have brought this to our attention, given us the opportunity to debate it, and to start the conversation, because that's all we're able to do tonight. I hope you can see that we're very engaged in it already, that Lynne and I, in particular, will be looking forward to working with you, and across party lines, on making sure that these agendas work for us all. We're a little nation, we have a long-standing and proud commitment of leadership in this field, both at home and on an international stage. So, we're really proud to take that forward.

One last thing I want to mention is our Uganda tree project. One of the things that we've been really successful in doing is planting more than 1 million trees out in Uganda. It's been a particularly successful project. One of the ways we did it was that we just asked everybody to plant a tree, and then we made sure that they could get hold of the right native trees to do that. So, interesting ideas such as that, which have worked elsewhere—would they work for us? Those kinds of things—that's what we want to look at, really small steps: what we need to do to enhance our tree nurseries; what we need to do to make our jobs sustainable as a result of that; what we need to do to make Wales the nation we want it to be.

I'm delighted to be able to at least start that conversation, Delyth, and I am very grateful to you for bringing it forward at such an early stage in the sixth Senedd. Diolch yn fawr.