Can I say to Delyth Jewell, who introduced this debate in the name of Siân Gwenllian, how much I welcome this? And it feels to me as if there is now a growing not just cross-party consensus, but a real momentum behind not just the climate change crisis, but the nature crisis and the biodiversity crisis as well. And that should be encouraging to the Minister, who spoke earlier on today at an event that Llyr and others attended on how we actually protect the very best in our marine environment, as well as sustainably exploit the marine environment as well. The Minister did speak very eloquently in her remarks at that debate, but I'm really, really pleased this early in the sixth Senedd that we have this gathering momentum around doing the right thing, following the evidence, sometimes making the hard and difficult decisions, and I see the Minister here, Lee Waters, has just joined us and he'll be very familiar with that from the announcements only a week ago on the roads review as well: following the evidence, following the data for climate change, for biodiversity. 

It also, of course, falls on the back of a motion that was laid on 15 June here in this place that was co-signed by Llyr and Janet and Jane Dodds as well, which in drawing reference to COP15 coming up—the UN Convention on Biological Diversity Conference—also called then on

'Welsh Government to support a successful outcome from COP15 by making clear its support for a global target to halt and begin to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and secure substantive recovery by 2050, and to commit to reflecting this in domestic law, incorporating targets for species and habitats.'

And of course that is reflected very much in the motion in front of us today.

But the scale of what we have to do has been known for quite some time and, in fact, Welsh Government has acknowledged it too. In the refresh that they did of the nature recovery action plan, in prefatory remarks there, it acknowledged that in the post 2020 framework for the CBD's strategic plan to 2050

'very few of the 2020 Aichi targets have been achieved and that biodiversity is still in decline.'

It acknowledged that:

'The 2019 report on biodiversity and ecosystems from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services...described the loss of biodiversity as a threat of equal size to the climate emergency', which is enshrined within this motion here today. And, of course, it also flagged up the need to address the post-EU exit governance gap. And away from the political aspects of this, we know that there is that clear and pending risk of a governance gap here, as we have left the EU. This is not a political point; it's just a pragmatic reality point that we need to address, and it refers to the need to actually change the way in which we approach landscape management here, through sustainable farming as well, and we'll come to that during this Senedd.

But it also pointed to some of the urgent short-term actions. It says we need to align the responses to the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis. That's within this motion today. I absolutely support this. It says that we need to address the post-EU exit funding gap for agri-environment measures—the Government is getting on with that; we need to support that—and that we need to provide spatial direction for action on biodiversity. It's not enough anymore to do small piecemeal fixes or pilots and so on; we need to do this at scale at large spatial dimensions, to improve the condition of the protected sites network, terrestrially and marine as well, and explore new and sustainable funding mechanisms as well, and so on.

So, we know we have to get on with this. I really welcome the wording within this about closing the environmental governance gap, about focusing on the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in the autumn, about targets, because targets are important. There are always the dangers with targets that you pick the wrong targets and you have the negative consequences, but I think we are clever enough to get through that. I really do think that. There is a commitment from the Government to do it, and that legally binding requirement to reverse biodiversity loss through those targets is important.

So, Minister, I think this debate is helpful—it genuinely is—and I look forward to the response that you bring forward, but I feel that there is a cross-party momentum now behind these sorts of changes, which is good to see. It shouldn't be seen as a threat to Government; it should be seen as a support to Government to do the right thing, follow the evidence, and sometimes take some really tough decisions as well.