6. Plaid Cymru Debate: The energy sector and the climate and nature emergencies

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:08 pm on 13 October 2021.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Delyth Jewell Delyth Jewell Plaid Cymru 4:08, 13 October 2021

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Any emergency requires urgency in response. That is the message at the heart of our debate today, because an emergency is defined as requiring immediate action; it is what makes it an emergency. We in Wales have declared both nature and climate emergencies in recent years, but to date, enough action has not been taken to reinforce those declarations. I fear that waiting is not a luxury we can any longer afford. Wales and the world face climate and nature disaster, and just as these crises are intertwined and their causes interconnected, so too must their solutions be interwoven. We must have parity in approaches to tackling both of these crises, both climate change and biodiversity decline, because Dirprwy Lywydd, we stand at a turning point in human history. It's not often that we can truly say something of that magnitude, but it is true. The choices we make now or those we fail to make won't just set the scene for generations, they'll ensure whether or not that scene still exists.

COP15 opens this week and COP26 is on the horizon. Now, they offer the world a chance to turn the tide of climate change and biodiversity decline. The stakes are high, but many fear that the frameworks that will come out of COP could be a cop-out, a collective burying of heads in the sands of time at the very moment that those sands run out of the hourglass, and at the hour of destiny world leaders could fall short. But it needn't be that way, and Wales can help set the tone. Instead of waiting for COP26 and COP15 to conclude and take from those frameworks our own solutions, we could show the way and prove again how a country the size of Wales can be world leading.