4. What is the First Minister's assessment of the impact of COP26 for Wales? OQ57202

I thank the Member. Llywydd, a major impact of COP26 will have been the increased public consciousness it has created in Wales of the need for urgent action. Through COP Cymru and Wales Climate Week we aim to galvanise the collective effort required of Welsh citizens post COP26 in pursuit of a planet fit for future generations.

First Minister, I very much look forward to taking part in COP Cymru, because I'm sure that's absolutely right—we need to engage everybody in this venture to save the world from climate disaster. 

Clearly, COP is a work in progress in persuading all countries that we have to radically change in order to avert the climate disaster that is staring us in the face. The UK retains its leadership of COP and yet, in this country, the UK continues to spend £10 billion a year on fuel subsidies. So, I very much welcome Wales joining the end oil and gas coalition. How do you think you can help persuade the UK Government of the need to end the scandal of fossil fuel subsidies, which is such a major contributor to the problems we now face?

I thank Jenny Rathbone for that, and thank her as well for having taken the time to travel to Glasgow and to be part of the COP discussions, as I know other Members in other parts of the Chamber did too. I agree, Llywydd, with what Jenny Rathbone said—COP did deliver a number of very important outcomes. The steps ahead in relation to deforestation, on methane, on the sums of money that have been put together now to support those countries in other parts of the world that are already at the sharp end of climate change—those were successes of the COP process, and they were successes of the leadership of the COP process shown by Alok Sharma as well. There were things, however, that we would have hoped that COP would have been able to grapple with that now are deferred to another day. And certainly, the curbing of fossil fuel extraction is one of the things that COP didn't bring off in the way that its initial ambitions would have suggested.

So, I'm very glad, Llywydd, that Wales is one of the eight founding core members of the end oil and gas coalition. It was one of the high spots of our participation in the conference. We are members alongside member states such as Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Ireland, Sweden and New Zealand, and we're there with other sub-national Governments from California and Quebec. The alliance will become the vehicle, we believe, through which we will collectively, with those other partners, be able to do more to end the extraction of fossil fuels. Here in Wales, we have the hierarchy that my colleague Lesley Griffiths developed during the time that she was responsible for these things, in which fossil fuels are at the bottom of our fuel and energy hierarchy. And in Wales, we are committed to reducing and then preventing further extraction of those inevitably limited and finite resources. We will bring the policies that we have delivered and the determination we have to implement them to be part of that alliance, and then attract others to the same cause, because that is an absolutely necessary part of the follow-up work that now will have to be conducted beyond the conference in Glasgow.