8. How will the sustainable farming scheme help tackle the nature emergency? OQ57546

Responding to the nature emergency is a key objective of our proposed sustainable farming scheme. Future farm support will reward farmers who take action to maintain and create resilient ecosystems. 

Thank you, Minister, for that answer. I'm giving at the outset full credit and any royalties that accrue from any mention hereof to Sam Kurtz for a statement of opinion he laid yesterday, fully supported on a cross-party basis by Mabon ap Gwynfor and myself—and there'll be many others, no doubt—on the continuing hedges, edges and tree-planting campaign spearheaded by the Woodland Trust Cymru and Coed Cymru. Does the Minister agree with this campaign that there's a need to increase trees in the right places on farms to urgently mitigate the climate and ecological emergency, and that in particular there are multiple nature, ecosystem and global cooling benefits, and, indeed, flood prevention and mitigation et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that can come from an agreed quality of maintenance and expansion of hedges and shelterbelts, planted fresh watercourses at edges, and expanded wood pasture? If so, will she support the role of good-quality expanded hedges and edges as a universal part of a sustainable farming scheme, providing direct support for farmers on the basis of multiple public and environmental benefits for cost-effective use of public money?

Thank you. Certainly that will be part of our sustainable farming scheme, which, as I mentioned in my earlier answer to Peter Fox, we are currently co-designing with our farmers and other interested bodies. You'll be aware that my colleague the Deputy Minister for Climate Change did a deep dive into the barriers of planting trees and what we could do to ensure that—. If we are going to react to the climate emergency in the way that we want to and to become a net-zero Wales by 2050, we've got to plant 86 million trees over the next decade. We haven't been planting enough trees—I don't think anybody would say that we had.

It's really important that we help our farmers get involved in these plans. The Deputy Minister has set up a woodland finance working group, which obviously my officials sit on with his, because I hold most of the funding in relation to trees, but, of course, the policy sits within the climate change ministry. It's really important that we work across Government, so it's good to hear of cross-party statements of opinion. We want to work with anybody, our stakeholders, to ensure that we do plant significantly more trees. But what is really important, and you said it at the beginning of your question, is that we plant the right tree in the right place.