Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:40 pm on 2 March 2022.
Well, again, I will just tell Natasha Asghar what I said to the Chamber at the beginning: the panel report on climate change that was published on Monday said the situation facing all of us is worse than they thought—it is at the upper end of the projections of the impact of global warming and the catastrophic impact that will have on our economy and our society. It said we have already been impacted, changes locked in, and there is now a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to build a climate-resilient society. I think we should all take that seriously. We can't de-link these things because we want to score political points about a different issue. The roads review panel, as part of its criteria, looked at the impact of climate change on transport and the pipeline of projects we had, and concluded the Llanbedr scheme was not consistent with the Wales transport strategy and was not consistent with achieving net zero. Now, I don't think that can be lightly set aside.
If you read the panel report on the airfield, it did show, in terms of access to that site, there were other options, and we have committed to work with Gwynedd council to explore those options to see what can be done. But we still come back to the fundamental point: climate change has profound and far-reaching consequences for us all, and we need to start reflecting that in the decisions we make. It's no good the Conservatives signing up to targets when every single time a decision is made as a consequence of those targets, they call for a different approach. It's not consistent.