We will now move to the short debate. Carolyn Thomas will take the short debate this afternoon, so if Members—

If Members can just be quiet so I can call Carolyn Thomas for the short debate. Carolyn Thomas.

Diolch, Llywydd. I've given Huw, Delyth and Sam Kurtz a minute of my time each. 

Whether you were buzzing about on World Bee Day or you’re on the verge of completing No Mow May, this time of year focuses on celebrating and learning about biodiversity, and since being elected last year, I’ve been impressed by the level of understanding in this Senedd. But the roots of my interest in nature go back to my childhood; in fact, if a child does not connect with nature before the age of 12, then they are less likely to as an adult. I used to power up a steep hill in my village, thinking that once I get to the top there will be an amazing view, but now I wander up lovely lanes slowly, taking in the variety of natural life in the species-rich hedgerows and banks that is going on all around me.

After I was made Flintshire council’s biodiversity champion and attended some presentations and workshops, I started to look for species. I developed an eye for spotting them in the verges; I spotted wild strawberries, orchids, honeysuckle, stitchwort, wild garlic, butterflies, bees and bats. I discovered singing hedgerows full of sparrows, crows fighting buzzards, otter spraints and snakes. I noticed that there was a whole world out there, another world going on outside the human bubble that I lived in. And I'm proud to say I am now a species champion for the butterfly orchid.

Nature is beautiful, and importantly, we cannot survive without it. Our natural environment is in decline and so are the benefits it delivers. It has served us well and now we need to nurture it and help it thrive. Biodiversity is an essential underpinning element of all resilient ecosystems and is fundamental to our economic, social and cultural well-being. We so often forget that the wild food chain we were taught as children starts with the smallest of insects who rely on our native flora.

We are now in a nature emergency, and our wildlife is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. We have no choice but to act now to save it. One in six species assessed in Wales alone are at risk of extinction. That's one in six—let that sink in. We focus on tree planting for carbon storage, yet three to five times more carbon is stored within our grasslands than in our forests. Rural grass verges make up more than 50 per cent of our rich meadow land in the UK, and 97 per cent of traditional lowland grassland meadows in Wales and England were lost between 1930 and 1987. This is where we need to look to put protections in urgently.

Road verges and parks may be the only regular contact some people in Wales have with nature. Having more native areas allowed to stay wild will enhance local character, visual interest and our health and well-being. Changing how grass is cut, over time, creates more native wildflower-rich meadows in amenity areas and along roadsides. Creating wildlife corridors via wild patches, natural growth areas and focusing on only cutting desirable footpaths where needed will make a difference. This will help combat both the nature and climate emergencies by supporting wildlife, enhancing ecological connectivity, storing more carbon in our soils and building more resilience to environmental change, while letting our children connect with our wildlife, so they too will continue to protect it for our future generations.

We can make road verges and amenity grasslands—parks and other green spaces—more wildlife friendly. Regularly cut, closely mown grass may look tidy to some, but it has little benefit for wildlife. We need to take a step back from our expectations of manicured monocultured grass, weeded to boredom. We need to allow all possible meadows to reach their full potential and let flowers grow. Great work is already being carried out by local authorities, North Wales Wildlife Trust and local nature partnerships across Wales, highlighted by No Mow May, the Magnificent Meadows Cymru partnership project, and the road verge management guidelines, which are an important framework for this partnership working. I also want to pay tribute to landowners who have managed land for nature, and hope that the incoming sustainable farming scheme will offer the right incentives to encourage others who can't afford to do so or have the expertise.

If we are to cultivate a fertile future, one in which our biodiversity is allowed to bloom, much more needs to be done to protect our natural environment, and I know the Welsh Government is working hard with partners to do just that. As they say, Minister, you reap what you sow. Diolch.

The Deputy Presiding Officer took the Chair.

Thank you, Carolyn, for introducing this debate—a great contribution there. I just want to say a few words, and it's picking up on the themes that you said. We can all play a role within this. This morning before I came in, I just happened to be flicking through a book that I've got on my bedside cabinet. It was Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin's Back to Nature: How to love life—and save it. They make this point about the head change that people have got to do, the mind change to actually allow untidy places—so, verges, edges. I've done, like a lot of people, the No Mow May. I've been doing it for a few years now. My youngsters have been encouraging me to do it. It's fascinating. There's three sorts of clover coming through there, all different sizes, shapes and colours. We've got natural vetch coming through in it, and, of course, the dandelions and daisies and so on. It looks beautiful and it's an absolute feast for wildlife. There's the hedges and edges campaign that's going on as well, about what can farmers do with their verges, a bit less manicured, a bit more untidy, with homes and habits for wildlife—flora and fauna. And also, there's what we can do with town councils and county councils in terms of pesticide-free communities. But it's all a head change—that's what we've got to do, and that's the exciting thing about this. It's actually making that leap to say, 'We've all got a part to play'—sometimes it takes bold decisions to do it, and then sticking with it, and we can make a real difference to biodiversity. So, Carolyn, thank you very much.

I wanted to thank Carolyn Thomas for bringing this debate before the Senedd. What a wonderful and important debate it's been. The pandemic has led so many of us to re-evaluate the importance of nature in our own localities. One doesn't have to travel to mountains and lakes to experience nature in all its glory, it's also there in our villages, or it could be if we allow it to grow. Wild flowers, as we've heard in that very passionate speech from Carolyn, provide some of the most beautiful spectacles and I'm fully supportive of any efforts to see more wild flowers in bloom. Finally, the nature emergency, of course, affects us all, but this is one way in which we can play a constructive part in species recovery and ensure that more people can appreciate nature in their daily lives. Thank you, once again, to Carolyn for this debate.

Huw, I was really struck, in your contribution there, by the importance of the beauty of untidiness. I was trying to think what 'the beauty of untidiness' would be in Welsh. I think it's 'prydferthwch blerwch', which is almost cynghanedd, so it's also a beautiful phrase in Welsh, and poetic too.

Thank you to the Member for North Wales for bringing this forward. As someone who brought forward the statement of opinion on hedges and edges that the Member kindly co-signed as well, I think this is really important. The agricultural community absolutely has a part to play in this as well. It's about planting the right tree in the right place for the right reasons, and they are absolutely on board with that. A little bit of a plea to the Deputy Minister, though, while he's here: let's not make public safety secondary to this. I draw the example of Milton in my constituency where verges are having a detrimental impact on visualisation on the road on the A477, with constituents really worried about the access from their properties onto the main road, because the verges are encroaching onto the road itself. But, Carolyn, you mentioned how you slow down to look at these verges and enjoy what's there, and I was reminded of the phrase from W.H. Davies's poem, 'Leisure':

'What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare?'

I think it's very fitting that we do take a little bit more time to stare and enjoy what nature gives us in Wales. Diolch.

I call on the Deputy Minister for Climate Change to reply to the debate—Lee Waters.

Thank you very much. That was a short and fruitful debate with many thoughtful contributions. Thank you, Carolyn, for tabling it and for the work you've been doing with us to help inform an approach on this to work with local authorities to try and spread good practice.

You highlighted the alarming rate at which nature is being depleted and many of the practical ways that we can all try and mitigate that. You also highlighted the good work being done by our Local Places for Nature scheme, as well as the projects, as Huw Irranca-Davies mentioned, being taken forward by town councils, housing associations, schools, the NHS and so on. I won't repeat the figures or the benefits that have been highlighted by Members. I would agree with Carolyn Thomas about the possibility from our road verges—we have 29,000 miles of road verges and they have the potential to sustain an astonishing amount of wildlife. And I take Sam Kurtz's point about the example in his constituency of verges in Milton. Where highway authorities do cut verges, they are very mindful of the impact that it has on visibility and on road safety. But even beyond the immediate side of the highway where these things are issues, there's a huge amount of surrounding land, which has got great potential, and, of course, the hedges and edges in your own community, not just on farms—little scraps of land here and there where there is potential to harness wildlife.

So, there is much work to be done. Carolyn has done some good work in promoting the collection of cuttings to stop the grass creating dead vegetation and smothering delicate plants, and collecting seeds. In fact, we have funded a number of local authorities to have the machinery that will allow them to collect the seeds and, in the process, support the local provenance of flowers. Having a monoculture wildflower intruder in our countryside, for the best of intentions, can, in fact, serve to stifle biodiversity, and that's not what we want. And Huw Irranca-Davies is right: having the courage to accept messiness. I'm doing it in my own front lawn, and I do feel the disapproving looks of neighbours that my hedge is a little unkempt and the lawn is looking scruffy. And I think that is one of our barriers, and I think that's one of the pieces of work Carolyn Thomas has identified, the need to educate people. It's not the council being lazy in not cutting the grass, there's a reason for doing it. But it does require, as Huw Irranca-Davies said, a mind shift, to get people to understand that nature isn't tidy, and, in fact, tidiness is an enemy of biodiversity encouragement.

So, there's a big education project to be done, and we are funding a range of projects across the country. Just to name one, the one mentioned by Carolyn Thomas—it was the North Wales Wildlife Trust's Biodiversity means Business project on the Wrexham industrial estate, which has created over 600 m of wildflower verges and eight roundabouts planted with wild flowers. There are many more examples that we are funding right across Wales, and we're working closely with Plantlife and their No Mow May campaign, which we really want to embed, and understand the barriers and do practical things to encourage them. My colleague Julie James is currently conducting a biodiversity deep dive, working in collaboration with a range of stakeholders, to try and understand practical barriers and how we overcome them.

But I think the key point for us to emphasise—we've mentioned in the Chamber this afternoon already the climate emergency, but every time you mention the climate emergency, we must also mention the nature emergency that runs in parallel. And there are tensions between the two, and those tensions need to be managed and worked through. I had an excellent visit with the RSPB last week to the Conwy nature reserve on the side of the A55, and saw there, in a pretty unpromising location, really, how they've created an idyll of biodiversity, but how there are tensions between our two objectives of climate and nature emergency mitigations. And I think the more we talk about it, the more we mainstream and normalise untidiness. And for once, I think we can all embrace being a bit scruffy. Diolch.

Thank you, Deputy Minister. And that brings today's proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 17:47.