Wales' climate targets - the problem that is proving impossible to solve
Welsh farmers are fuming and the Welsh Gov are in a really tough spot
Hello!
Take a look at the picture below. This was taken inside Welshpool Livestock Market. It isn’t bulls, cows or sheep occupying the pens but something far harder to domesticate: Welsh farmers.
There have been a series of such meetings in Wales over recent weeks to air frustrations with what they perceive to be the Welsh Government’s anti-agricultural policies. Most prominent among their frustrations is the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS), which is due to start in 2025 and which will require all farms to allocate at least 10% of land to trees and an additional 10% of land to semi-natural habitat.
This image is a really good illustration of the challenge policy-makers in Cardiff Bay currently face as they try and fail to hit Wales’ climate targets.
Now this is complex. It is not a case of the Welsh Government doing something terrible, stupid or even, necessarily, unreasonable. But nor are the farmers' concerns without merit and there are perfectly legitimate reasons for them to feel both frustrated and threatened.
The Welsh Government is trying to do something incredibly hard - become carbon neutral by 2050. Today I am going to try and put into simple terms the biggest challenge the Welsh Government is facing, why it is so hard for them to deal with and where they are making mistakes (especially around messaging and renewables).
Where we are at and where we need to get to
Here are some headlines from the situation:
Agriculture accounts for around 12%-14% of Welsh emissions (UK wide it is about 10%).
The sectors of agriculture and land use, land-use change and forestry (which has the ungainly acronym LULUCF) have seen their emissions fall by 18% since 1990. However, there has been little progress in reducing emissions in recent years.
Direct methane emissions from livestock currently make up 61% of agricultural emissions in Wales with manure management contributing an additional 14% of emissions.
In Wales, farming is the dominant land use with around 80% of Welsh land managed for agriculture.
Agriculture is a far, far harder sector to decarbonise than others. Take heating homes and driving cars. If you can produce most of your electricity from renewable sources (we will come to this later) and then use electricity to keep the radiators on and power your vehicles (AKA get rid of gas boilers and use electric cars), you make some pretty big strides towards net zero. I am not saying this is easy, just that it is a clear path to how you go about doing it.
But when it comes to agriculture, the emissions are far more stubborn. If methane emissions from livestock make up 61% of a sector's emissions, the way to reduce emissions realistically means having less livestock and making a big effort to offset emissions you can get rid of.
Just before Christmas I spoke at the National Farmers Union Cymru conference in the always delightful Llandrindod Wells. Often as a journalist you have to coax people into opening up, but this was definitely not the case here. The major talking point was the tree planting quota (10% of land should have tree coverage) which people saw as arbitrary, ill-conceived and a direct attack on themselves.
The points raised included:
“I farm literally on cliffs in Pembrokeshire, it is literally too windy to grow trees here.”
“I farm in the Vale of Glamorgan which is incredibly productive land. Why are we sacrificing really productive land to tree planting when we still need food when we could instead plant trees on land which is not as conducive to grow crops?”
“We still need food to eat. If we reduce our capacity here we will not simply just have to import more food at great cost both to our wallets and environment?”
The consensus from these farmers was that they feel like the Welsh Government isn’t just unconcerned about their plight, they feel that it is actively hostile to it. To be fair, the Welsh Government hasn’t always been great in its language when it comes to agriculture. Back in 2022 Mark Drakeford said that subsidies to replace EU funding won't be provided unless it can be justified to "Bangladeshi taxi drivers" in Cardiff.
While the First Minister’s point here does make sense (that there needs to be a justification for giving taxpayers money to farmers) it was unnecessarily combative and it was obvious that this was going to rub people up the wrong way.
Take the words of Labour MS Mike Hedges in the Senedd recently who suggested, rather combatively, that “there is no reason to subsidise agriculture” and that supporters of subsidies think “putting money in the pockets of farmers is more important than feeding kids”.
At the same conference I spoke in, rural affairs minister Lesley Griffiths also spoke. Fair play to her for fronting up to a clearly less than warm audience. But she completely lost the room when she said that “some farmers think we are not going far enough when it comes to tree planting” and also, in the style of almost every politician since the dawn of time, she shot off the second her speech was done therefore avoiding actually speaking to people they govern.
But despite the Welsh Government having characteristically bad messaging on this issue (for more examples see 20mph), it is really clear why they feel the need for serious action. Buckle up for some graphs.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC), which is an independent non-departmental public body that advises the United Kingdom and devolved Governments and Parliaments on tackling and preparing for climate change, released a progress report on how the Welsh Government was dealing with the transition to net zero and it was not good.
Below are some of the conclusions:
The black line is historic data
The purple is where the CCC say we should be at to hit targets
The yellow line (if in the graph) is the Welsh Government’s own ambition
This graph is emissions from agriculture. As you can see we have to reverse a trend to be on target.
They are also significantly off track when it comes to annual woodland creation. The damning graph below shows the target for woodland creation compared to the actual result (the numbers on the side are for thousand hectares of woodland created) as well as peatland creation.
The Welsh Government is also off track when it comes to machinery emissions.
So what you have in all the graphs above is not just the fact that the Welsh Government are off track on many key indicators, but also that they are often not even trending in the right direction.
I genuinely don’t believe that this is a lack of desire on their part. There is a really sincere wish within the Welsh Government to tackle emissions in Wales. But this does reflect that agricultural emissions are really bloody hard to reduce. To succeed in this you need a bold and confident administration which, and this is crucial, is very good at messaging, showing its workings and bringing people along for the ride. I would suggest a government that has been in power for two decades and realistically has never had legitimate challenges is unlikely to have honed the skills of boldness and persuasion because it has never had to.
This is really difficult
So you have a Welsh farming industry which in many ways is the soul of Wales, made up of communities that safeguard the Welsh language, provide our food, are big exporters and account for about 4/5ths of our land. They feel attacked by the Welsh Government and shortchanged by Brexit (which many of them voted for).
On the other hand you have a Welsh Government which is having to deal with a climate crisis while controlling none of the economic levers that other national governments around the world have. They are doing this under a Westminster administration which has failed on the climate to point that one could argue criminal charges should be brought against them. The Welsh Government also has an economy that has higher percentages of both manufacturing and agriculture (two of the hardest sectors to decarbonise) and stringent targets that it isn’t even close to hitting at this point.
They have made changes to the SFS, including making adjustments to take into account the needs of tenant farmers. The Welsh Government has also stressed that the tree coverage requirement does not apply until 2030.
The vast majority of farmers are fully aware that their industry needs to change, that they need to evolve or die. But you only bring them along with you by being ultra clear and logical in both your messaging and your legislation.
Focussing on renewables
Compared to decarbonising agriculture, decarbonising the energy grid is a breeze (literally, with wind farms). To repeat, I am not saying it is an easy thing to do, just that the technology is there, it is mature, it has significant public support and offers the opportunity to create more jobs.
Given this, some have been frustrated at the perceived lack of focus on renewables from the two Labour candidates to be the next First Minister. To be fair, much of the responsibility for this lies with the UK Government but there is a key area where the Welsh Government could make a difference - in planning.
Jess Hooper is the director of RenewableUK Cymru (a members group representing companies who work in renewable energy) who said “Unfortunately, to date we haven't seen sufficient recognition of the pivotal role renewable energy plays in growing Wales’ wider economy and decarbonising our heavy industry through the delivery of projects” adding “right now we urgently need a champion for this sector at the heart of government.”
And there is a big opportunity here. If you think about the big industries of Wales you likely think of things like mining, farming and steel. Well mining is basically gone, we have spoken about how farming is going to see a huge period of change and Port Talbot has just been given the news of almost 3,000 jobs being lost. Wales desperately needs a growth industry and given our hills and our coast line we are so well placed to be leaders in wind and tidal power.
And there is significant public support for this. A poll of Welsh people by RenewableUK Cymru asked people to what extent people supported or opposed onshore wind and the consensus was pretty overwhelming:
That same poll also expressed scepticism among the public about the chances of the Welsh Government achieving its electricity generation target.
You have to have hope
I want to just finish on a positive note because I think it is so easy to just despair when looking at climate stuff.
I am back writing this in person after a few weeks in the Galapagos Islands. It is a place, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, that has seen the best and worst of the impacts humanity can have on the environment.
80% of plants on the islands are considered invasive. There are far, far more male tortoises on the island than females because they are smaller and were historically easier for passing ships to take to be eaten or kept as pets. Much like Europeans coming to the New World, the introductions of cats, dogs, goats and horses on the islands devastated the perfectly balanced but incredibly fragile ecosystem.
Yet humans have also done incredible things to amend the issues they have caused. For example, the introduction of a particular type of fly has destroyed the populations of the island’s finches because it lays its eggs inside the chicks of many of the native birds. To counteract this, conservationists have built purpose built nests which are covered in a chemical that kills the insect so that it can’t get to the chicks while not harming any of the native animals. They also excavate every tortoise nest they can find, extract the eggs and then raise the tortoises in captivity until they are big enough to not be killed by rats then release them back into the wild.
There is a great project going on in Wales at the moment to plant sea grass. 340,000 seagrass seeds are to be planted at Penychain and Carreg y Defaid this month with the support of the community in Pen Llŷn.
Seagrass is a flowering marine plant that captures carbon from the atmosphere up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests. Globally, it accounts for 10% of annual ocean carbon storage, despite occupying only 0.2% of the seafloor.
It helps protect our coasts from erosion as it absorbs wave energy, produces oxygen, removes polluting nutrients and also helps protect sea animals. To put this in context, a 10,000m2 of seagrass can support 80,000 fish and 100 million invertebrates.
Devastatingly, up to 92% of UK seagrass has been lost in the last century.
Humanity has an incredible ability to do good when we commit to it and nature has proven itself immensely resilient. We need to keep pushing our governments and where there are difficult decisions that need to be made we have to mitigate the negative effects and bring people with us.
I hope you enjoyed. Please keep sharing the newsletter and thanks so much again for all the lovely comments.
Take care
Will
I make TV programmes. If I can help at all - let me know. Chwarel.com
Great article Will - thanks for highlighting the issue that renewables are such a positive growth story for our economy, our communities and our environment. They are the best all rounder, a win-win, and the only foreseeable levelling-up opportunity Wales has. So let's push to get those projects rolled-out quicker!