Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2026 [Draft]
I am grateful to Sarah Boyack for all the work that she has done on this important bill.
The bill makes me wonder where we would be had we not waited until now to formally recognise in law the wellbeing of future generations. If we had not left it so late to think about decarbonising, would we be experiencing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events that we see now? If planning law had been written with nature in mind, would as many as one in nine of our native species be under threat of extinction?
So much destruction was and is done knowingly. As early as 1954, the fossil fuel and car industries had clear evidence that their activities would cause global warming in the future, yet they drilled and burned like there was no tomorrow. Indeed, there might not be a tomorrow if we do not take radical climate action today. The wealthy few’s greed for profit in the present was put ahead of the wellbeing of future generations and of the poorest. For too long, politics has been trapped in the short term—the next headline, the next budget line and the next election cycle. Meanwhile, the planet burns, nature collapses and inequality deepens—by design and not by accident. It is no wonder that we have young people going on climate strikes from school, protesting that their futures have been sacrificed and struggling daily with existential dread.
The bill is a start, but I believe that we must go further. When climate scientists are saying that we are likely to breach 1.5°C of warming within a few years, we cannot just have regard for sustainable development and the wellbeing of future generations. The duty could be strengthened so that public bodies must, as Oxfam and Stop Climate Chaos have suggested,
“promote and deliver sustainable development while protecting the wellbeing of current and future generations”.
That comes closer to the definition in the Welsh act, which is now approaching its 10th birthday. Public bodies there are under a duty to carry out sustainable development. We are starting 10 years behind other parts of the United Kingdom, so we should be doing more, faster.
I would like the definitions of sustainable development and some other terms that we use to be broadened. No less than radical climate action will do, and in everything, everywhere and by everyone. The definitions of wellbeing and of sustainable development are entirely anthropocentric, but that must change to reflect the nature emergency faced by the animal, plant and insect life that we share our planet with and by the habitats and ecosystems that sustain all life.
Also, as shown by the thousands of tonnes of waste still being exported to low and middle-income countries, we must recognise that the actions that we take here have an impact far beyond Scotland. Further, because we must all take climate action, the duty should be expanded to all public organisations and to any other organisations or businesses that carry out public functions on their behalf.