7. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its plans for Scottish carbon credits, including how it ensures benefits for local communities. (S6O-02282)

The Scottish Government is committed to establishing a values-led high-integrity market for responsible private investment in our natural capital, as set out in “Scotland’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation”. That commitment includes the voluntary carbon markets, as backed by the United Kingdom Climate Change Committee, and is supported by our interim principles for responsible investment in natural capital.

Those principles set out that investment should deliver integrated land use; provide public, private and community benefit; demonstrate engagement and collaboration; be ethical and values led, be of high environmental integrity; and support diverse and productive land ownership. Those are Scottish ministers’ expectations of those who would invest in our natural capital.

I thank the cabinet secretary for that reply, but is it not the case that, far from protecting community interests in achieving net zero, the Scottish National Party-Green Government has embarked on an exercise in privatising our nature and opening up carbon credits to speculators and giant corporations to asset strip, cash in and make all the gains, and so widen the wealth inequality gap even further?

They include Fleetcor, which sells fuel cars to the road haulage industry; the oil giant Shell; defence companies such as Thales Group; and banks such as Barclays.

How is that green or sustainable, or even in the national interest? How is that values led? Is that what equality, opportunity and community looks like under this SNP-Green Government?

It is quite the opposite of the narration from Richard Leonard. It is about the Scottish Government recognising that our natural capital is an exceptionally valuable asset to our people and to our environment. It is also about our recognising that there are many interventions that we need to take in our natural environment that will help us to rise to meet the challenge of the climate and nature emergency, and that will have other co-benefits, including good green jobs in rural areas.

However, the public purse can never, and will never, fund those interventions alone. We are therefore dedicating ourselves—as Miss Martin set out—to leveraging necessary private investment, but we are doing so in a pioneering, values-led, high-integrity way that is verifiable and that benefits the people in this country. That sits alongside the development of an ambitious land reform bill and continued investment in the Scottish land fund, which is helping communities throughout the country to buy land and assets in their local areas and put them to local use.

Pension and hedge funds are engaged in the carbon market, similar to the way in which they are involved in the deposit return scheme, where the Scottish National Party and Greens decided to award a multimillion pound waste collection contract to an American hedge fund. Can the cabinet secretary confirm that it is SNP-Green policy to develop new initiatives in order to benefit multinational hedge funds?

No, that is not this Government’s motivation. As I have just narrated in response to Richard Leonard, our motivation involves seeking to harness the opportunities that we have in abundance in Scotland in a way that helps us to rise to the climate and nature emergency, but equally in a way that empowers our people to benefit from the schemes and the developments that will happen in the communities around them.

I refer Maurice Golden to the principles for responsible investment in natural capital. They are pioneering principles that are being referred to by other organisations in countries that are trying now to do likewise, and they state very clearly ministers’ expectations on ethical and values-led investment, high environmental integrity and public, private and community benefit. I would be more than happy to furnish Maurice Golden with evidence of how they are now being utilised by those who are investing in Scotland.