To be honest, it is difficult to deal with any of those matters concisely. If there were easy yes or no answers, I would be giving them. You can see that I am shuffling backwards and forwards, because the briefings that I have are similar across a range of subjects.
It is our express desire to maintain not just, in effect, parity with EU standards and to look to the EU for a lot of what we want to do, but to try to do that on a more organised basis. Indeed, I have an event coming up that will be put on by Scotland house, which involves the European side of things. I have tried to maintain contact with the chair of the European Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, for example. I am trying to keep all the networks going.
I think that the committee heard last week from Terry A’Hearn. He talks about maintaining contact with the European Environment Agency organisations so that we do not lose those connections. At the moment, those are the ways in which we are trying to do what Mr Stevenson asks about. You will know that there are attempts to formalise some of those matters. Members will have seen the attempt to formalise a continuation of the Erasmus programme, but that does not work. If there are opportunities to formalise some of the matters, I expect that we will want to pursue those but, at the moment, it is difficult to see them.
It is pretty clear that people in Scotland want us to retain close links with EU institutions and European member states. Frankly, that is the path that represents the best future for Scotland. I have indicated that I have been attempting to do that over the past few months, with direct one-to-one meetings and conversations, and I expect that my colleagues in other portfolios have been replicating what I have been doing.
We have other mechanisms by which we can try to do it. The fact that we are European co-chair of the Under2 Coalition brings us into direct contact with a great many other devolved Administrations across Europe, with whom we have very good relationships. Throughout that, we are trying to increase our global ambition and to maintain our voice in the world.
I could talk about a variety of things, such as the European green new deal. However, if you are asking me about formal networks, I would have to say that there is not much just yet. Part of that is just about the difficulty that we have at the moment and the speed with which things have been happening. We are not yet much further forward in our attempts to establish where we could have a more formal arrangement.
Stewart Stevenson mentioned other things that go beyond the European Union. There are things such as the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic—OSPAR—and the rest of it. These are global agreements, and it is important that we are absolutely clear that we want to continue, and take a leadership role in, discussions at that level, particularly when there are workstreams of strategic interest for Scotland, as there often are.
We have also done a huge amount of work on the other COP that will be held this year—COP15, on biological diversity—and on the Edinburgh process, on which we have led and which is about representing the Under2 level of Administrations. We are continuing to work on those as formally as we possibly can in all the arenas that are available to us.