Letter to the new First Minister of Wales regarding the first 100 days plan of the Welsh Government from Climate Cymru

Letter to the new First Minister of Wales regarding the first 100 days plan of the Welsh Government from Climate Cymru

Dear Rhun ap Iorwerth MS, First Minister of Wales,

A mandate for action. Delivering for a fairer, greener Wales.

Dear First Minister,

Congratulations on your appointment as First Minister of Wales. This is a great achievement, and we wish you well in your role. We also note the publication of your new cabinet, and welcome the MSs to Cabinet roles. We are grateful that your Cabinet Minister for Rural Resilience and Sustainability, Llyr Gruffydd MS, has already reached out to meet with us during the first 100 days. We look forward to sharing our ideas with him in due course.

Climate Cymru welcomes the principle and purpose of your 100-day plan. Your commitment to a government that is people-centred, open, and cooperative mirrors the values of our movement-a coalition of hundreds of organisations, businesses, and community leaders united by the belief that the pressures facing Wales today are connected, and so are the solutions.

You have inherited a mandate at a time when there is a profound appetite for a new style of leadership. One that prioritises active listening and genuine partnership over top-down decision-making. To realise your vision, your administration has a unique opportunity to champion ambitious, joined-up policies that reflect the interconnected nature of the challenges our communities face.

To deliver the fairer, greener Wales we all strive for, climate and nature must be the heartbeat of government policy. We urge you to reinforce the portfolio of the Cabinet Minister for Rural Resilience and Sustainability by appointing a Deputy Minister for Nature and Climate. This role would be vital in bridging the gap between rural policy and national climate action, providing the dedicated oversight needed to secure a sustainable future for our land, our food systems, our health, and our wider communities.

Ahead of the Senedd election, Cymru Together was launched as a growing movement of organisations united in our call for a fairer, healthier, and more equal Wales. It is a non-party-political collaboration, organised by Climate Cymru. We convened over an open letter to all political parties on our shared goals, signed by 240 organisations, which can be viewed here. Our response to your roadmap is framed through the three pillars of the Cymru Together mandate.

1. Make life fairer

Your plan rightly identifies that poverty and rising costs are crippling households. We believe that investing in warmer homes and cheaper, cleaner energy is fundamentally an issue of fairness.
Housing and retrofit: We urge you to use your review of the Warm Homes Programme to move towards a local-authority-led, street-by-street retrofit model. Treating home energy efficiency as a national infrastructure priority is the most effective way to lower bills, raise living standards, and create secure local jobs simultaneously. How will your government ensure that this programme is scaled with the urgency required to reach every cold home in Wales, and what specific measures will be in place to ensure the hardest-to-reach households are not left behind.

Tackling poverty: We welcome the Child Payment Pilot (Cynnal) and the ambitious childcare offer. However, to truly change a child’s life, we need to fix the world around them too. Every child in Wales deserves a warm home that is cheap to heat, healthy food grown right here in our communities, and safe green spaces to play in. How will your government make sure these payments work alongside your plans for housing and nature, so that we are fixing the root causes of poverty rather than just helping people manage it?

A National food strategy: We support the work toward a new National Food Strategy. By ensuring the “Welsh public plate,”including schools and hospitals, procures nutritious, local produce, we can provide a fairer start for the next generation while supporting our nature-friendly farmers and building long-term food security. What measures will you introduce to mandate local and nature-friendly procurement across the public sector, and how will you ensure this strategy directly increases the affordability of healthy, local food for low-income families?

2. Put power in people’s hands

You have pledged to work with communities, not just for them. Real stability comes from local ownership and sovereignty over our own resources.

Energy sovereignty: We support your intent to unveil plans to develop Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru into a single, strengthened national energy company. For this to succeed, it must be owned by and for the people of Wales, with a clear remit to reduce bills and partner directly with community-owned energy projects. How will you ensure that Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru acts as an enabler for local energy groups rather than a competitor, and what mechanisms will be in place for communities to share in the direct profits of national generation?

Community wealth: Your commitment to a Wealth Fund could be transformative for Welsh communities. The proposal to capture a fair share of profits from renewable projects will be an important part of this, but we feel that there are broader opportunities to use it as a vehicle for using Welsh pension funds to enable community energy development and nature finance, as well as aligning other funding streams such as the Crown Estates Coastal Communities Fund and the community funds for transmission infrastructure. We are keen to see the funds distributed strategically with a proportion allocated and managed locally to projects, ideally on local assets, a proportion regionally on strategic initiatives like housing retrofit, and a proportion nationally on initiatives that support economic growth like skills and training.

The Community Right to Buy Bill is another transformative tool. It must empower local people to take over assets, from high street shops to land for community housing, that keep wealth circulating in our communities rather than being extracted. What steps will you take to ensure communities have the necessary capital and technical support to exercise this right, and how will you prevent these assets from being lost to private developers during the transition?

Meaningful cooperation: Shared power means those who live the reality are the ones designing the solutions. We ask that you bring voices to the table that are too often ignored: youth, migrant communities, and those with disabilities. In your first 100 days, how will you move beyond traditional consultation and establish a formal, ongoing role for these voices in the core decision-making processes of the new Cabinet Office?

3. Restore nature for everyone

Clean rivers, healthy soils, and thriving wildlife are not “extras,” they are essential to our health, our food security, and our economy.
A new strategic pathway: We are encouraged by your commitment to commence work on an updated Climate and Nature Action Plan for Wales, focused on charting a practical pathway to net zero by 2040 and substantive nature recovery by 2050. For these targets to be met, rigorous prioritisation will be essential. How will your Cabinet ensure that these long-term goals are protected from short-term political pressures, and will you formalise a process to involve the expertise within Cymru Together to help you navigate these difficult choices and ensure delivery on this issue?

Farming with nature at the heart: We welcome the shift to multi-year funding for the Sustainable Farming Scheme. To restore nature for everyone, this scheme must place nature recovery front and centre. We believe farmers are the primary guardians of our landscape and they must be supported to produce sustainable food in a way that actively restores our ecosystems and builds resilience. This requires a new culture of cooperation, where the agricultural sector works hand-in-hand with the environmental and community sectors. What specific steps will the Welsh Government take to facilitate this partnership and ensure good relations are built on shared goals for a nature-positive Wales?

Global Solidarity
As a Nation of Sanctuary, Wales has a unique role to play on the world stage. Our pursuit of a fairer, greener future must be rooted in global solidarity, recognising that our actions at home, from the goods we consume to the energy we produce, impact communities Worldwide. We urge you to ensure that as Wales leads on climate action, we continue to stand with those on the frontlines of the global climate crisis.
Our partnership: Turning ambition into reality

The role of civil society organisations who are part of the Climate Cymru network should not be underestimated. In the lead-up to the election, polling consistently indicated that people across Wales support stronger action on climate and nature. Civil society groups play a crucial role in translating this public mandate into practical policy ideas, grounded in community experience and evidence. They can help bridge the gap between government ambition and public expectation, ensuring that policies remain responsive, inclusive, and rooted in the realities of those most affected.

While we welcome your commitment to transparency, we are also prepared to act as a critical friend, scrutinising delivery against pre-election promises to ensure government priorities translate into tangible improvements in people’s everyday lives. We look forward to an early meeting with you, to discuss how our network’s collective expertise can help deliver the fairer, more resilient Wales we all want to see.

To note, we will also be following up this letter with separate detailed information on our thoughts on specific issues to appropriate Cabinet Ministers, recognising the cross cutting agenda of this area. We hope to be in regular communication with you and your team as the term progresses.

Yn gywir,
Bethan Sayed, Head of Politics and Advocacy, on behalf of Climate Cymru