THE First Minister is set to urge Theresa May to protect Scotland’s green energy industry during the Brexit process in a speech to leading business figures.

Nicola Sturgeon will underline how EU membership has benefited the sector – including receiving a £500 million grant for the Beatrice offshore windfarm in the outer Moray Firth – as she calls on the UK Government to set out how the sector will access such funding in future. She will also speak about other threats to the industry from Brexit including losing access to skilled labour and to disruption of supply chains. More than a third of Britain’s green energy is produced in Scotland with almost 50,000 people employed in it and the wider low carbon industry.

“If we are taken out of the single market, it will hinder our supply chain and reduce our skills base. If we are outside the internal energy market it could affect our influence on issues such as energy regulation and cross-border energy flows, something which is of increasing importance. And, arguably more damaging to our ambitions, we could also lose access to EU funding,” Sturgeon will tell the Scottish Renewables Conference in Edinburgh. “Although the overall outlook for this sector is hugely positive, we need the UK Government to provide clarity on these points.” The First Minister will say her Government has a clear “direction of travel” on climate change, including a ban on new diesel and petrol cars by 2032.

Her speech comes a day after two experts quit a group set up to oversee ministers’ air pollution strategy. Scottish Environment Link members resigned from the Cleaner Air for Scotland Governance Group (CAFSGG) after raising concerns around “commitment, ambition and urgency” into plans for Scotland’s first low emission zone (LEZ) in Glasgow.

Friends of the Earth Scotland campaigner Emilia Hanna and Professor James Curran represented Link – the forum which brings together environmental organisations – on the governance group. In their resignation letter, they said: “We want Scotland’s air quality to be legally compliant as soon as possible, in line with Scotland’s obligations under European law and in line with the continued urgent and pressing need to stop preventable early death and ill-health for exposed populations ... Continuing to be represented on the CAFSGG is no longer an effective route for us to pursue that aim.”

Their resignations come after the Glasgow LEZ details were revealed. The zone will come into effect at the start of 2019, initially cracking down on bus pollution. All vehicles will be required to be compliant with restricted emissions in the area by the end of 2022. The campaigners said the plans were not ambitious enough and they had no alternative but to resign.