Carbon neutral islands project: progress report

3. Introduction

3.1 Scotland’s Islands and the Climate Emergency

The Scottish Government has declared a climate emergency and stepped up its climate action and commitments through Scotland’s 2019 Climate Change Act. We remain steadfast in our statutory commitments in calling for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.

We know that island communities are among those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change globally. Scotland is no exception to this and many of our islands are particularly exposed to the risk of rising sea levels and coastal erosion. The potential damage and even loss of habitats will impact heavily on their rich natural diversity.

At the same time, the transition to net zero offers an opportunity to support the sustainability of island communities and their economies in the long term. In order to ensure this happens in line with the Just Transition principles, the CNI project is working to address the particular challenges that islands face - be that higher costs of living, fuel poverty, connectivity or community resilience.

To support climate action going forward in an island context, the CNI project is facilitating community-led efforts to ensure that islanders can actively patricipate in the drive to net zero in decarbonisation. The learning from the project will inform the journey to net zero across all Scottish islands and potentially mainland rural areas too.

Scotland’s climate change legislation also ensures we prepare and adapt to the impacts which we are already seeing, including rising sea levels and more extreme weather.

3.2 CNI Project Background

Since its inception under the ‘A Fairer, Greener Scotland: Programme for Government 2021-22, the project has worked closely with communities and built capacity to support decarbonisation activity across the six islands. This report summarises activity which took place in financial year 2023/2024.

The project’s key principles remain:

Alignment: The project aims to align with existing island-based climate change efforts and to avoid duplication.

Justice and fairness: The project will support islands to become carbon neutral in a just and fair way. Fairness will be promoted through an effective bottom-up participatory process driven by the six island communities.

Replicability: All Scottish islands will benefit from the project through the sharing of good practices coming from the implementation of the project. Effectively the six islands will act as catalysts for net zero action across Scotland.

The CNI project’s core goals link closely with Scotland’s National Planning Framework’s overarching spatial principles, namely the following:

• Just transition: We will empower people to shape their places and ensure the transition to net zero is fair and inclusive.
• Conserving and recycling assets: We will make productive use of existing buildings, places, infrastructure and services, locking in carbon, minimising waste, and building a circular economy.
• Local living: We will support local liveability and improve community health and wellbeing by ensuring people can easily access services, greenspace, learning, work and leisure locally.
• Rebalanced development: We will target development to create opportunities for communities and investment in areas of past decline, and manage development sustainably in areas of high demand.
• Rural revitalisation: We will encourage sustainable development in rural areas, recognising the need to grow and support urban and rural communities together.

As highlighted in section 4, many of the capital funded projects that have been developed during the project to date align with several of these principles bringing greater value to rural communities and supporting a just transition to net zero.

3.3 Delivery Partners

A key aim of the project is to ensure that island voices drive their own decarbonisation journeys and are empowered to take action that works in their own local context. To allow the project to be embedded in communities, the Scottish Government provide funding to six local anchor organisations which each employ Community Development Officers (CDO). The CDOs are a driving force behind the CNI project and have worked closely with us and their communities to make substantial progress.

Community Energy Scotland (CES) has been a key partner in the Scottish Government’s Carbon Neutral Islands project. CES has provided project coordination, technical expertise, resources, and tools to support the successful implementation of low-carbon activities that benefit local communities across Scotland’s islands. Throughout the project Local Authorities, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and the Scottish Futures Trust have also supported the islands in moving towards their decarbonisation goals.

Carbon Auditing

Overview

It is crucial to gain an understanding of the greenhouse gas emissions for each island to inform plans on how to decarbonise. Baseline greenhouse gas (GHG) audits have been produced for each island, which consider the main emission sources and sinks. These inventories consider the key sectors of Energy, Transport, Waste, Agriculture, and Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF). The audits follow the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Inventories and IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

The Scottish Blue Carbon Forum is also working to include ‘blue carbon’ – or carbon deriving from marine habitats – in the UK Greenhouse Gas Inventory. A ‘Habitat Suitability Study’ is in development within the CNI project framework to estimate blue carbon potential for the islands.

The CNI GHG audits provide a tool for community engagement to inform action towards decarbonisation. The audits play a significant role in GHG management, providing baseline emissions estimates for each island, allowing local communities to target areas where interventions can be made to reduce emissions. By updating the inventory after a given period, the community can monitor their progress towards emissions reduction goals. The process of accounting for all emissions generated on an island-wide basis is clearly quite challenging and complex. Uncertainties and gaps in the data are inevitable, and confidence levels vary across sectors. The audits do, however, offer the most up-to-date information currently available. The climate emergency calls for immediate action, and the data we have to hand is reliable enough to allow us to track developments.

Summary of Findings

The findings and full reports from the audit process are published on the CNI website. A brief summary of the findings is given below:

Energy

• The most significant emissions come from oil burning for household, commercial, and industrial heat production.
• Emissions from imported electricity vary depending on the level of renewables.
• Robust commercial sector data is not generally available.

Transport

• Ferries typically emit the most emissions in the transport sector.
• Personal vehicles are the greatest source of emissions from on-road transport.
• It is difficult to distinguish between on- and off-island road transport.

Waste

• There is little variation across most islands in terms of size and population.
• Waste from business, industry and manufacturing could be more significant than from households.
• It is anticipated that there are unaccounted waste emissions from transportation.

Agriculture

• The primary source of methane emissions is enteric fermentation, which occurs when ruminant livestock digest food.
• Agriculture is a major source of emissions on several islands.
• Manure management is also significant.

Land use, land use change, and forestry

• Local activity data is limited and uncertain.
• It is anticipated that emissions from damaged peatlands will be the biggest emitter.
• Forestry is the largest major carbon sink, with two islands being net carbon sinks in this sector.

Next Steps

Having completed the initial GHG audits, the emissions inventories are now undergoing a process of ‘ground-truthing’ and further data collection to fill gaps in existing knowledge. This will allow more accurate benchmarking. The audits showed significant uncertainty in the land use sector and so efforts are underway to help us better understand emissions and explore solutions to reduce them and, in some cases, sequester carbon.

In addition to this process, the CNI project is working to build local capacity and skills to take on the work to refine and revise the GHG inventories going forwards and develop effective GHG management plans.

3.4 Community Climate Change Action Plans

The CNI project is supporting Scotland’s islands to move towards carbon neutrality according to their own decarbonisation priorities and at a pace that considers their community needs whilst recognising the urgency of taking action. To do so, the six islands received support towards developing community Climate Change Action Plans that respond to the interests of the island stakeholders and community. Each community was engaged to explore what the key priorities are for each island and how best to tackle these in order to make real and lasting change. This will ensure that the voice of island communities will truly drive the decarbonisation and resilience-building process, delivering on the fairness driver of the Project. Please follow the links below to visit each action plan.