Climate Change Plan: monitoring report 2018

Overview

This monitoring report on the Climate Change Plan is complementary both to the Plan^[i] itself and the most recent Official Statistics on Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions^[ii].

The Plan sets out the “policies” and “proposals”, leading to defined “policy outcomes”, by which Scotland’s statutory emissions reduction targets from 2018 to 2032 will be met. The annual emissions statistics, which come with a two-year lag, provide the assessment of whether targets have been met and a breakdown of progress at a sector by sector level.

This monitoring report provides more detailed information on progress in implementing the Plan^[iii]. The report is made up of a series of sectoral chapters, containing information on the policy output and implementation indicators set out in the corresponding chapter of the Plan:

• “Policy output indicators” identify whether we are on track to achieve the policy outcomes for that sector. Information on these indicators is set out within blue boxes.
• “Policy implementation indicators” report on whether measures are in place to deliver the policy outcomes. Information on these indicators is set out within green boxes.

The diagram below summarises the links between the indicators upon which information is being reported here, the policies in the Plan and their outcomes.

Updates on the development of the proposals set out in the Plan are also provided in the introduction to each sectoral chapter of this report, where appropriate.

The chart below provides an overview of progress against the 29 policy output indicators across all chapters of the Plan. A list of these indicators, organised by sector, is also provided in the table on the following page. Full details on each indicator may be found in the relevant chapters of this report.

Summary Figure 1: Overview of progress against policy output indicators.

It has been less than a year since the Plan itself was published, so this first annual monitoring report represents a baseline for future assessments of progress. For the majority of the indicators, it is currently still too early to make an assessment of whether these are on track. A comprehensive assessment of whether the Plan itself is fully on track is not therefore possible at this stage.

We will continue to develop and improve this monitoring framework over the coming year, learning from the experience of this pilot version to explore ways to make the assessment of whether indicators are on track as transparent as possible and to consider where the design of individual indicators can be improved.

Summary Table 1: Progress against policy output indicators.