Scottish climate change adaptation programme 2019-2024: consultation draft

How We Are Developing the Programme

Public Engagement

The purpose of our engagement with external stakeholders and the public is to:

• raise the profile of climate change adaptation issues across Scotland
• stimulate discussion about the key adaptation issues, risks and opportunities
• engage a wide range of views, examples and approaches in order to develop an evidence-based, Adaptation Programme for Scottish Ministers
• gain support for the process and Programme from partners and stakeholders
• inform the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for the new Programme

Policy Workshops

In preparation for this consultation, the Scottish Government hosted two policy workshops with officials and public bodies to share experience on adaptation and begin the development of our second five-year Programme.

Digital Engagement

Our external digital media engagement began in autumn 2018 with seven interactive events on Twitter. Their purpose was both to raise awareness of adaptation and gain understanding of wider stakeholder priorities. We held one session for each outcome. Comments then fed into workshops on those topics to aid discussion.

The digital events allowed us to interact with, and hear the perspectives of, a more diverse group of stakeholders. People and organisations from all over the country shared their observations of climate change effects and priorities for climate change adaptation in Scotland. These observations included: changing growing seasons, increased coastal erosion, tarmac and roofs melting due to heat, and increased ferry disruption due to storms.

Informal Stakeholder Workshops

Informed by the findings of the digital engagement events, in autumn 2018 the Scottish Government hosted a series of stakeholder engagement workshops. Six workshops were held across Scotland, one workshop for each outcome with the international outcome addressed in each workshop. A final wrap-up workshop was held in Edinburgh.

Attendees included members of the Scottish Government, public, third and private sectors. Over the course of the workshops, participants reviewed the outcomes and sub-outcomes, proposed and discussed monitoring and evaluation metrics, and suggested current and future actions needed to meet the outcome aims.

Some cross-cutting themes emerged, including the importance of: continued partnership building, place-based approaches as opportunities and solutions, awareness raising and education around adaptation, and the interdependencies across outcomes and policy areas. The workshops also helped to refine the structure of the sub-outcomes. The written outputs of the workshops informed the development of the draft Programme.

Public Consultation

We consult because we want better policy - and better outcomes as a result. We want to hear from the broadest range of views on the consultation questions. Scottish Ministers look forward to hearing from the public on how we can work together to strengthen our approach to climate change adaptation. This public consultation will be open for eight weeks and closes on Tuesday, 9 April 2019.

Climate Conversations

While the public consultation is underway, we have commissioned a set of ten Climate Conversations to be held with target groups of non-environmentally-focused voluntary and community groups across Scotland between January and March 2019. The original Climate Conversations were created to provide a step-by-step 'how to' guide to facilitate conversations about climate change and mitigation behaviours with a small group of people. The guide for the conversations has been adjusted to focus on adaptation and seeks to discover people's priorities for adaptation, as well as raise awareness of the public consultation. The results of these Climate Conversations will be fed into the development of the Programme.