Discussions on costs due to global warming in Glasgow: EIR release

You asked for:

1. All material held regarding any discussions around the associated costs due to global warming in Glasgow (this should include internal communications, external communications, briefing/proposal documents, minutes of meetings and any other relevant documents) from January 2010 – present.

2. All material held regarding any discussions around any possible plans or actions put in place to tackle the potential costs due to global warming in Glasgow (this should include internal communications, external communications, briefing/proposal documents, minutes of meetings and other relevant documents) from January 2010 – present.

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations.  We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.  This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’.  Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.  We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes.  This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

Response 

Under regulation 7 of the EIRs a public authority may extend the 20 working day deadline for responding to a request by up to a further 20 working days, if the complexity and volume of the information makes it impractical for the authority to respond within the original deadline. Having completed an initial search for the information you have requested, we have established that it is complex and voluminous because we have found 168 documents relating to Glasgow and climate change on our documents database which will have to be assessed in order for us to answer your enquiry. This means it will not be possible for us to respond to your request before the original deadline of 7 December 2018, and so we are extending the deadline by a further 20 working days to 10 January 2019.

You may wish to review our published annual progress reports on our website that reports more broadly on action taken across the country in relation to adapting to the impacts of climate change and shows how we are delivering of our first statutory Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme. Many of these actions have taken place in Glasgow but not exclusively to Glasgow. The latest progress report published in 2018 is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/climate-ready-scotland-scottish-climate-change-adaptation-programme-fourth-annual/

You may also be interested in contacting Climate Ready Clyde, a collaborative adaptation partnership for the City Region, initially set up with Scottish Government funds but now funded by partners within Climate Ready Clyde. Climate Ready Clyde have co-ordinated much of the current adaptation work for the City Region. While Climate Ready Clyde may be able to help you with your request, they are not subject to FOISA and are not legally bound to respond.