Reducing greenhouse gas emissions - proposals and policies: report

Context

Section 36 of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 requires that whenever an annual emissions reduction target is not met, the Scottish Ministers must prepare a report setting out proposals and policies to compensate in future years for the excess emissions.

The present report discharges this duty in relation to both the 2021 and 2022 missed targets, with 1.0 MtCO2e excess for 2021 and 3.2 MtCO2e excess for 2022, giving a combination of 4.2 MtCO2e excess emissions to account for under section 36 of the Act.

The 2021 target is the smallest margin by which an annual statutory emissions target has been missed since 2011, and while the 2022 margin is larger than in 2021, both years are influenced by external factors including a rebound from COVID-19 restrictions following the pandemic.

This was also seen in the UK Government statistics and, using comparable metrics, we can see Scotland has still made the largest emissions reduction in the UK. Between the 1990 baseline and 2022, Scottish emissions reduced by 50.1 per cent, while emissions in England fell by 49 per cent; followed by Wales at 36.5 and Northern Ireland at 25.9 per cent.

The variation in external factors, such as the pandemic, also highlights the value in moving to longer term carbon budgets, rather than yearly targets. Indeed, as the CCC point out, yearly targets are “highly vulnerable to year-to-year fluctuations in emissions” and multi-year budgets “provide a more reliable indicator of underlying progress”^[1].

Nevertheless, missing these targets is undoubtedly disappointing, and the Scottish Government must continue to take forward the action required to reach net zero.

Since the Climate Change Plan update (CCPu), we have developed a number of policies and proposals. This report will set out additional policies and proposals to compensate for the combined excess emissions of 4.2 MtCO2e from 2021 and 2022.