Scottish Government at COP26: What was achieved?

Case study: Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone

What happened?

Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone, based out of The Lighthouse in Glasgow, was the Scottish Government’s principal Stakeholder Hub outside of the Blue Zone. Its purpose was to host a variety of Scottish Government-led activity that would:

• showcase Scotland’s best practice and demonstrate the ambitious climate action taking place in Scotland across Government, business and civil society sectors.
• inform and empower stakeholders to take action that contributes to Scotland meeting its ambitious emissions reduction targets.

The intention was to engage a wide ranging audience including government delegations, international NGOs, international business leaders, domestic stakeholders and civic society. A digital platform was also delivered to enable greater accessibility to certain events to facilitate wide networking between stakeholders and to raise awareness of Scotland’s ambition and innovation both domestically and internationally. Types of activity included policy announcements; events and receptions; bilateral meetings; engagement activities and strategic communications.

60 events were held over the period of the conference:

• 24 hosted by Scottish Enterprise and related Enterprise bodies
• 36 hosted by the Scottish Government

6961 people registered to attend events at Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone. Demographic data was collected as part of the registration process. This showed:

• Those registered were resident in 68 separate countries.
• The majority attended because of their work in the private sector (31%), in national or local governments (20%), for international or national NGOs (11%) or for academia/research organisations (9%). Around 9% attended as individuals and 13% attended in some other capacity.

What was the impact?

Over 2,400 attended in person and over 3,000 attended virtually. A post event survey was sent to attendees of Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone.

Of the 427 attendees who responded:

• 93% agreed or strongly agreed that the event(s) that they attended were well run
• 92% agreed or strongly agreed that the event(s) they attended were worthwhile

Those who responded to the post-event survey were presented with options as to what they felt they achieved from attending Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone and asked to select all that applied.

Evidence from survey responses suggested that the biggest impact of Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone was in facilitating exchange of knowledge and networking opportunities for attendees. It was less impactful as a space where people identified solutions to sustainability challenges or identified new prospects or clients.

Of the 427 attendees who filled in the Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone post-event survey:

• 55% said that attending had encouraged them to do things differently at home or work to help address climate or environmental issues

These respondents were then asked to describe what they would do differently at home or at work to address issues related to the environment or climate. Of the 175 that answered 46% noted they would take actions at home, 28% at work, and 26% did not specify whether they would take action at home or at work. The table below shows the categories of activity most often mentioned in response to this question.

Given the purpose of the Scotland’s Climate Ambition Zone was to showcase Scotland’s best practice and demonstrate the ambitious climate action taking place in Scotland both domestically and internationally; and inform and empower stakeholders to take action that contributes to Scotland meeting its ambitious emissions reduction targets, activity within it contributed to meeting multiple objectives across each of the three main aims.