Climate Manifesto:
Policies to deliver action and justice

Deliver on current climate plans

The Scottish Government must deliver on the policies in the current climate plan, and over deliver to make up for the failure of carbon capture to become operational during the current plan period.

The current Climate Change Plan runs to 2032.  We have missed four of the last five annual targets. The Scottish Government’s own monitoring¹² and the analysis of the Committee on Climate Change¹³ show that delivery is off track and we will continue to miss our annual targets without further action.  9 out of 43 Scottish Government outcome indicators are off track and a further 13 are classified as ‘too early to tell.’  Overall, less than half of all these indicators are definitively on track.

A large part of this failure is the admission that carbon capture and storage will not be operational at a meaningful scale until well into the 2030s, if at all, which means that installation of energy efficiency measures and renewable energy capacity must go faster to compensate.

Top priority must be to deliver on the policies in the plan, over delivering on some to compensate for gaps, and ensure that the next Climate Change Plan is a credible, comprehensive and clearly explained set of policies to meet all our future targets, without relying on unproven Negative Emissions Technologies.

For further information:

Stop Climate Chaos Scotland reacts to the latest Climate Change Committee report on emissions reductions in Scotland, SCCS, December 2022, https://www.stopclimatechaos.scot/media-statement/

See also policy ‘Don’t rely on Negative Emissions Technologies for emissions reductions’ in the Energy chapter.