Ministers are treating the climate emergency as a crisis in ‘name only’, Scotland’s climate coalition has said.
The Scottish Government’s five-year action plan is thin on the detail needed to tackle climate breakdown, protect people, safeguard livelihoods and boost the quality of life for Scots, according to Stop Climate Chaos Scotland.
Fraser Sutherland, coalition manager for Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, said:
‘It’s a relief to see that “tackling the climate emergency” is still one of the Scottish Government’s top four priorities, but the detail on how that will be done is thin. It seems they are treating it as an emergency in name only.
It’s good to see some nods to what Stop Climate Chaos Scotland has been calling for, including supporting warm homes and clean heating, delivering better buses legislation, scaling up community-owned energy and establishing a Wealth Fund, as well as a commitment to develop the Private Jet Tax during the next financial year.
We are also glad to see ambitions for peatland restoration, which absorbs vast amounts of carbon, and a promise to increase the Climate Justice Fund to help the most vulnerable adapt to the impacts of climate change.
However, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a proper response to the climate emergency.
The Scottish Government must now get serious about funding climate action, and accept that cash is needed to do this. Funding can be raised by taxing the richest and most climate-polluting section of society – like private jet users.
We also support calls for a road-user tax and a land-value tax, which could raise over £1,000 million per year for tackling the climate emergency. And public money could be saved by ending the subsidising of costly and unproven carbon capture and storage projects and courting foreign investment in energy-guzzling data centres.
The coalition welcomes the pledge to publish the long-awaited Energy Strategy, but the Scottish Government must stop sitting on the fence regarding oil and gas. They must clearly oppose new fossil fuel projects, which will do nothing to reduce energy bills or create long-term employment, and will only add fuel to the fire of the climate crisis.
Scottish ministers have long patted themselves on the back for Scotland’s “world-leading” climate policies, but the latest Programme for Government suggests they are looking the other way as ordinary people and communities become more exposed to the increasingly harsh and costly impacts of a warming planet.’
ENDS
NOTES
SCCS has been calling for:
- Better buses with a £2 price cap nationwide, with services improved, increased and moved to local control and public ownership;
- Warmer homes, with schemes to improve energy-efficiency, eliminate damp and lower bills;
- More community and public ownership of renewables to share the country’s energy wealth;
- A moratorium on new energy-intensive Hyperscale AI data centre planning applications until the environmental impacts are properly assessed;
- To urgently bring in a meaningfully high tax on private jets.
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First released: 01 September 2026
