THE Scottish Government has published its long-awaited Climate Change Draft Plan – setting out 150 different actions to tackle carbon emissions.
The 30-page draft plan was published as Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy, Gillian Martin, addressed MSPs in Holyrood.
It was accompanied by three annexes, totalling over 330 pages. It set out various existing policy commitments, with a few additional ones.
“It’s Scotland’s climate change plan, not the Government’s climate change plan,” Martin said in the Holyrood chamber.
Opposition MSPs challenged the Climate Action Secretary on its contents on Thursday afternoon, so what’s in it? And what isn’t?
Let’s go through the key points.
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Decarbonising buildings
There are currently around 2.2 million residential properties in Scotland using “a polluting heating system”, the draft plan reads, setting a target to decarbonise homes by 2045.
The attempt to reduce emissions in this sector will focus on transitioning buildings and homes to “clean heating systems such as heat pumps, electric resistive heating or heat networks”.
It also includes plans to reform Energy Performance Certificates. Scottish Greens MSP Patrick Harvie, who presided over the Government’s strategy in this area when he was a junior minister, said in Holyrood that the Heat in Buildings Bill had been “filleted, now proposing a target with no delivery mechanism”, adding that this approach had “failed many times before”.
Transport
Electrifying cars, vans, and trucks is how the Scottish Government hopes to reach its target to decarbonise the sector by around 68% between 2025 and 2040. It also set a new target to reduce current emissions from cars by at least 16% by 2026.
“While these sectors are expected to undergo some decarbonisation over time, the outlook for emissions from aviation and shipping is heavily dependent on future transport demand and the pace of technology rollout for lower carbon solutions,” an annex to the plan added.
While road transport is expected to be "significantly decarbonised”, it does note issues with aviation, the second most polluting area in transport, stating that it will “experience little decarbonisation”, and that any improvements will be “offset by potential demand growth for air travel at Scottish airports”.
Shipping emissions, it suggests, are expected to decline alongside “reductions in oil and gas activity in the North Sea”.
Waste
Rubbish and how it is disposed of is another big issue impacting Scots. The draft plan suggests that emissions from the sector are expected to decline by around 58% between 2025 and 2040, mostly driven by reductions in methane emissions from landfill “reflecting reductions in the landfilling of biodegradable waste”.
It adds that while landfill is the primary source of waste emissions, compost and sewage “are not expected to see significant reductions”.
The report adds that recycling and reusing products would clearly have an impact on this area, and could boost productivity and create new jobs in the circular economy.
“Increasing the amount of materials recycled and increasing the proportion of these recycled in Scotland will deliver carbon reductions, reduce the environmental impacts associated with extracting new raw materials, and create a range of important economic opportunities to reprocess and reuse materials here in Scotland,” the report states.
Energy supply
Decarbonising energy heavily relies on Scotland moving away from using fossil fuels.
While the report does not go so far as to support a presumption against oil and gas, it does note that reducing emissions in the sector by around 85% between 2025 and 2040 will be “primarily as a result of the decline in demand for fossil fuels reducing emissions from the fuel supply subsector and from carbon capture technology being utilised at Peterhead power station”.
Peterhead is Scotland’s last remaining fossil fuel power plant, with the report noting that it “has a large bearing on Scotland’s electricity supply emissions”, but added that it is due to come to the “end of its operation lifeline”.
This has previously been suggested to be in the 2040s, but the Carbon Capture Power Station is expected to come online in 2032.
It is assumed to have a 90% carbon capture rate, but environmental campaigners have repeatedly raised concerns about the true effectiveness of the technology, suggesting it keeps fossil fuels locked in for longer.
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Agriculture
Emissions from agriculture were the third largest source in Scotland 2023, behind transport and buildings.
Between 2025 and 2040, emissions are projected fall by around 21%, some of which will be from reducing emissions from “non-road mobile machinery”, such as tractors, supporting emerging technologies in the sector, such as Smartsheds, and investigating new fertiliser alternatives.
Emissions from livestock are “projected to decline”, the plan adds, as will those from “slurry and manure storage and use”.
“We will support farmers, crofters and other land managers to continue producing high-quality food and protect rural livelihoods, while enhancing biodiversity, soil health, and agricultural business productivity,” Martin told MSPs.
“We can do this because of emissions savings in other sectors, including higher fuel supply decarbonisation in our energy supply, and emissions reductions in peatlands. This plan reflects a distinctly Scottish way of achieving this.”
Land use and forests
The Land Use, Land Use Change, Forestry sector, known as LULUCF, is “unique” as while forests are responsible for removing carbon, peatlands are its largest source of emissions. The plan states that the current target to scale up new woodland each year by 2029 is 18,000 hectares.
It states: “By 2040, this will result in an estimated total of 258,000 hectares of new woodland being planted.”
The plan also notes that emissions from peatlands are “not expected to change substantially without policy action”.
It points to current peatland restoration targets, set at 10% each year until 2030. Restoration is the “primary means” of reducing emissions in this area, the report adds.
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