Climate change 2030 targets – focusing on the "how" of policymaking

On Thursday, the Scottish Government announced the 2030 climate change target is “out of reach”. So, what went wrong?

In 2022, we undertook research commissioned by ClimateXChange for the Joint Budget Review between the Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament on matters related to climate change. Our remit focused on how budgetary and policy decisions are made rather than individual policies themselves. This required us to piece together through many interviews how civil servants were developing policy in practice, how decisions were being made and challenged internally and what information was flowing to Ministers and Parliament.

The culmination was a number of recommendations, one of which was for a “Net Zero Assessment” of policies as they are being developed. The basic principle is simple – if your policy is likely to have significant positive or negative impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, you need to roughly estimate the emissions that policy is likely to create. In most cases, this isn’t hugely difficult and some parts of government were already applying fairly rigorous assessments. But for many areas, these were patchily applied at best or seemingly sidestepped at worst.