Welcome to the first edition of our new ‘Election Spotlight’ series. As Scotland prepares to head to the polls this May, we’ll be examining the country’s performance over the last five years, and mapping out the key priorities for the next parliament.

Scotland has long positioned itself as a global leader on climate ambition, setting some of the most stretching emissions reduction targets in the world. But if the last Parliamentary term taught us anything, it is that world-leading ambition is far easier to declare than to deliver in practice.

After missing 8 of the previous 12 annual targets, and facing growing delays to key policies, the Scottish Government abandoned its annual and interim targets in 2024 – including its 2030 target of a 75% emissions reduction. This followed a damning assessment from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which concluded that “there is no comprehensive strategy for Scotland to decarbonise towards Net Zero”, and that the 2030 target was no longer credible. 

The CCC’s report brutally laid bare the widening gap between Scotland’s rhetoric and reality, forcing a reset in approach. Scotland had been talking the talk on climate change, but not sufficiently walking the walk. As Scotland approaches the May election, the key question is whether political parties are ready to learn from the past, and start matching ambition with real delivery.

Against this backdrop, the Scottish Government’s new Climate Change Plan for 2026–40, delivered by Climate Secretary Gillian Martin on 24 March, sought to reset Scotland’s approach. The Plan is a statutory document setting out how emissions will be reduced across all sectors of the economy as Scotland works towards its 2045 net zero target.

The new Plan marks a shift in approach, moving away from annual and interim targets towards five-yearly carbon budgets, in line with frameworks used by the UK, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It also expands requirements to include greater transparency on the costs and benefits of policies, and places a stronger emphasis on delivering a just transition.

However, the draft Plan arrived following significant delays. First expected in 2023, then 2024, then 2025 – it wasn’t published until November 2025. This created a prolonged gap without an updated and credible pathway to meeting Scotland’s targets, increasing the pressure on the eventual Plan to deliver more rapid emissions reductions within a compressed timeframe.

The Plan itself has some limitations. Despite its new requirements to cover costs and benefits, it lacks sufficient detail on the expected costs and benefits of decarbonising different sectors, and on how these will be shared between different stakeholders. Total gross costs appear to be estimated at around £44 billion. However, the underlying data, assumptions and methodologies are not consistently set out, which was critiqued at the draft stage as it limited meaningful scrutiny. 

The Plan contains a mixture of proposals and policies designed to meet its first three carbon budgets. However, Annex 3 notes that “proposals are not costed owing to the absence of sufficient certainty”. As only developed policies are costed, the cost estimates included in the Plan are likely to represent a significant under-estimate of the true costs of delivery. 

In many sectors it also remains unclear how these costs will be funded: what proportion will be met by the Scottish Government, what will fall to business and industry, and what costs will ultimately be passed on to households and consumers. A similar lack of clarity applies to the benefits expected to arise from the Plan. The figures suggest total benefits of around £42 billion, implying a net cost of approximately £2 billion over the fifteen-year period 2026-40. For 2026-30, the benefits are estimated at almost £10 billion, with a net cost of £5 billion. The presentation of costs over a five or fifteen-year period further limits transparency, as it provides only limited information on spending profiles by sector, making alignment with Scottish Government budget settlements difficult. 

That these limitations remained in the final version of the Plan, despite significant advice, consultation and a 120-day scrutiny period of the draft version (double that of previous plans), is unfortunate. Apart from small tweaks to monitoring and evaluation, including updates to costs, the Plan shows little progress compared to the draft Plan published in November, which was widely criticised in its extensive consultation. This may have been linked to the fact that there were fewer than 3 weeks between the end of Parliamentary scrutiny on the draft and the final Plan being issued.

Then there are the policies themselves. Scotland’s emissions are now less than half the levels seen in 1990. This good progress has mostly been driven by a reduction in electricity supply emissions due to a rapid scale-up of wind and solar electricity generation, the complete cessation of coal use for electricity generation in Scotland, and a reduction in use of fossil fuels more generally. Current global instability and soaring oil and gas prices demonstrate why we must not let up the pace on renewable energy. Yet for Scotland, with its abundant renewable energy resources, this can be seen as the low hanging fruit. 

The real task ahead, which must be tackled in the next Parliament if Scotland is to meet its 2045 target, is to broaden progress across a range of harder-to-decarbonise sectors, notably land use, transport, buildings and heat. These are the sectors in the bottom half of the chart above, which shows how little their emissions have reduced since 1990 compared to electricity supply at the top of the chart. In these sectors, the Plan tends to back-load emissions reductions, with relatively slower progress in the 2020s and greater reliance on accelerated delivery in the 2030s in the hope that funding, technologies and supply chains mature over time. 

Take peatland restoration for example. In 2020, the Scottish Government pledged to invest £250 million over ten years, aiming to support the restoration of at least 20,000 hectares of Scottish peatlands a year. But between 2018 and 2023, annual restoration averaged just 5,776 hectares. In our recent report, Restoring Nature to Deliver a Just Transition to Net Zero, we calculated that the annual target would have to double the area restored in 2024/25 (which itself was a record high) every year to meet the 250,000ha by 2030 target (from the 1990 baseline). But rather than doubling down efforts, the new Plan has backtracked from this 2030 target, instead suggesting a slower and more gradual journey to 400,000ha of restored peat by 2040. 

As we outlined in our evidence to the Rural Affairs and Islands Committee in January, we suspect that this is largely due to the Scottish Government’s hope that degraded peatland will become an attractive investment opportunity for private finance who want to generate carbon credits by restoring the land. The Plan states that “the expectation is that private finance is going to contribute more to funding peatland restoration over time.” The problem is that our research has shown that this is unlikely to happen, which means that the Scottish Government are delaying action for a highly uncertain solution. Instead, they could be exploring more realistic solutions within their control – like the public investment model we outlined in our recent report.

The Plan also confirms continued delays to reduce emissions from heat in buildings. The CCC has called the Scottish Government’s plans in this area over the next decade unambitious and risky. Indeed, the Plan adopts a delay-and-catch-up approach for this sector, relying on very rapid decarbonisation of heat in buildings but not until 2035 onwards, largely driven by heat pumps. Proposals for sooner action were a key part of the deal between the SNP and Scottish Greens following the 2021 election, but the Heat in Buildings Bill was shelved not once but twice by the last Parliament in 2025, and its future is now uncertain until after this year’s election.

The Scottish Government has avoided some difficult decisions by choosing a pathway with a heavy reliance on negative emissions technologies (NETs), for example carbon capture and storage (CCS). In the 'business and industrial processes' sector, NETs are expected to ramp up to removing 12.2 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in the third Carbon Budget. This is roughly equivalent to the entire transport sector’s emissions in 2023, or almost a third of Scotland's total 2023 emissions, and as such seems somewhat unrealistic.

Campaigners have warned that by pinning its copes on unproven technologies like CCS, the Plan is too reliant on ‘science fiction’. The CCC has also highlighted this as an area with significant risk. There is no working CCS plant in Scotland and no application to build one in the planning system. Indeed, since the CCC’s risk assessment, the lead developer has pulled out of the flagship Acorn project, Scotland’s main proposed CCS scheme. What’s more, it’s an area over which the Scottish Government has little control, with policy powers largely reserved to the UK Government.

In contrast, the key sectors outlined above – land use, transport, buildings and heat –  are all devolved to the Scottish Government. The CCC’s verdict on the new Plan is that Scotland’s new targets are achievable, but only if the Scottish Government urgently utilises policy powers within its gift. 

The missed targets, abandoned promises, and delayed solutions have all painted a picture of this last Parliament as unable, or unwilling, to follow through on its rhetoric on climate change. Scotland is already experiencing the effects of climate change, with increasing flooding, wildfires, sea level rise and heat wave-related illness and death. As we outlined in our recent report, Funding Scotland’s Future: Tax Reform for a Just Transition, the long-term cost of not acting far exceeds the cost of acting today.

As such, Scotland can no longer afford to delay taking decisive action. The evidence is clear: with the right policies and sustained commitment, Scotland’s net zero target is achievable. This is not only a climate imperative – it is Scotland’s greatest economic opportunity.

The new Climate Change Plan is a step in the right direction, but significant gaps and unanswered questions remain. More importantly, a plan is only as strong as its implementation. With the election looming, the onus is now on political parties to show how they will avoid repeating the mistakes of the last Parliament – by setting out a clear, credible and fully funded pathway to net zero.