Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 27 October 2021
The member will recognise that this is an ambitious target. Funding will come from a number of sources—partly public sector and partly private sector—and there will be changes in how we deliver heat in buildings, as my colleague Patrick Harvie set out during his statement.
Scotland can point to successes. This Government has prioritised the climate emergency and introduced a rigorous legislative framework that underpins our climate emissions journey. After all, a crisis of this scale warrants a collective and unified political response. The Scottish Parliament has, rightly, set highly ambitious and legally binding targets to reduce emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 and to net zero by 2045, all of which are to be met without relying on offsetting credits.
Scotland’s ambitious and global leadership goes beyond what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report says is required to deliver the aims of the Paris agreement, as is set out in our indicative nationally determined contribution for COP26.
Although I am proud of the progress that we have made so far, I have no doubt that our aim to decarbonise emissions through a just transition over the next 10 years will be challenging. In line with the requirements of Scotland’s climate change legislation, today we laid in the Parliament an emissions reduction catch-up report, which sets out the additional emissions reductions that are required to make up for missing the annual target in 2019. The policies and proposals in the report will supplement our ambitious and transformational commitments in the updated climate change plan and advance and strengthen Scotland’s emissions reduction pathway to 2032. We are proud of Scotland’s world-leading targets and we are proud that we are accountable for any missed annual goals in that way, to ensure that the promises that we make are underpinned by urgent and ambitious action.