Scottish Climate Intelligence Service (SCIS) Enhances Climate Action Planning and Monitoring in Edinburgh and Across Scotland
The work of the Net Zero Edinburgh Leadership Board and the delivery of Edinburgh’s climate action plans are now being supported by the new Scottish Climate Intelligence Service (SCIS), which is building capability and capacity to embed climate impact into local decision making across Scotland.
Partnering with Swedish technology company ClimateView, the SCIS will support the Board and the city to manage and monitor progress on action and interventions to reduce city emissions. The SCIS data platform breaks down city emissions by source and aligns them to the interventions needed for decarbonisation, projecting the costs, benefits, and impact on emissions reduction. It allows us to monitor progress by breaking down the huge challenge of emissions reduction into visible and measurable transition elements, such as number of journeys shifted to lower carbon forms of transport, the pace of adoption of low carbon heating technologies, scheduled plans for retrofitting buildings, and other current intervention to facilitate low carbon transition.
Most importantly, it brings the city’s climate plans into a dynamic online platform, so they can be managed, monitored, and improved on an ongoing basis. The city will be supported by the SCIS to input and update its plans and projects in the platform. Edinburgh will be able to model different net zero pathways by balancing and adjusting the range of interventions it must put in place against different net zero transition elements, and to track the effectiveness of current plans and policies in delivering progress. The platform also has a public portal which anyone can access.
Working with the SCIS gives the city a continuous and up-to-date assessment of whether current plans are delivering at the pace and scale required to meet local and national targets, and where more targeted actions and interventions are needed. This means city leaders and partners will have live data with which to design, manage and communicate changes with relevant city stakeholders, and which can be used to update plans and to help support and secure future investment.
The SCIS is supporting all 32 local authorities across Scotland to develop common approaches, underpinned by the national data platform, making it easier to connect plans and programmes between local authorities. It is delivered as a partnership between the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, the Improvement Service and the Sustainable Scotland Network.
The SCIS had its origins in the partnership between the City of Edinburgh Council and the University of Edinburgh, leading the development of the city’s climate ambitions in response to the Scottish Climate Change Plan. Working through our partners and the Scottish Cities Alliance, we quickly identified a need and an opportunity to support all 32 local authorities to design and deliver local climate action more effectively. The SCIS has been jointly funded by all 32 Scottish local authorities through COSLA, and by the Scottish Government.
Jamie Brogan, Strategy Director, Scottish Climate Intelligence Service
