Peatland restoration, to protect some of the world’s largest carbon stores, had to occur “at a significantly higher rate”, it said. And as yet there was no explicit goal of cutting aviation emissions or reducing flying, despite the deal with Greens.
The CCC’s annual reporting to the Scottish parliament, published on Tuesday, said the challenge of achieving such deep cuts was particularly acute because the easiest task – decarbonising energy production – had been largely completed.
Scotland now met much of its electricity needs from renewables, but was running short of time to decarbonise the rest of the economy – a far tougher task. Sturgeon’s government had also missed its annual CO2 reductions targets so far by a large margin, making it far harder to hit the 2030 target, the CCC added.
“It has taken 30 years to halve Scottish territorial emissions; they must halve again in a decade to meet the legislated 2030 target,” the committee said.
“Although a broad set of policies and proposals have been announced, there is still relatively little detail on exactly how committed public funding will be spent and how emissions will be reduced in practice.”
Michael Matheson, the Scottish cabinet secretary for net zero, said the government would set out clear commitments to address the climate crisis in its annual budget later this week and was “resolutely focused” on delivering those policies.
He said ministers welcomed the CCC report, adding: “I agree entirely with the committee’s key finding that the focus now, both for us in Scotland and for countries around the world, must be on the delivery of the policies to drive transformational emissions reductions across all areas of the economy.”
