Consumption and Lifestyle – Scotland’s Climate Change Plan – 2026-2040

Consumption and Lifestyle

The Climate Change Plan focuses totally on discount of our territorial emissions (emissions ‘produced’ inside a rustic’s territory or financial sphere); nonetheless, with a purpose to make our contribution to limiting world warming, we should additionally handle the emissions related to the products and companies we devour, no matter the place they’re produced.

It is important that Scotland, as a world local weather chief, does what it could actually to restrict the emissions impression of the alternatives made in Scotland, each at residence and overseas. The most up-to-date publication of Scotland’s Carbon Footprint, for 2021, was launched in April 2025. It confirmed that since 1998, Scotland’s carbon footprint has decreased by 19.9% from 73.9 MtCO2e in 1998 to 59.2 MtCO2e in 2021.

Environmental coverage is devolved to Scotland, and we’re taking motion on coverage measures that lie inside devolved competence. But we recognise that sure powers referring to the round economic system are reserved to the UK Government, and that the manufacturing of our merchandise, companies and supplies contain provide chains that transcend Scotland, spanning the UK, European Union, and the remainder of the world.

Building on this, the Circular Economy and Waste Route Map^[21] established the Scottish Government’s dedication to develop and publish a Product Stewardship plan. This will set out our framework to prioritising merchandise primarily based on their environmental and financial impression, our ambitions for these merchandise to 2030, and the actions we’ll tackle at the least three extra precedence merchandise over the following 5 years.

We proceed working to enhance public understanding concerning the sources of emissions by our annual, nationwide marketing campaign, ‘Let’s Do Net Zero’. The marketing campaign runs throughout a number of media platforms, and reaches tens of millions throughout Scotland. The marketing campaign seeks to contribute among the information and motivation individuals have to successfully change how they devour items and companies.^[22]