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LONDON — The Scottish government will ditch a key climate target, ministers in Edinburgh confirmed on Thursday afternoon.
Net Zero Cabinet Secretary Màiri McAllan told the Scottish Parliament that the government will scrap plans to reduce carbon emissions in Scotland by 75 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.
The move is a significant climbdown from a government which was one of the first in the world to declare a climate emergency. It comes on the back of a damning report last month from the government’s independent climate advisors — the Climate Change Committee (CCC) — which warned that the region’s 2030 target was “no longer credible.”
McAllan said: “In this challenging context of cuts and U.K. backtracking [on green policies], we accept the CCC’s recent rearticulation that this parliament’s interim 2030 target is out of reach.”
The Scottish government will also scrap its annual emissions reduction targets, which ministers have missed eight times in the last 12 years. They will be replaced by “carbon budgets,” blocks of five-year emission reduction targets, which governments in the rest of the U.K. currently use to stay on track to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Scottish ministers recently delayed the publication of a draft climate change plan setting out how climate targets would be met.
The government has pledged to retain a more ambitious target of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2045. McAllan said this goal still had her “unwavering commitment,” and outlined a range of climate-friendly plans including quadrupling the number of electric vehicle charge points.
Hitting that goal will become more challenging if ministers do not urgently lay out a draft climate plan. McAllan told MSPs that the plan will be published “this summer.”
The decision to drop the target is likely to rock Holyrood, where the Scottish Greens are junior partners to the Scottish National Party in a power-sharing agreement. One prominent Green Party activist in Scotland, Niall Christie, warned that the decision may result in supporters of left-wing Scottish Greens turning against the coalition agreement.
“It’s frankly embarrassing for a Green Party to accept that [scrapping the 2030 goal], and I don’t really see how we can, in good faith, continue in government if the climate was such a low priority that it was delayed for months and then we’re abandoning targets,” Christie told POLITICO.
But one SNP MP, granted anonymity to speak freely about the situation, tried to play down such fears.
“Targets always have to be realistic and if this interim goal no longer is, then there’s no point pretending otherwise,” they said. “Best to focus on more realistic pathways to get to where we need to be.”
