Scotland not adapted to climate crisis, says advisory committee | Scotland

The Scottish government must raise its ambition immediately to adapt to the climate crisis, an influential advisory body has warned, as a report sets out how the Scottish National party’s “vision” for building resilience has not translated into “real-world action”.

the Climate Change Committeewhich advises all the UK’s governments on climate policies, said Scottish government action to adapt to wetter winters, rising sea levels and extreme weather events such as the recent Storm Arwen, had “stalled”, and that this posed risks to people, infrastructure and business.

It is the second critical intervention by the committee in the past six months, and comes after the prime minister, Nicola Sturgeon, agreed an ambitious partnership deal with the Scottish Greens last summer and enjoyed significant media coverage at Glasgow’s Cop26 summit in Glasgow last November.

Last December, the committee warned that Scotland would miss its targets to cut carbon emissions because government policies were too vague and weak. It said that although Sturgeon’s government had the most far-reaching pledges of any in the UK, the policies needed to hit them were absent.

Tuesday’s 174-page report to the Holyrood parliament sets out how, over the past 30 years, the average temperature in Scotland has risen by 0.5C, winters have become 5% wetter and the sea level around the coast has increased by up to 3cm each decline.

The chairwoman of the CCC adaptation committee, Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, said working on adapting to changes in the climate was the “poor relation” of the net zero targets.

King said the committee commended the Scottish government on its vision for a climate-ready Scotland, “but the reality is that action is not happening at the scale or pace required”.

The report found “no credible plan” to adapt farmland habitats – which make up 73% of the land area of ​​Scotland – to a changing climate; rates of peatland restoration “falling well short” of government targets; “insufficient” plans to adapt infrastructure, such as ports, airports and telecoms. It added that the gap in planning how to maintain a weather-resilient energy system “increasingly threatens the delivery of greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets”.

Meanwhile, the report found a “critical gap” in how policies were monitored and evaluated, meaning key developments in climate risk were “largely unknown”, while there was little clarity – and thus a lack of accountability – over which government ministers were responsible for delivering these commitments.

The CCC report underlined that “most of the levers” needed to implement change were “within the hands of the Scottish government”.

The cabinet secretary for net zero, energy and transport, Michael Matheson, said his government welcomed critical scrutiny, and accepted that “more needs to be done”.

“This is a global challenge and we are not alone in needing to accelerate progress.”

Liam Kerr, the Scottish Conservative minister for net zero, energy and transport, said: “For all the SNP’s lofty rhetoric on the environment – ​​and Nicola Sturgeon’s grandstanding at Cop26 – Scotland is miles behind where we should be”.

“In just the last few months, we have seen the damage and devastation caused by severe winter storms and the SNP’s belated response – this cannot be allowed to continue.”

Scottish Labor net zero spokesman, Colin Smyth, said the report was a “damning indication of the SNP-Green government’s atrocious record on the environment”.

“The Greens are no longer worthy of the name, now that they’ve abandoned the last of their principles to prop up this failing government,” he said.