Climate law in Scotland — Has the nation lost its Net Zero nerve?

It is a lively and exciting time for climate law in Scotland. The stakes are high, and much hangs in the balance, writes Dr Thomas L Muinzer, co-founder of the Scottish Climate Emergency Legal Network.

Setting our direction – a fast start

In 2019, I assessed the UK’s Climate Change Act 2008 for the publisher Palgrave, just after the framework’s 10th anniversary.¹ Here, I found that this extensive Westminster statute remained nationally important and even internationally pioneering; but I also highlighted that the Scottish Parliament had pushed the envelope of progressive climate governance even further. This was achieved through passage of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009.²

The national Climate Change Act 2008 mandated a 34% reduction in UK greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, measured from 1990 emissions levels. The Scottish Parliament’s 2009 Act ramped this up, placing a duty on the Scottish ministers to achieve a 42% reduction for Scotland by 2020. Scotland’s Act also included a variety of innovations that were absent from the national legislation, including annual emissions reduction targets and bespoke public engagement provisions.

This 2009 Act currently applies a ‘net zero’ target to Scotland for 2045, meaning that by this date the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere are to be cancelled out by those that are removed. The national 2008 Act aims for the less ambitious date of 2050.

Remarkably, by 2017 the Scottish Government was reporting that Scotland had “exceeded its own 42% greenhouse gas emissions reduction target [for 2020] six years early”. Scotland’s place as a climate leader was cemented. This was so not just in the UK,³ but around the world.⁴ Scotland had charted its own direction, pressed its legislative accelerator and exceeded national ambitions.

Foot off the accelerator

All this is good for the planet. It is also good for the economy, signalling that Scotland is very much open for green business and investment. 

As a result, the renewables sector is booming⁵ and energy efficiency has been enhanced across homes, businesses and infrastructure. Energy security has also taken a leap forward, as increased green energy generation has boosted Scotland’s ability to produce power domestically while better facing down volatile, insecure and environmentally harmful fossil fuel import–export markets. 

Scotland’s initial positive progress has stalled somewhat, however. Hindrances have arisen from both national (UK) and domestic (Scottish) sources.

Bumps in the road — UK factors

UK-level hindrances to Scotland’s climate progress are not difficult to spot.

North Sea oil and gas governance is reserved to the national level under the terms of the Scotland Act 1998, and the UK Government continues to hold Scotland back from mitigating North Sea fossil fuel extraction. In turn, this prevents a Scottish green energy revolution from realising its full potential. 

Earlier this year, the Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled that consent to produce oil and gas from the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields in the North Sea had been granted unlawfully.⁶ Lord Ericht held that there had been an impermissible failure to take into account the potential impact on the climate of emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels extracted from the sites. In so finding, the learned judge appropriately followed the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on these sorts of “downstream” emissions in Finch v Surrey County Council.⁷

But for all the centrality of Scotland to this controversy – including the centrality of the Scottish courts – the actual North Sea approvals in question were issued by the UK Government (initially by a largely fossil fuel-friendly Conservative government, then sustained by a purportedly ‘greener’ incoming Labour administration).

Spotlight on Aberdeen

Such national offshore UK energy choices are inextricably bound up with onshore Scottish socio-economic outcomes.

This is seen clearly in the author’s place of residence, the great city of Aberdeen. Here, an urban economy built in significant part on North Sea oil and gas is struggling to realise its promising green potential.

The UK Government’s protracted economic lock-in of the fossil fuel base in the Scottish northeast is constraining the city from developing into a green energy world-leader, a position it is both trying to pursue and is well placed to achieve, given its second-to-none energy skills base. 

Such circumstances have put the wind in the face instead of at the back of the region’s Net Zero Aberdeen Routemap and Strategic Infrastructure Plan for energy transition. They have hindered the substantial inward investment and associated innovation that the city must attract to diversify its economy away from fossil fuels and transition into a green leader.

Thus, development of the city’s exciting and much-needed Energy Transition Zone, summarised by Invest Aberdeen as “a 250-hectare site in close proximity to the brand-new £420 million Aberdeen South Harbour”, has been the subject of arduous delay.

All this is occurring as environmental needs and Scottish and UK climate law continue to drive Scotland on towards Net Zero 2045. It is a period in which Aberdeen, as the UK’s ‘energy capital’, needs to actualise its tremendous green potential, while protecting itself against being left behind as the country’s energy transition unfolds rapidly around it.

Bumps in the road – Scottish factors

It was noted above that domestic factors originating from within Scotland have also hindered the dynamic progress embodied by the early years of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009.

The Scottish Government and Parliament have recently gutted some of the 2009 Act’s key components. Annual emissions reduction targets have been pulled out and replaced with more flexible five-year “carbon budgets”⁸ – perhaps unsurprisingly, given an ongoing failure to achieve the year-on-year reductions over the latest annual rounds. 

More concerning, however, has been the recent removal of the Act’s “interim” emissions reduction targets, which were sitting at 75% for 2030 and 90% for 2040.⁹ These goals have been removed entirely. This renders the emissions reduction trajectory under Scotland’s primary climate legislation fuzzy and unspecific over the long-term run-up to Net Zero 2045. It flies in the face of best-practice legislative design.¹⁰

What next?

So, what next for climate law’s direction of travel in Scotland? 

Scotland’s progressive climate regime has long been in the front rank nationally and internationally. Scotland helped to lead on climate law, and it can still do so. 

But after missing our annual reduction targets over a prolonged period recently, and in light of the softening and gutting of important parts of our 2009 Climate Act, to say nothing of inadequate complementary action from the UK Government, it is time to decide if we want to continue to drive positive change, or take a back seat.

Dr Thomas L Muinzer is co-founder of the Scottish Climate Emergency Legal Network and a Reader at the University of Aberdeen.

References

¹ Muinzer, T. L., Climate and Energy Governance for the UK Low Carbon Transition: The Climate Change Act 2008 (Palgrave, 2019).

² Ibid, Chapter 3.

³ When the Climate Change Act (Northern Ireland) 2022 was being formulated, Dr Amanda Slevin of Climate Coalition NI noted: “The Climate Change (Scotland) Act (2009) involves a net-zero target of 2045 and just transition principles, exemplifying how devolved administrations can innovate and become climate leaders.” Collaboration Key to NI’s First Climate Change Act (PCAN, April 2022).

⁴ When the influential text EU Climate Law in Member States was published in 2012, although it was part of the UK, Scotland was deemed so important that it received its own full chapter in a book with chapters otherwise devoted to complete EU member states: Colin Reid, ‘Scotland: Constraints and Opportunities in a Devolved System’, Chapter 7 in Peeters, M., Stallworthy M. and De Cendra de Larragán, J. (eds), Climate Law in EU Member States (Edward Elgar, 2012).

⁵ In December 2024, the UK Government reported: “The share of [UK] low carbon generation varied across the four nations with Scotland having 89.6%, England with 57.2%, Northern Ireland with 50.9% and Wales with 34.0%.” Electricity Generation and Supply in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England, 2019 to 2023.

⁶ Greenpeace Ltd v Advocate General for Scotland [2025] CSOH 10.

⁷ R (on the Application of Finch) v Surrey County Council and Others [2024] UKSC 20.

⁸ Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2024, s2.

⁹ Amended into the 2009 Act in 2019 by s3 of the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019.

¹⁰ See further: Thomas L Muinzer, ‘Conceptualising and Formulating National Climate Change Acts’, Chapter 10 in Muinzer, T. L. (ed.), National Climate Change Acts (Bloomsbury, 2020).