Read time: 8 mins
Is Scotland still a world leader on climate change? Ben Wray finds that while targets are still being hit, little progress is being made in key industry sectors, while other countries and climate scientists raise their ambitions and expectations.
This is Climate Week in Scotland, just as scientists meet in the South Korean city of Incheon for crucial Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) talks ahead of a much anticipated report publication.
The anticipated outcome of the report (which will be published on 8 October) is that the IPCC will agree that emissions can rise no further than 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels to stop catastrophic climate change. We have already passed the one per cent mark.
The Paris Summit agreed to keep emissions to “well below two degrees C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees C”, and a scientist at Incheon told the BBC that if the world were to adjust to fulfil the 1.5 degrees C limit “our lives would never be the same”.
Those talks come after a summer heatwave which has heightened consciousness around the issue of climate change around the world. After a summer of forest fires in Sweden, the issue became a hot topic in the country’s elections last month. And in Scotland concern about climate change has been rising, with the Scottish Household Survey published last month showing that Scots are increasingly worried that climate change has become an “immediate and urgent problem” requiring action, rising from 46 per cent to 61 per cent in the space of four years.
