John Rembowski, Scottish Climate Intelligence Service Capacity Building Project Officer, looks back at a big year for SCIS and looks ahead to exciting developments in 2026.
2025 was a great year for the Scottish Climate Intelligence Service (SCIS). We have taken great strides to build capacity and capability across all 32 local authorities for area-wide emissions reduction, while continuing to innovate develop our programme and offer to ensure we’re giving users what they need and more.
This blog recaps some of the highlights from a packed year and explores what’s coming this year.
What is the SCIS?
For those who may not know what SCIS is all about, here’s a quick reminder.
The SCIS is a climate change capacity-building programme for local authorities in Scotland, combining a national digital platform and a support service co-designed by the delivery partners and local authorities from across the country.
The SCIS is delivered by a partnership between the Improvement Service, Edinburgh Climate Change Institute and ClimateView. This partnership brings together expert climate knowledge, practitioner insights and a track record of successfully supporting local authorities to deliver high quality, efficient local services both in Scotland and across the world.
Our digital platform - ClimateView – collates area-wide emissions data to create standardised emissions inventories across all 32 of Scotland's local authorities. It also calculates and visualises the emissions reduction impact of particular projects and interventions taken by local authorities in delivering their own area-wide emissions reduction strategies.
Through workshops, knowledge-sharing sessions and 1-2-1s, our tailored support service is helping local authorities across the country to build the skills and knowledge to use this data to better plan, monitor and deliver climate action at the scale and pace required for achieving their net zero targets.
SCIS in 2025
We’re proud of the support we provided to local authorities in 2025 (albeit there’s a lot still to do!) Here’s a summary of the best bits:
1. Between January – December 2025, SCIS ran 22 training workshops and drop-in sessions for 127 council officers across all 32 Scottish local authorities, in addition to three in-person ‘Roadshow’ events for 75 participants across 23 local authorities in Glasgow, Inverness and Edinburgh.
2. Deepened our tailored support for local authorities. This included developing and co-creating personalised support plans for all 32 local authorities, ensuring our capacity-building support meets councils where they are, targeting the most effective actions to support area-wide emissions reduction in a given local authority area.
Additionally, our data team updated emissions inventories for all 32 local authorities and produced Area Wide Emissions Inventory reports for all councils who asked for one.
3. Aberdeenshire became the first local authority to publish their ClimateView dashboard as part of the SCIS programme! You can find out more here.
4. We recruited seven fantastic new team members: Alex Rathmell – Capacity Building Manager (IS), Annika Schwochow – Local Lead (IS), Hannah Oliver - Local Lead (IS), Joe Perry – Local Lead (IS), Harrison Clark – Data Officer (ECCI) and Maja Pitcairn – Data Officer (ECCI).
5. We continued our extensive external engagement with key stakeholders and delivery partners to support multi-level climate delivery, including:
- At the national level, speaking and being showcased at New York Climate Week with Gillian Martin MSP and publication of Multilevel Governance Briefing in collaboration with COSLA & SG, being a case study at the inaugural Just Transition Summit, giving evidence at two parliamentary committees, delivering a workshop at COSLA’s Annual Conference and multiple presentations to the Climate Delivery Framework: Political Oversight Group.
- At the regional level delivering presentations and speaking on panels at the All Energy Conference, Daring Cities 2025 Bonn Dialogues, Scottish Research Alliance for Energy, Homes and Livelihoods event and for external partners including hubWest, Public Health Scotland, SPT, Transport Scotland, and many more!
6. Finally, we created myriad resources, recordings and toolkits for our local authority users to support them on their SCIS journey.
Our SCIS Insight briefings for external stakeholders highlight the multiple additional benefits of climate interventions such as active travel, electric vehicles and heat pumps. You can find out more about those in our blog here.
With our thanks again to our user group – officers from all 32 local authorities – who continue to engage, participate and co-design this programme with us: the SCIS would not be where it is today without them!
What’s next for the SCIS?
2025 was jam-packed, but we have lots more in store for 2026! Here’s a snapshot of what we’ll be getting up to:
1. The user Journey continues!
We will continue to develop and deliver workshops, drop-ins and collaboration opportunities for our local authority users, in addition to reviewing our Support Plans to ensure we are delivering as best we can for officers and elected members to accelerate climate action in their areas.
Having laid the foundations through our ‘How to’ workshop series, a primary focus continues to be supporting local authorities to upload interventions onto the platform, with our hope to have a majority of dashboards published by the end of the year. We will also continue to develop and deliver workshops that support cross-service area collaboration, including our Tempo Analysis and Target Balancing workshops for domestic heat and transport.
Finally, we will continue to refresh our users in our SCIS Refresh series and highlight exciting developments through our Spotlight series. In January and February alone, we’ll have our User Group to update all users on our plans for the next quarter and beyond, Refresh users on our Area-wide Emissions Inventory and put a Spotlight on our carbon calculator work and nationally collated intervention analysis. Which leads me onto…
2. Nationally collated intervention analysis
This one’s a bit of a mouthful but is a piece of work we’re very excited to get stuck into.
Local authority officers have dedicated a considerable amount of time and effort to collating and inputting interventions on ClimateView. For the first time ever, SCIS will be sharing a detailed summary analysis of interventions with local authority officers across Scotland.
With interventions collated from the start of the programme till the end of January 2026, we’ll be running a session with our users towards the end of February to get into some of the analysis.
This session will explore key insights such as (i) The state and scale of local authority climate action in Scotland; (ii) The main transitions being adopted to drive Scotland's net zero transition; (iii) The key gaps and opportunities for area-wide decarbonisation; (iv) Local authorities' main barriers to net zero; (v) The reported carbon reduction potential of current interventions.
Given the significance of this dataset, our initial session provides the time and space for local authority officers to explore and feedback on both this analysis as well as future analysis processes. This will enable officers to shape an accurate and representative narrative of local authority climate action in Scotland, which they are comfortable with us sharing with Scottish Government, COSLA and key local authority partners.
3. National sprint
From January to May 2026 the SCIS programme will be running a national sprint programme with Scottish Government, Transport Scotland and representatives from local authorities and COSLA. This series of workshops aims to facilitate the co-design of an improved approach to multi-level delivery of climate action by:
- Identifying national intelligence needs
- Enabling sharing of practitioner experts
- Showcasing SCIS intelligence and insights
- Developing relationships with SG and Transport Scotland
At time of writing, we’ve already had our kick-off calls with colleagues from across Scottish Government and Transport Scotland and are very excited to get started!
4. Family gatherings
As part of our continued efforts to encourage collaboration across local authorities, in March 2026 the SCIS team will be travelling across Scotland to meet our local authority users where they are.
Over three days in locations across the country, we will be running a range of sessions and workshops aimed at bringing together our user group to explore, discuss and learn about different parts of their area-wide emissions reduction journeys. We have already sent out a survey to users to get their thoughts and are excited for this to come together over the coming months!
5. Continued partner collaboration
Throughout 2025 we were fortunate to meet and engage with lots of individuals and organisations also working across scales and sectors to reduce area-wide emissions in just and equitable ways.
In 2026, SCIS will continue to meet and collaborate with partners at local and national level to develop our programme, align support by beginning to integrate some partner interventions into local authority dashboards and keep working together for just and equitable transitions across Scotland.
To find out more about the SCIS and explore potential collaboration with the programme, you can reach us at info@climateintelligenceservice.scot.
You can also stay up-to-date with our journey by following us on LinkedIn and signing up to our mailing list.