The Scottish Climate Intelligence Service has had a busy summer developing our offer and building our team. Here are the latest updates and a look at what we've got coming up over the coming months.
1. New beginnings
We're thrilled to have four new staff members join the SCIS programme as part of the Improvement Service! Three new Local Leads — Kathryn, Lucy and Sara — join the Capacity Building team with rich experience delivering climate action across sectors and scales, bolstering the level of direct support we can provide to all Scottish local authorities. Ru, our new Communications Officer, brings comms expertise from across both the private and public sector and will help SCIS to maximise its reach and impact, amplifying the brilliant local government work advancing just and equitable transitions across Scotland.
You can find out more about our new team members in the upcoming SCIS Bulletin.
2. Spotlight: Indicator Dashboard
Local authorities are doing lots of good climate action across the country, and it's having an impact. We know this because we have emissions datasets highlighting area-wide emissions falling across most sectors. However, these datasets are fuzzy and time-lagged, meaning while essential to highlight the progress we are making, they are not always the most useful indicators for proactive climate decision-making.
To make informed decisions, those delivering change need to understand indicators of transition beyond emissions: that is, indicators that the activity we want to happen is actually taking place.
So, if we want to reduce emissions across Transport, we might want to know: are more people walking and cycling? Are more people using public transport? Are there more electric vehicles on the roads than last year? And are there more EV charging stations to support them? How do people feel about electric vehicles? And so on.
In recognition of this need, the SCIS Data Team has created an Indicator Dashboard for our local authority users. The dashboard highlights multiple key indicators across sectors and scales highlighting the pace of transition, presence of infrastructure or skills necessary to enable sectoral transitions, and wider behaviour, policies and funding.
These indicators give us greater granularity about the shifts that are, or aren't, taking place to support a sectoral transition. In the hands of decision makers, this information can lead to more informed, targeted interventions, benefitting places and communities.
We will be demonstrating the Indicator Dashboard to our User Group on Thursday 1st October. If you would like to find out more, please reach out to your council's climate change team or contact your SCIS Local Lead.
3. Improvement Service Just Transition Workshop
We have heard from colleagues in local government that working in silos, data gaps and communication gaps are three critical barriers slowing just transitions in their local areas. It was in this context that on Thursday 20th August, SCIS Climate Equity Lead John Rembowski and National Delivery Lead Morgan Watkins led an internal Just Transition workshop for Improvement Service colleagues.
Coming together with colleagues working on a range of programmes across the IS' Digital Public Services and Transformation, Performance and Improvement teams, the workshop highlighted the importance of embedding justice and equity throughout a policymaking process, and the need for cross service-area collaboration to achieve this.
We know all of the technological and behavioural changes that will help us to achieve our emissions targets. The exact mix of solutions that are implemented will vary from place to place and must be based on the needs and wants of citizens and communities in each area.
From design and decision making, to implementation, monitoring and evaluation and adaptation, asking who is not included at each stage of the process, interrogating why, and remedying as needed, is critical to more just and equitable climate action.
If you are interested in accelerating local authority action to advance Just Transitions across Scotland, please reach out at john.rembowski@improvementservice.org.uk.
What’s coming up?
SCIS is excited to ramp-up delivery once more after a summer of growth and development. Over the coming months, we'll continue our dedicated 1-1 support for all Scottish local authorities, dive into place-based Residential Heat transitions through Transition Pathway workshops, update our Scottish Area-Wide Emissions Inventory to reflect new data, and continue our ongoing collaboration with Scottish Government to improve multi-level climate delivery.
Key upcoming sessions for our Users include:
- SCIS User Group Q3 - Thursday 17th September, 2PM-3.30PM
- SCIS Spotlight: Indicator Dashboard – Thursday 1st October, 2PM-3.30PM (invitation to come)
Alongside these sessions, we will be publishing additional guidance on the co-benefits of climate action for climate officers, in addition to the final of our Insight briefing series on the additional benefits of climate action: this time, Public Transport. You can find out more here.
If you would like to find out more about the SCIS programme, you can visit our website and follow us on LinkedIn. You can also contact the team at info@climateintelligenceservice.scot.