1. Outline
Letter from Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee, to Kersti Berge, Director of Energy and Climate Change at the Scottish Government about a change in the reporting practice for inclusion of the greenhouse gas emissions inventory for Scotland in the annual UK-wide Progress Report to Parliament.
2. Key messages
Each year, the greenhouse gas emissions inventory for Scotland is published in the first half of June. The timing of publication is typically extremely close to our annual UK-wide Progress Report to the UK Parliament, which must be laid in the UK Parliament by the end of June.
This year, the deadline to finalise our UK-wide Progress Report is 2 June. Unfortunately, this is before the Scottish emissions data are expected to be published. We will not, therefore, be able to include these data in the UK Progress Report.
Due to our concerns over quality assurance and Committee oversight, we have also concluded that, for future years, we will not include the Scottish emissions statistics in the UK Progress Report, unless they can be received with sufficient time for analysis. We would require earlier publication and/or pre-release access to the data for inclusion, such that we receive it no later than the third week of May.
We will, however, cover the June 2021 statistics publication in the annual Progress Report to the Scottish Parliament, which the Committee plans to publish in late 2021, after the conclusion of COP26.
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