The Scottish Climate Intelligence Service (SCIS) is delivered in partnership by the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI) and the Improvement Service, jointly funded by Scottish Government and all of Scotland's 32 local authorities. Our team has a range of skills and experience to support delivery of climate action.

Delivering net zero for Scotland by 2045 means taking action at the local level. Local authorities are climate leaders and SCIS works with all 32 Scottish local authorities to help deliver climate action at the scale and pace needed. We want to support them to design, manage and deliver plans for area-wide emissions reduction, targeting all sources of emissions within their local authority area. We do this by:

• Delivering training, peer-to-peer learning, and tailored, hands-on support through a dedicated capacity-building programme for local authority officers.
• Supporting use of a common data platform – ClimateView - to track progress on the actions required to reduce emissions.
• Providing a standardised annual dataset of local emissions by source, critical for collating insights across local authorities.
• Helping local authorities develop an emissions reduction pathway that best suits their local circumstances, geography, opportunities and constraints.
• Directing attention and investment to where interventions will have the greatest systemic impact.

We also know that climate change is not just about emissions, and that understanding and delivering the wider benefits of climate action, notably for adaptation, nature, health and inequality, are vital to society and critical to net zero delivery.

Our service is building capacity within local authorities. By working within and across local authorities, we support collaboration and help to share skills, knowledge, insights and common approaches which support and accelerate effective local climate action.

More information

To find out more about our impact to-date, read our Annual Impact Report 2024-25.