General
SCIS is a programme delivered in partnership between the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute and the Improvement Service. It is jointly funded by Scottish Government and all 32 local authorities.
SCIS helps councils build capacity and capability for the development of area-wide programmes of emissions reduction, to deliver their own area-wide net zero targets, and to contribute to Scotland’s national commitment to net zero by 2045. SCIS also works to build on the existing relationships between local authorities and their external stakeholders, linking with regional partnerships and networks.
SCIS is a co-designed programme of activities to:
- Build capacity across all local authority functions to enable planning, monitoring and delivery of climate action at the scale and pace required for achieving area-based target progress.
- Build capability in skills, knowledge, and influence to ensure that climate impact is a priority embedded in all decision making.
- Support local authorities and Scottish Government to work together to develop and deliver climate projects and programmes (also referred to as interventions) at the pace and scale required.
- Define an agreed boundary and methodology for area-wide emissions data to bring a consistent approach to using and adapting the national emissions dataset, helping to better plan and monitor actions for emissions reduction.
- Support use of the ClimateView platform to coordinate and enhance delivery of area-wide emissions reduction strategies.
Scotland is making progress against climate change targets but there is a need for urgent increase in the scale and pace of change across every sector, especially for heat in buildings and transport. Local government is vital to the delivery of these targets and councils are designing and delivering their own ambitions and action plans.
Reducing emissions to tackle climate change is a massive, complex and systemic problem, in which the sources of emissions are interconnected and where solutions must be designed and delivered at scale. An area-wide approach is needed to recognise this connectivity, breaking down emissions in a region by source and designing area-wide programmes for emissions reduction.
Whilst we think a live tracking platform is more useful for planning and tracking climate change plans, we recognise that a lot of work has gone into the development of various PDF plans and strategies by local authorities across the country. We want to use the information that is already in these, and work alongside Council processes in a way that works for each local authority.
The SCIS has been a long time in the making! From idea to funding took about 2 years, with subsequent initial development funding for 6 months enabling us to co-design the service and platform requirements with local authorities and go through public procurement for the platform.
In Year One we recruited and trained a new team, developed a Scottish GHG inventory methodology and set up all 32 LAs on the ClimateView platform. We completed the Y1 User Journey training programme: designing and running 10 platform training workshops for over 100 local authority staff across all 32 local authorities. We also hosted Roadshow events in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness with 75 local authority colleagues and elected members in attendance, where we met, discussed and ran in-person workshops covering various elements of the SCIS programme and ClimateView platform.
During Y2, we are continuing to grow the team as we develop individual support plans for each local authority. We will also increase the number of teams engaged with the platform within local authorities, for example, running transport transition workshops or LHEES workshops with other council services. This engagement will include further user group meetings, tailored workshops and the creation of resources for our primary users, key sector areas and elected members.
During Year 3, we will extend out from LAs to other key stakeholders within local areas to get a more complete picture of interventions, which will then feed into better transition modelling and identification of key enabling actions. However, all of this is dependent on delivering an effective annual service leading to continued funding. The service is designed to be flexible to LA needs and we aim to respond to these as far as possible through ongoing service co-design and delivery.
Alongside central data expertise, there is a capacity building team working across all 32 local authorities. Six Local Leads are working across three family groupings designed to preserve existing local and regional partnerships, building on the work already undertaken together.
The family groupings are a starting point - we support and encourage connections outside of these groupings (namely, 'friend' groupings) where local authorities have other partnerships and commonalities outside of the family boundaries. Our Local Leads support local authorities to identify these commonalities, connect the dots, and bring people and councils together on the relevant topics.
You can find the family groupings map here, as well as a User Group session recording where the family groupings were co-designed and informed by LA views.
Our primary users are climate officers/managers within each local authority.
As we move beyond populating and publishing ClimateView dashboards and into the transition modelling for different sectors (such as transport or domestic heat), we are engaging with multiple service areas across councils, in addition to elected members.
Ultimately, the SCIS programme and platform exists to aid collaborative thinking within and between key stakeholders. However, not all users need to be expert or have an active login - some staff might interact with the platform at workshops or provide updates to the climate team.
As an elected member you can influence decision making, development and policy to make a difference, improving the quality of people’s lives and the communities of which they are part. The SCIS will support you to make these decisions through an improved evidence base on the common data platform and the provision of capacity building support.
Understanding the climate change impact of decisions and projects can be complex. Different councils are taking different approaches, some using impact assessments or carbon budgeting to ensure organisation-wide buy in and to assist with decision making. Whatever the approach, leadership must work to understand and analyse the impact of projects, from strategies to capital works and infrastructure. The SCIS will provide a consistent approach and give officers and Elected Members the confidence and capacity to use the data to understand impact in decision making around policies and projects.
Empowerment at local level is key to successful climate action. The SCIS platform will support local authorities in their engagement with community groups and constituents by demonstrating area wide progress and priorities.
The Platform
ClimateView is a Swedish technology company that helps cities, regions, and nations to plan, implement, and monitor their sustainability transitions using data. This is achieved through a platform built on the Transition Element Framework.
You can find out more about ClimateView in the FAQ section of their website.
Each local authority can take the decision to publish their ClimateView dashboard; this enables the public and other stakeholders to engage with the data, the interventions and the progress indicators. Dashboard publication is a key
Dashboard publication is a critical milestone in a council's area-wide emissions journey. As of Q1 2026, three local authorities have made their dashboards public: Aberdeenshire Council, Dundee City Council and Falkirk Council. We expect more local authority dashboards to be published throughout the course of the year.
Currently the transition elements within ClimateView are mitigation measures designed to reduce carbon emissions based on IPCC methodologies.
While the SCIS is initially focussing on interventions around Heat in Buildings and Transport to deliver these transitions, we are actively working with ClimateView to better integrate areas such as nature, biodiversity, adaptation, health, equity and Just Transition into the platform, and they are open and receptive collaborators. Additionally, we have engaged with the Scottish Government around nature, biodiversity and Just Transition themes; and are engaging with national organisations such as Verture, the Just Transition Commission and Adaptation Scotland.
Currently, the platform facilitates inclusion of these themes by giving users the ability to add tags to specific interventions, i.e. adding a ‘Just Transition' or ‘Biodiversity’ tag to help identify co-benefits of an action where it directly or indirectly affects Just Transition or biodiversity outcomes.
A key example of ongoing development work in this area is the integration of AFOLU datasets (agriculture, forestry, and other land-use) into the platform. While ClimateView have previously focussed on urban areas, we recognised that we needed to tailor the approach for rural areas. As such, we are working with them to help develop transition elements around land use including woodland creation and peatland restoration, as well as around low carbon agricultural systems.
It is important that co-benefits of different transitions are identified and maximised – in the AFOLU transition, there are likely to be benefits around ecosystem services such as natural flood management and nature restoration but as with health inequalities, it is important to also recognise and assess the potential for adverse impacts and avoid these where possible.
Methodology
In calculating area-wide emissions data, we use the DESNZ LA GHG dataset (and the underlying sub-national datasets) as a basis for our inventory but aggregated to different categories in line with international standards. We also have more locally specific data from local authorities such as on ferries and aviation, and we are using this to improve upon DESNZ data. This inventory data will be updated annually with the new published dataset and any methodological changes affecting historic data.
This methodology was created in direct response to feedback from local authorities as to what would be most useful for them, and we have already run two workshops for our local authority user group explaining the decisions we made when creating these emissions inventories. We have documented how we arrive at the numbers we do, and we are very happy to share and discuss this methodology with anyone interested.
The dataset that is much harder to surface is the array of current and future climate ‘interventions’, as it is significantly harder to extract text from PDF documents such as Climate Action Plans or Net Zero Strategies than it is to extract and process numerical data from an Excel file. Also, many of the interventions across local authority strategies and plans have a lot of gaps in terms of the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ for a given intervention.