Audit Scotland’s insights into public sector Climate Action

Climate change spans almost every area of public policy in Scotland. Responding to climate change is a national, local and personal challenge, with no one body able to act alone.

A transformation in approach is needed to enable effective collaboration locally and nationally. Climate change is an audit priority for the Accounts Commission and the Auditor General for Scotland. Huge amounts of public money will be invested in activities to tackle and adapt to climate change.

Independent public audit plays an important role in assuring people about how the Scottish public sector is responding to the climate emergency and how public money is being used to help achieve Scotland’s climate change ambitions.

Our latest report, Transforming the approach to climate change: Lessons from public audit, brings together learning from across four years of climate change reporting.

We’ve identified five key, interlinked areas of challenge that the public sector needs to address to ensure an effective approach to tackling climate change.

Audit Scotland

We encourage councillors and other public sector leaders to reflect on their organisation’s readiness to address these challenges and identify areas for improvement.

Leadership and collaboration

We’ve found there’s a need to develop a stronger culture of collaborative leadership, vital to support the public sector’s ambition to address climate change.

Local government and COSLA have a critical leadership role, alongside the Scottish Government, in coordinating activity and learning across the public and private sectors. This means identifying and supporting shared long-term goals, combining resources and sharing services where appropriate, and sharing learning.

Planning for delivery

Robust planning for the immediate and longer-term is critical, with clear and detailed delivery plans. Councils have identified issues relating to workforce capacity and capability as key challenges in implementing climate change policies.

We’ve reported that councils and the Scottish Government need to do more to fully integrate climate change considerations across all decision-making. This includes:

• Identifying shared long-term goals and strategic objectives.
• Aligning policies that have shared priorities.
• Combining resources and sharing services where it is more efficient to do so.
• Clarifying roles and responsibilities and addressing gaps in skills and capacity.
• Sharing learning and good practice to support continuous improvement and ensure sustained progress.

Failing to achieve this creates a high risk that the action needed will not happen at the scale and speed required.

Financial planning

The Accounts Commission recently reported that there are significant risks to the financial sustainability of councils, with the cost of delivering services rising faster than available funding.

Councils face difficult choices. Current and increasing financial pressures risk climate change ambitions not being realised, as actions and investments may not be affordable. But failing to act now will increase costs in future years.

This means identifying how best to target spending on the areas  with the most impact on emissions reduction and climate adaptation, ensuring the impact of spending is monitored and reported to help inform future decisions.

Governance

Our reporting found that councils, the Scottish Government and other public bodies need clear governance arrangements for climate change activity. Risks need to be identified and managed effectively.

Without effective monitoring of progress and robust evidence to inform decision-making, the risk increases that climate change and net-zero objectives won’t be achieved.

Public engagement

Across its work, the Accounts Commission emphasises the importance of communities being involved in decisions about how limited money and resource is used. With climate change already impacting communities and the need for behaviour change, public engagement is vital.

Councils and other public bodies have an important role in raising awareness of the actions communities and businesses need to take to tackle climate change. They need to work collaboratively with communities to develop policies and empower people to take action. This includes understanding and addressing inequalities in their engagement on climate change.

By bringing together learning from across our audit work, and highlighting examples of some different approaches, we aim to help drive change and improvement and support the Scottish public sector in delivering its long-term climate change ambitions.

Future reporting

Climate change will continue to be an important focus for Audit Scotland’s work. This includes a report, later in 2026, from the Auditor General for Scotland on renewable energy, considering the Scottish Government’s offshore wind investment programme. You can read more about this report here.

You can find more about Audit Scotland’s reporting on climate change on their website: Climate change | Audit Scotland