CERG 2025: Driving Climate Action Through Delivery

As an already busy 2026 gets underway, we’re taking a moment out to reflect on CERG’s impact over the past year. 

CERG works through its members, climate leaders from the public, private and third sectors, bringing together a wealth of knowledge and experience to provide practical, workable solutions that can be implemented now. 

In 2025, CERG focused on five interconnected areas that together helped shift Scotland’s climate conversation from ambition to delivery.

Figure: CERG’s 2025 impact across debate, policy influence, scrutiny, collaboration and forward-looking reform. 

Our core focus was shaping the debate around the need for climate policy to prioritise implementation, not just targets. Through briefings, events and expert engagement, we have helped reframe climate action around delivery, setting out practical, credible recommendations on governance, monitoring and accountability to close the implementation gap, and reinforcing Scotland’s leadership in this space. 

We influenced policy by bringing together climate leaders from across sectors to develop key recommendations for the Scottish Government’s Climate Change Plan 2026–2045 (CCP). These were published ahead of the draft Plan in our briefing Embedding Delivery in Scotland’s Climate Change Plan: Improving Design, Governance and Implementation, defining the standard for a delivery-oriented CCP. 

Building on this work, we strengthened parliamentary and civil society scrutiny of the draft CCP. We convened an event at the Scottish Parliament and submitted evidence to parliamentary committees and worked with the Scottish Government to co-facilitate a workshop on delivery. These initiatives will help to strengthen delivery, governance and accountability in the final CCP and to support its long-term success. 

Throughout the year, we deepened collaboration and systems thinking by strengthening connections across sectors. Recognising that effective climate policy must also be good policy thatdelivers social, economic and environmental benefits, we advocated for climate policy to be framed, designed and delivered with these outcomes at its core. This narrative has since been reflected in the CCP itself. 

We also advocated for practical delivery mechanisms, including multi-year funding models, regional scale delivery and the use of Net Zero Assessments (NZAs) for all new Scottish Government policy decisions. Through our briefing Embedding Climate into Decision-Making: Mandating Net Zero Assessments, we reiterated the case for NZAs as a core tool for embedding climate considerations across government and made practical recommendations on how to implement them. We are now seeing NZAs being rolled out. 

Finally, we showcased Scotland’s climate story internationally, highlighting the international role that effective sub-national climate action and delivery can play in our briefing From Ambition to Delivery: Scotland and the Role of Sub-national Climate Action. 

Looking to the future, we set out recommendations for the next Scottish Government in our briefing, Delivering on Climate for a Thriving and Resilient Scotland. We argue that to address the ‘delivery gap’ and ensure a fair transition – with warmer homes, cleaner air, better health, safer streets, biodiversity, economic opportunities and new jobs, requires government to focus not just on policy development but on making sure policies and plans are implemented effectively and achieve real outcomes, with robust programme management and accountability.  

Achieving this means moving quickly to put delivery enablers in place:  

• committing to multi-year funding models that give confidence to delivery partners;  

• scaling up regional approaches to delivery in areas such as transport and land use;  

• unlocking private investment through a Technical Assistance Facility; and 

•  expanding Net Zero Assessments and developing climate resilience screening as routine requirements for all major spending decisions;  

CERG looks forward to continuing to work constructively with the Scottish Government and allies across all sectors to turn these recommendations into practical steps that can be actioned now.