Scottish Greenhouse Gas Emissions 2019

15th June 2021

There are two measures of greenhouse gases presented in this release:

SOURCE EMISSIONS
A measure of the actual emissions or removals of greenhouse gases in Scotland, including international aviation and shipping. Source emissions were 47.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019; falling by 43.8 per cent between 1990 and 2018 and falling by 2.3 per cent between 2018 and 2019.

EMISSIONS FOR REPORTING AGAINST TARGETS
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommended a new method of reporting emissions for the purposes of reporting against targets which was implanted for the first time in June 2020. This is known as the GHG Account and the calculation in detailed in section C of the statistics release.

On this basis, the GHG account reduced by 51.5 per cent between the baseline period and 2019.

The Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019 specifies a 55.0 per cent reduction over the same period.

Therefore the target for 2019 has not been met.