Climate policies in Scotland address both mitigation – reducing greenhouse gas emissions – and adaptation – preparing for climate impacts. Many of these policies will directly or indirectly affect health through housing, transport, the built and natural environment, and fair work. Policies that promote fairness and equity can improve health and reduce inequalities, while poorly designed or implemented policies could harm or cause inequality to widen.

This report provides the first Scotland-wide stocktake of evidence and research expertise on how climate policies affect health and health equity. It aims to summarise the evidence, consider how health and equity impacts can be monitored, and identify research expertise to help build a more connected climate and health research community.

Findings

• A broad but fragmented evidence base: Evidence varies considerably in depth and quality. It is strongest for housing, nature-based solutions, agriculture and food systems, temperature and air quality. Gaps remain in areas such as marine conservation, waste management and water quality.
• Inconsistent concepts and measurement: Health is rarely measured directly and is often considered through wider determinants such as housing and income. Definitions, measures and methods also vary, making findings difficult to compare. Equity is widely recognised but rarely clearly defined or measured.
• Fragmented research and knowledge: Research expertise is dispersed and often lacks visibility, limiting connections between researchers, policymakers and practitioners.

Recommendations

• Develop shared approaches: Establish common definitions and conceptual approaches to health, health equity, vulnerability and resilience, including how climate action affects these outcomes.
• Strengthen monitoring and evaluation: Use a wider and more consistent range of measures to capture health and equity impacts across different places and population groups.
• Address key evidence gaps: Prioritise research on areas including marine conservation, water quality, waste and direct health outcomes, alongside cross-cutting issues such as housing.
• Embed equity in climate action: Assess how climate policies affect different population groups and incorporate health and health equity into relevant impact assessments.
• Strengthen collaboration and knowledge exchange: Build connections between Scottish, UK and international researchers, policymakers, practitioners and communities to support collaboration, data sharing and the use of place-based and lived experience.

If you require the report in an alternative format, such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.

Additional data outputs

This review is intended to act as a useful starting point for mapping Scottish examples of how the health and health equity impacts of climate policy are assessed. Four additional outputs are intended to help researchers and policymakers situate projects in this research landscape. These are static snapshots capturing activity accessed between October 2025 and March 2026.

Photo by David Dvořáček on Unsplash

Research completed March 2026

https://doi.org/10.7488/era/7606

Executive summary and recommendations

This report provides the first Scotland-wide stocktake of evidence and research expertise examining how climate mitigation and adaptation policies affect health and health equity. This report concludes that Scotland has a strong but fragmented and inconsistent evidence base that cannot yet fully support the anticipated monitoring and evaluation requirements for the Scottish National Adaptation Plan 3 (2024 – 2029) (SNAP3) and the Climate Change Plan (2026 – 2040) (CCP). It presents policy focused recommendations for action.

Purpose of this review

The aims of this rapid review were three-fold. Firstly, to summarise existing evidence on the health and health equity impacts of climate action in Scotland. Secondly, to consider how these impacts can be monitored with a clear focus on equity. Finally, to identify individuals with relevant research expertise in Scotland and engage with them to consider how best to support a more connected climate and health research community

Relevance to the policy context

Scotland’s urgent response to climate change requires mitigation and actions to adapt to a changing climate, as part of a just transition to net zero by 2045. The policy actions aimed at achieving this, set out in the SNAP3 and CCP, will impact on health directly. They will also shape the building blocks of good health in local places. This includes housing, transport, the built and natural environment, and fair work in a thriving local economy.

Where climate policy actions are designed and delivered in line with just transition principles of fairness and equity, they can protect and improve population health overall and reduce health inequalities. Where actions are poorly designed or implemented, they can lead to health harms and may widen health inequities. Addressing environmental sustainability and health equity together will support Scotland to realise its climate ambitions while contributing to the prevention-focused Population Health Framework and the wider Public Service Reform agenda.

Findings: nature of the reviewed evidence base and research landscape

Our findings on the nature of the evidence base and the characteristics of the research landscape are as follows:

• The published evidence base is diverse and highly fragmented. We used an existing typology to categorise the literature. This captured the disciplinary and methodological breadth of published literature. This stocktake shows that the depth and distribution of evidence across different categories of climate action/threat is highly variable.
  
• There are strengths and gaps in the evidence base: Strengths include more extensive understanding of the health and health equity impacts of climate policy in housing, nature-based solutions, agriculture and food systems, and responses to temperature and air-quality. Gaps (in a health context) include research on marine conservation, waste management, and water quality.
  
• A shared conceptual underpinning is urgently needed: At the stakeholder workshop, participants identified the need for shared understandings of health, health outcomes, vulnerability and equity to improve conceptual clarity. They reinforced the importance of mixed-methods, and participatory approaches to overcome the difficulties of attributing health and health equity impacts to climate actions, and a strong desire for cross and transdisciplinary collaboration.
  
• Health is primarily an indirect concern: From our evidence base it is striking that only a small number of studies treat health or health equity as primary outcomes. Health is often captured indirectly, framed in terms of wider determinants, or treated as contextual rather than measured.
  
• Metrics are varied and methodological consistency is low: Metrics vary widely from clinical health outcomes to behavioural and wellbeing indicators. Methodological consistency in relation to metrics is low, reflecting the heterogenous nature of disciplinary expertise, and the different contexts for climate action that characterise the evidence base.
  
• Equity is a poorly operationalised consideration: Equity is acknowledged in most publications but is inconsistently defined and poorly operationalised. Socioeconomic status is the most frequently used equity indicator, with very limited attention to protected characteristics. Few studies measured equity outcomes, and many engaged instead with theoretical or potential inequities.
  
• Expertise is fragmented and lacks connectivity: From the perspective of the stakeholders that we engaged in this project, the research and evidence landscape, whilst full of potential lacks visibility and is fragmented. There is a collective desire amongst researchers to be better connected and networked with policymakers and each other, in Scotland and beyond. This requires structured support to bridge the perceived gap between government research needs and academic knowledge production.
  

Recommendations

To generate meaningful, policy-ready evidence, it is crucial that the research landscape is supported by shared definitions, common metrics, collaboration across disciplines and sectors, practitioner involvement, and systems-based approaches. From this rapid review and stakeholder input, we make ten recommendations:

1. There is a need to develop shared understanding of concepts that sit at the heart of this research-policy nexus. These include health, health outcomes, health equity, vulnerability, and resilience. There is an urgent need to clarify and then test conceptual pathways between climate actions and health/equity outcomes through systems-based models and theories of change.
2. Future monitoring and evaluation frameworks could benefit from incorporating more diverse forms of measurement, that help to capture complexity and dynamic change, including process, progress, and intermediate outcome indicators.
3. Efforts to develop monitoring and evaluation frameworks should consider indices of vulnerability (such as the Net Zero Vulnerability Index), or new evaluation tools that help to understand different climate vulnerabilities and steer interventions based on their context and populations to improve place-based and population-based resilience.
4. There is an opportunity to strengthen the evidence base by targeted commissioning of research to address clear evidence gaps. Some of the gaps are topical e.g. marine conservation, water quality, and waste; some relate to the quality and quantity of health specific evidence that is currently insufficient for policy development and monitoring. The evidence base may also be strengthened by focusing on leverage points (such as housing) that sit at the intersection of climate policy action with multiple policy areas.
5. To combat the often-superficial engagement with health and health equity in the literature, commissioning research that examines differential impacts across protected characteristics, alongside socio-economic and place-based disadvantage, would strengthen understanding of how climate policies affect different population groups and help ensure that just transition approaches address intersectional disadvantage.
6. Consideration of health and health equity impacts could be incorporated into impact assessments of relevant climate policies and plans to promote the use of all possible policy levers for health.
7. A coordinated, additive network aligned to existing structures (e.g. Scotland Beyond Net Zero) is needed to reduce fragmentation and low visibility within the research landscape. Such a network needs agile governance, shared tools, better data linkage, and two-way dialogue to accelerate evidence into policy and incentivise interdisciplinary collaboration. The regular publication of Scottish Government research priorities would be a key enabler.
   Network building should create further links between Scotland’s community of health equity researchers and those whose focus is on the implementation of adaptation and mitigation interventions in the Scottish policy context.
8. Engaging with UK-wide and international research will help identify lessons and best practice for measurement. Aligning a future Scottish climate-health research-policy network with similar developments in Wales, for example, and enabling active exchange between them, would accelerate and amplify future knowledge exchange.
9. Understanding of the health and health equity impacts of climate policy could be enriched by further engagement with practitioners and communities outside formal research institutions, who hold valuable applied, place-based, and lived experience insights into the pathways through which these policies affect health and health equity.

Glossary and Abbreviations

Introduction and overview

Aims of the project

This project was commissioned by ClimateXChange in October 2025 and has been delivered by researchers from Lucidity Services Limited and the University of Glasgow. The work comprised three elements with the following aims:

• Stocktake: describe and assess what evidence exists or is in development to measure the impacts of climate policy on health outcomes in Scotland (including any best practice examples of measurement, evaluation or indicators);
• Equity integration: consider how the impacts of climate policy on health outcomes can be monitored, particularly across different population groups and communities of place; and
• Building networks: map where this expertise exists in research institutions in Scotland and lay the foundations for a collaborative expert climate and health outcome research network in Scotland that strengthens research-policy connectivity.

Our findings are intended to inform policy development, support monitoring and evaluation, and strengthen collaboration across sectors. We hope this resource provides a useful assessment of current expertise in Scotland and an articulation of how better integrated current and future research activity could support Scotland’s climate policy ambitions.

Background and policy environment

A pressing area of policy activity in Scotland is addressing the threat of climate change. Scotland’s climate change response, in the form of large-scale societal transformation, will have a significant impact on the way we live our lives. In this report we consider how these changes, across a wide range of policy action areas, might be important for human health and wellbeing, and how we can study and measure these. A cornerstone document, the Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK: State of the evidence 2023, sets the context for the challenges we consider.

Scotland already faces significant population health challenges. These challenges will be exacerbated by the health effects of climate change through direct and indirect pathways. Directly, population health is threatened by a changing climate in several ways, including extreme weather events (particularly flooding), increased spread of infectious (including vector-borne) diseases, reduced water and food security, air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, and impacts on the capacity of health and social care services (Dow, 2025). Climate change also poses indirect health threats through its impacts on the building blocks of good health, such as, good housing, affordable transport, high quality green space, and strong social networks and fair work for fair pay^[1]. Furthermore, climate change and associated health risks will differentially impact people and places in Scotland (with vulnerability determined by levels of sensitivity, exposure, and adaptive capacity), meaning that existing health inequities could be made worse^[2].

There is a pressing need to mitigate climate change as far as possible, by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through decarbonisation and carbon sequestration actions set out in Scotland’s Climate Change Plan (2026 – 2040) (CCP), which has a target to reach net zero by 2045^[3]. Some climate change, with a warming world and unstable climate, is now inevitable which has specific challenges for Scotland. As has been made clear by the UK Climate Change Committee, we need to plan for at least two degrees warming by 2050^[4], and this requires significant adaptation.

Climate policy (the actions that we take to urgently decarbonise and adapt to our current and future climate) can also protect and improve population health and reduce health inequities. For example, adaptation can enable us to directly protect against some of the health harms that come from adverse weather events such as floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires. There is also potential for climate actions to improve health directly, for example by reducing transport or heating related air pollution that leads to respiratory and cardiovascular conditions. Investments in the building blocks of health, such as improved energy efficiency in buildings leading to warmer homes, could also positively impact physical and mental wellbeing. Other adaptation interventions, such as nature-based solutions, can create health promoting environments with mental and physical health benefits through different pathways including improved air quality, increased opportunities for physical activity, or connection with nature.

If climate actions are not targeted towards those who need them most, there is a risk that health inequities will be exacerbated. Existing health inequities are experienced along the lines of deprivation, and other structural injustices that leave particular population groups exposed to poor health, such as disadvantage according to age, ethnicity, and disability. There is a need to apply an equity lens to climate action, and target policy interventions towards the most vulnerable people and places, ensuring that any potential impacts on health, and the building blocks of health, are beneficial to the populations who have most to gain.

It is also important to avoid any possible unintended negative health consequences of climate policy, such as installing housing insulation without adequate ventilation, which can lead to damp, mould, and poorer indoor air quality. Some vulnerable groups (e.g. elderly people, or those with underlying health conditions) would be disproportionately affected by such impacts. There is a need to deliver climate policy in a way that maximises opportunities for health and health equity benefit and minimises potential harms. This includes mitigating potential unintended consequences.

Scotland is committed to a just transition ensuring that nobody is left behind as a result of the large-scale transformation required to become a resilient low-carbon economy^[5]. There is an expectation that climate actions help to address existing inequalities and poverty. Interventions such as improving the energy efficiency of housing, improving active and sustainable transport, and nature-based adaptation solutions can reduce fuel poverty, reduce transport poverty, and address inequalities in access to green and blue spaces. However, if actions such as switching to healthy lower carbon diets, or the upfront costs of low carbon heating options (such as heat pumps) come with a high-cost barrier, this may exclude low-income groups who are already likely to experience poorer health. The accessibility of options for walking, wheeling and cycling may also differ between communities, and it may be harder for remote or rural populations to replace car journeys with walking or wheeling.

As laid out in Scotland’s prevention focused Population Health Framework (PHF)^[6] set within the context of the wider public service reform agenda, addressing the climate emergency is not only a planetary necessity but also an opportunity to improve population health and reduce health inequities. The aim of the PHF is, by 2035, to improve Scottish life expectancy overall while reducing the gap in life expectancy between the most deprived areas and the national average, and to increase the years people live in good health (healthy life expectancy) through a prevention-focused approach. Such an approach is essential for managing increasingly limited resources sustainably. Pursuing environmental sustainability and health equity in parallel by directing resources upstream and focusing on prevention can help deliver cross-governmental policy ambitions. Climate action in multiple sectors will affect and reshape the fundamental causes of health inequalities, as well as the building blocks of good health in local communities. Climate policy must, therefore, work to proactively ensure that the benefits and costs of policy actions are fairly distributed.

Crucial to meeting this ambition is identifying ways to measure and evaluate the potential health and health equity impacts of Scottish mitigation and adaptation policies. Suitable outcome metrics and indicators that can reflect progress towards long-term health goals are needed. This is a big challenge when considering multiple policy interventions, each with complex pathways to health and health equity outcomes, with positive impacts and sometimes unintended consequences taking place over short-, medium- and long-term timeframes.

The need for a Scottish stocktake

This work is intended to support Scottish climate policy action, including the further development of the Scottish National Adaptation Plan 3 (2024 – 2029) (SNAP 3) monitoring and evaluation framework. This framework recognises key evidence gaps, particularly the need for updated indicators by 2027, when it will be reviewed. Quantified standards or targets for climate resilience in response to the UK Climate Change Committee’s forthcoming Fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment (with a specific chapter on health and wellbeing) will also need to be developed. The CCP sets an approach to monitoring emissions reduction targets and policy delivery, and embeds just transition principles, recognising the potential health and equity benefits of climate action. It has not established an approach to monitoring and evaluating health and health equity impacts of decarbonisation policies over time. There remains a gap between key policy intentions and the evidence required to assess whether climate action contributes to reducing, maintaining or exacerbating existing health inequalities. This research provides a foundation to fill this gap.

Previous reviews from outside Scotland have highlighted the limitations and challenges in this area of work. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) conducted a comprehensive scoping review on potential climate change and health indicators, with a focus on England and priorities for the UKHSA (UKHSA, 2023). Some indicators are focussed on adaptation and mitigation actions, under the headings of Energy, Housing, Food, Transport, and Waste. Of the 19 indicators suggested for monitoring mitigation, no feasible data were available for 13 and the remaining 6 needed new processing of existing data. Issues with identifying and operationalising appropriate metrics represent an ongoing challenge for both researchers and policymakers.

An important aim of this project was to consider how health equity can be integrated into this evidence base, by exploring how the research considers differential impacts of adaptation and mitigation across population groups and places. This is especially important for Scotland, where long-term health inequities persist, and the gap in healthy life expectancy between the most advantaged and disadvantaged populations is approximately 26 years (26.7 years for women, 25.6 years for men)^[7]. Through the CCP’s due regard for just transition principles, and the Fairer Scotland Duty, there is an existing expectation that climate action will be delivered in a way that is fair, reduces existing inequalities and poverty, and will support the wellbeing of workers and communities in Scotland, ensuring that nobody is left behind. Our mapping review takes stock of how and where equity is considered within the existing climate policy and health research, and identifies where there might be important gaps in understanding.

Overview of the methodology and report outputs

This rapid review took place between October 2025 and March 2026. It was progressed through three complementary and iterative activities: a mapping review of the literature, desk-based stakeholder mapping, and a stakeholder workshop (Figure 1). These activities were supplemented by an open call for evidence. The methods used are briefly outlined below with supporting information and methodological detail provided in the Appendices.

Mapping review of the literature

This mapping review set out to take stock of the peer-reviewed literature, non-peer-reviewed literature (often described as grey literature), and emerging or unpublished research. This review focused on studies that made an explicit connection between a specific area of climate policy action and a related health or health‑equity outcome.

We based our searches, evidence review, and expertise mapping on the climate policy action typology developed by Boyd et al., 2023, and used in the systematic review by Hjelmskog et al., 2025. The Boyd typology was developed from a reading of UK adaptation and mitigation policies which existed in 2022. It sought to identify types of actions that high income countries might carry out in response to climate breakdown and describes them against types of hazard and sector-based domains of intervention. We took the Boyd typology as a starting point and amended it to reflect post-2022 policy developments in Scotland. More detail is given in Appendix C. We used EPPI-Reviewer software to collate, code and categorise the literature.

Developing a register of expertise

Using the results of the library searches together with other publicly available information we set out to identify individuals who have published research and/or are conducting ongoing research on the health and health equity impacts of climate adaptation and mitigation policies in Scotland, and on how those impacts might be measured. Our objective was to develop a register of expertise and to visualise this interactively using online software called Polinode®. Developing the register of expertise supported the review by:

• Identifying relevant published research missed by the library search from our review of public websites.
• Identifying ongoing work and unpublished expertise from a review of webpages of researchers. This revealed ongoing grant-funded projects and supervised PhD students conducting relevant research that has not yet been published.   
• Facilitating targeted invitations for the stakeholder event which was aimed at active researchers. This supported the validation and refinement of the findings from this review.

The stakeholder workshop

A stakeholder workshop was held in Glasgow on the 13th of January 2026. This brought 28 researchers, policy specialists, members of the steering group, and project team together. More detail on the design, process, and insights from the workshop is set out in Appendix D. The stakeholder workshop enabled us to:

• Explore the emerging findings from the review and identify research gaps and priorities.
• Gather perspectives on how health and health equity impacts are, or could be, measured in the context of climate and health policy.
• Characterise and discuss the current research landscape and identify opportunities to strengthen research-policy connectivity through network-based approaches.

Outputs from this review

This review is intended to act as a useful starting point for mapping Scottish examples of how the health and health equity impacts of climate policy are assessed. Four additional outputs capture these findings. These outputs are intended to help researchers and policymakers situate projects in this research landscape, and are static snapshots capturing activity accessed between October 2025 and March 2026. They are not maintained as live registries. The evidence gap map matches the data extraction table. The Polinode® map visualises the underlying register of expertise.

Table 1 Outputs from this review that accompany this report

Considerations associated with this review

This is a pragmatic piece of policy focussed research. Like any study, the scope of the review creates a number of considerations. The description and implications of these considerations for the insights and recommendations presented in this report are summarised in Table 2.

Terminology

Key terms used in this review (e.g. equity, vulnerability) can have multiple interpretations. Definitions applied in this review can be found in the Glossary.

Detailed methodology

For convenience, Table 3 indicates where detailed descriptions of our methodology can be found in the Appendices to this report.

Taking stock of the research landscape

Summary

In this section we take stock of the evidence landscape and the researchers active within it. Through a rapid mapping review, we created a high-level overview of research that has been published either relating to Scotland directly (for example, using Scottish data, or with Scottish case studies) and/or published on this topic by authors and researchers based at Scottish institutions.

The evidence base is growing rapidly. Large interdisciplinary studies such as JUST-Systems, INHABIT, OPTIMA and GALLANT will expand the evidence base in coming years. Viewed from the perspective of the typology to classify literature used to underpin this review (which comprised categories of climate action and response), the depth and distribution of evidence identified is highly variable. Strengths include understanding the health and health equity impacts of climate policy on housing, nature-based solutions, agriculture and food systems, and responses to temperature and air-quality. Gaps include forestry, marine conservation, waste management, and water quality.

Only a small number of the studies treat health or health equity as a primary outcome. Health is often captured indirectly, framed in terms of wider determinants, or treated as contextual rather than measured. Metrics vary widely from clinical health outcomes to behavioural and wellbeing indicators. Methodological consistency in relation to metrics is low, reflecting the heterogenous nature of disciplinary expertise and different contexts for climate action that characterise the evidence base.

Scottish research expertise

We set out to identify and categorise individuals and organisations with relevant expertise^[9]. These are captured in our registry of expertise, which was created from publicly available data and reflects a snapshot in time (from Oct 2025 – April 2026). The registry is appended to this report as both a log (excel file) and a visualisation which can be accessed through the publicly accessible link to the Polinode interface.

Thirteen out of Scotland’s eighteen Higher Education Institutions are represented in our register. In our searches we found no explicit links to relevant areas of expertise at the remaining five universities. There is a concentration of expertise at Scotland’s research-intensive universities with the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow being the most represented institutions (41 and 26 experts identified respectively), followed by Glasgow Caledonian University (17), the University of Stirling (15) and the University of St Andrews (14).

Over 80% of experts were from Higher Education Institutions in Scotland. Expertise has been identified within a range of other organisations including independent research institutions (e.g. the James Hutton Institute (JHI)), Scottish Government bodies (e.g. Scottish Land commission), Non-Governmental Organisations (e.g. Community Land Scotland) and the third sector (e.g. Zero Waste Scotland).

Scottish research institutions and organisations hold extensive research expertise in relation to housing, nature-based solutions, health equity, agriculture and land use, temperature changes and air quality. A notable strength of the research landscape is the significant number of experts focused on evaluating the health outcomes of climate policies, alongside the presence of a substantial cohort of individuals and organisations whose research areas closely intersect with this field. This includes health equity researchers whose expertise in assessing equity dimensions of other policy areas could support the monitoring and evaluation of climate policies. Potential key gaps in Scotland’s research capability include for example forestry, which was identified as the area with least expertise in relation to measured health outcomes of climate policy.

The research projects undertaken by those listed in the register of expertise are largely self-contained. The stocktake of expertise, live research projects, and published literature illustrates a small number of cross-institutional collaborations. For example, JUST-SYSTEMS is a highly collaborative multi-institution, interdisciplinary project involving four Scottish Universities as well as several from England. It brings together academic researchers and local practitioners in support of Scotland’s just transition. Further examples of multi-institutional grant awards include GroundsWell (a multidisciplinary project to identify and implement actions to maximise health benefits from urban green/blue spaces) and the Greenspace Feasibility Study for Mental Health and Problem Substance Use project. Overall, though, less than a third of the projects identified in the mapping exercise involved more than one academic institution. Taken together our observations on the evidence base, distribution of active researchers and the limited number of multi-institutional and interdisciplinary projects, suggests that research activity is fragmented and there are opportunities for greater connectivity between researchers with common, adjacent or complementary areas of interest.

Characterising the literature

Our stocktake reveals that the evidence base is extremely diverse, and represents a wide spread of disciplines, research institutions, and methodological approaches. This is evidenced by the spread of expertise held by researchers and their primary research areas which cover all seventeen typology categories. The research landscape was identified as having a varied but complementary range of expertise. Our registry categorises researchers with both primary and secondary research areas – very few individual experts had the same set of expert knowledge.

The studies we identified show that there are many ways to analyse these health outcomes, and the evidence is very mixed in terms of how deeply the relationship between specific climate policies and tangible health outcomes is interrogated. The evidence base includes some examples of health outcome analysis for most of the categories in the climate action typology. From our analysis (see Figure 2), some types of climate policy appear to be far more extensively studied than others. In line with the number of researchers identified with expertise, the highest numbers of published papers (combined peer review and grey literature) are in the categories of Greener transport, Blue and green infrastructure, Dietary change, and Community and social resilience. Fewer published studies exist in categories such as Marine conservation, Water availability and quality, Waste, and Natural carbon sinks. The distribution of papers included in this mapping review (for categories with at least five publications) is shown in Figure 2.

The typology categorisations are helpful in showing which areas have had the largest amount of research attention in Scotland, as indicated by the volume of papers. The evidence base for health outcomes related to Greener transport is particularly well developed. It includes studies which look at the health effects of walking, wheeling and cycling, increasing public transport, and reducing high-carbon private transport. Some adaptation and mitigation actions can fall into more than one category. For example, a study on afforestation to reduce flood risk by Dittrich et al., 2019 was classified as both Forestry, and Floods and erosion. There are also examples of broader papers which deal with topics such as adaptation as a whole (Jager et al., 2015; Zamuruieva et al., 2023). This is particularly the case for grey literature publications, which are generally more high-level overview papers rather than detailed studies of specific interventions.

The degree to which health is considered within these publications is highly varied. Of the 47 peer-reviewed and 34 grey literature publications we have included, only 24 treat health and/or health equity as the primary concern of the paper. Of the remaining 57 papers, 36 treat health as a secondary concern (meaning that health impacts are considered explicitly, or even in detail, but that they are not the focus of the study) and 21 consider health or wellbeing only as a footnote. For example, Henderson et al., 2025 explore recent Scottish flood policies, which aim to prioritise equity, but make only very minor references to the health and wellbeing consequences of flooding (e.g. stress and worry) which the policies might address. To provide a fuller picture of Scottish evidence, and the current baseline, we have included the studies which consider health as only a footnote, although these papers are less useful in terms of providing examples of metrics and measurements which might be used to demonstrate impact. Identifying such studies also helped to inform identification of researchers with relevant expertise that have been included in our register.

Figure 2: Number of studies by climate action/climate threat, based on typology category

Health outcome metrics and indicators

In the snapshot of the research landscape captured by this review, we found that more than half of the experts we mapped are actively working on climate policy evaluation in relation to health outcomes. As mentioned elsewhere, this work is hugely varied and diverse in terms of methodology, and metric specificity. The mapping outputs identify a large group of researchers who could contribute to policy moving forward and support efforts to design monitoring and evaluation processes for climate policies.

Identifying appropriate metrics and indicators is a crucial part of policy monitoring. A key objective of this review was to capture examples of these from the literature. To evaluate whether Scotland’s climate policy is having the intended impact on health and health equity outcomes, we will need to track the progress of agreed, meaningful measurements of health. The large number of possible entry points into this field of research reflects the different kinds of perspectives that can be taken. This includes different interpretations of what constitutes a health outcome. We found, within our reviewed evidence base, a large range of approaches, understandings, framings, and terminologies relating to these health impacts.

Researchers are using a wide range of measurements and metrics to assess the possible health outcomes of different mitigation and adaptation actions, each of which may be able to tell us something slightly different about the likely impacts of a climate policy. These can be specific (e.g. mortality), general (e.g. wellbeing), behavioural (e.g. changing diets), or consider wider determinants (e.g. quality of public transport). See Appendix B.

The measurements can be characterised by a distinct lack of uniformity, although when considered by climate action category some trends and gaps emerge. Some typology categories provide very narrow examples of metrics, and some are much more diverse. For example, the studies on Dietary change mostly assess behaviours and attitudes (Cleland et al., 2025; Macdiarmid, 2022), whereas the two studies under Temperature change interventions both use mortality as a specific, quantifiable metric (Dwyer et al., 2022; Wan et al., 2024). Significant gaps for examples of identified metrics include the categories of Biosecurity, Marine conservation, Waste, and Water availability and quality.

As the volume of studies increased so too did the diversity of metrics. Blue and green infrastructure, and Greener transport are the categories with the largest volume of literature and the largest range of identified metrics and measurements which include:

• Clinical metrics (Tieges et al., 2020; Baker et al., 2021)
• Wellbeing metrics (Dick et al., 2020; Brennan and Ogilvie, 2025)
• Behavioural outcomes (Douglas et al., 2023; Harrington et al., 2024)
• Wider determinant measurements (Mabon et al., 2023; Lucas and Pangbourne, 2014).

Some studies also highlighted specific methodological tools or assessment frameworks to evaluate health impacts. These included: National Therapeutic Indicators (NTIs)^[10]; Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (Malden et al., 2025); Place Standard Tool^[11] (Douglas et al., 2023); TESSA (Toolkit for Ecosystem Services Site-based Assessment) approach (MacDonald et al., 2017); and Pedestrian/Cyclist counters (Baker et al., 2021).

The literature reviewed for this stocktake includes a wide range of health metrics (often specific, quantifiable measurements), as well as examples of indicators (broader qualitative or quantitative measures that can suggest wider trends). While observable, quantifiable health metrics (such as mortality, Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), disease incidences etc.) (e.g. Baker et al., 2021), could reasonably be expected to be influenced by many kinds of climate action, they are often too broad, or too far removed from the intervention to be reliably and tangibly linked to specific policy measures.

Wider-ranging or more complex examples of measurement may be used to indicate performance, or progress, towards health impacts, in ways that tell us more than the narrower, more linear, health outcome metrics are able to. Examples we identified include resilience (e.g. to drought or flooding) (Henderson et al., 2025; Meyerricks and White, 2021), nature-connectedness (Malden et al., 2025), and heat-health relationships (Dwyer et al., 2022). It may be possible to identify further best-practice indicators in this space by looking beyond Scotland. It may also be possible to identify indicators along the causal pathways to health impacts by looking to an even wider evidence base, as policies can impact health indirectly through social and economic determinants. The evidence for the latter pathways may sit outwith the reviewed climate literature.

The development of meaningful tools and indicators to support measurement of climate policy related health outcomes is an ongoing, emerging, and growing field of research activity. Scottish researchers are making a clear contribution towards this. We identified a small number of relevant interactive resources that could be helpful for understanding the health effects of climate action. These tools often use data that is already readily available. A curated rather than exhaustive list of examples of useful tools produced from this rapidly growing area of research, are summarised in the third table in Appendix B. One example is the UK Co-Benefits Atlas. This is an interactive tool developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute which reports on 11 social and economic co-benefits of reaching net zero in the UK. These co-benefits could be either directly or indirectly influential for health outcomes (for example: air quality improvements; excess cold/heat reduction; physical activity increase; and dietary improvements). The modelled co-benefits data are available at local authority and data zone level and can be analysed according to several demographic and socio-economic factors (such as age, housing tenure, income and employment status) to help us understand the potential equity impacts.

Insights from the stakeholder workshop

Stakeholders were invited to share their thoughts in response to the following question: “How would you expect health outcomes to be measured with regards to the impact of climate policy? Do you have any examples?”. The individual responses to this question were notably limited, with a substantial proportion (more than half) of participants providing no answer. This absence was itself considered informative, suggesting both the difficulty of specifying appropriate indicators, and a degree of uncertainty among respondents. Among the small number of substantive responses, reflections emphasised the challenges of attributing long-term health outcomes to climate policy interventions and the value of approaches such as theories of change to articulate expected pathways to impact. The group discussions highlighted the prospective value of process and progress indicators alongside outcome indicators that could support these pathway type approaches.

Participants suggested that there is a lack of well-developed conceptual frameworks or systems based models to support attribution of health outcomes from climate policy, with measurement approaches often limited, generalised or insufficiently precise to enable meaningful evaluation. Participants also noted that meaningful assessment requires indicators that operate across multiple time horizons and account for direct, indirect, upstream and downstream effects. Stakeholders highlighted that while policymakers may favour clear metrics, such as mortality or life expectancy, these are not always clearly attributable to complex, real-world interventions in the context of climate policy, reinforcing the need for a more nuanced conceptualisation.

Several participants noted the importance of using qualitative measurements to compliment ”hard numbers”, with one participant noting how qualitative measures are “actually very specific and very helpful”. Despite this, workshop participants felt that there is a challenge in policy circles to integrate qualitative data into monitoring and evaluation. Further, knowing the pathways through which policy will have impact was identified as an important process and key consideration. Overall, the conversation underscored that there appears to be limited established best practice in this space and suggested that future work may benefit from developing a more coherent framework for defining, selecting and operationalising health related indicators linked to climate action.

Looking beyond the published evidence

Ongoing and emerging research

This is a relatively new area of scholarship; 63 of the 81 papers included in our evidence review are from the past 5 years i.e. since 2020. Further relevant evidence is likely to be available to decision-makers over the next few years, both in Scotland and internationally. Although the open call for evidence yielded very few official responses (n=2), through our stakeholder mapping and engagement, we identified some additional ongoing pieces of work in Scotland that are relevant.

The desk-based review and stakeholder workshop identified several live research projects being undertaken by researchers with expertise relevant to the scope of this review (set out Appendix C). For example. there are several active grants either hosted by or affiliated with Scottish universities which are expected to produce relevant evidence in the near future. Two projects in particular – GALLANT and JUST-Systems are important sites of active knowledge production. GALLANT (Glasgow as a Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation)^[12] has a strand of research working on indicators that will demonstrate Glasgow’s performance against the simultaneous social and ecological wellbeing requirements of the Doughnut Economics framework (Fanning and Raworth, 2025). These will include health indicators as a specific domain, but also several social and ecological dimensions that are important building blocks of good health (e.g. housing, food, social equity, income and work), and which are likely to be influenced by climate adaptation and mitigation policy.

The cross-institutional live grants identified were varied in nature. The JUST-Systems project began in 2025 and is of direct relevance to this work. Drawing on systems thinking, the project will build and facilitate partnerships with communities and stakeholders to identify new interventions in support of Scotland’s just transition. Focusing on marginalised communities across Scotland within a case-study approach, JUST-Systems will explore interventions that prioritise co-benefits in health, local infrastructure and community wealth building. Including the JUST-Systems project, we can see an increasing trend towards projects working within a systems approach, notably the Living Good Food nation lab, OPTIMA and GALLANT.

Looking beyond research that is based in or on Scotland

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this review, there is relevant published research and research activity outwith Scotland that is likely to be of interest and value to Scottish-based researchers and policymakers. For example, two large projects based at London universities are exploring similar challenges. These are the Pathfinder initiative (at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and Policy and Implementation for Climate and Health Equity (PAICE) at University College London^[13]. Forthcoming results from these projects may be particularly helpful in the case of developing best-practice metrics and indicators (see a protocol for forthcoming work from Juel et al., 2026). Another area of scholarship that is more active outside Scotland, but relevant to the Scottish context, is Health Net Gain (or Net Health Benefit). This is similar to Biodiversity Net Gain in Planning which proposes that a condition of land use decisions within spatial planning policy could be to deliver population health benefits (Stewart-Evans et al., 2024; 2025).

Leveraging expertise that exists outwith universities

The scope of this stocktake was limited to mapping research expertise within Scotland’s Higher Education Institutions and independent research organisations due to time and funding constraints. This does not reflect the full range of knowledge required to assess the health and health equity impacts of climate policy. Applied and place‑based insights held by practitioners and communities are critical to understanding delivery and real‑world impacts. These could be further interrogated through complementary approaches.

Equity as a consideration for health outcomes

Summary

More than half of the peer-reviewed and the grey literature publications included in this study acknowledge the importance of considering equity and justice in the assessment of health outcomes. However, these are inconsistently defined and poorly operationalised. Socioeconomic status is the most frequently used equity indicator, with very limited attention paid to protected characteristics. Few studies measured equity outcomes, and many engaged instead with theoretical or potential inequities. This requires focused attention in the future to support the intent of a just transition and to avoid exacerbating inequalities.

At the stakeholder workshop, participants identified the need for shared definitions of health, health outcomes, vulnerability and equity to improve conceptual clarity. They reinforced the importance of mixed-methods, and participatory approaches to overcome the difficulties of attributing health equity impacts to climate actions, and a strong desire for cross and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Indices of vulnerability (such as the Net Zero Vulnerability Index), or new evaluation tools which seek to understand how vulnerability might be turned into resilience, may offer a useful starting point for exploring the health impact of climate action on broader and more diverse population demographics.

The renowned expertise of Scottish researchers on health equity and inequalities could be more thoroughly incorporated into climate policy research in the future if the right enabling conditions (e.g. policy support, funding opportunities) were in place.

There is huge potential in Scotland to make further links, or increase challenge-led, cross-disciplinary research activity, that engages Scotland’s existing health equity expertise.

Health equity: findings from the literature review

Health equity means a fair opportunity for everyone to be as healthy as possible, free from avoidable structural or discriminatory barriers. More than half of both the peer-reviewed and the grey literature publications included in this study acknowledged the importance of considering equity and justice in their assessment of health outcomes. The way equity is integrated into this overall research landscape takes many different forms. A minority of the research we considered examined how climate actions might translate into tangible health equity impacts. Most papers refer to equity in more general terms or treat it as a context to be aware of, rather than as a pathway to be explicitly evaluated.

Multiple concepts, or dimensions, of equity are included in this evidence base. The literature shows some diversity in terms of which groups or populations are focused on. The breakdown of this is illustrated in Figure 3. The dimensions of inequity that are most considered relate to socioeconomic status (42 papers). Examples of these measures within the peer-reviewed papers include disadvantage (Ross and McCartney, 2025), income levels (Reynolds et al., 2019), and other relative measures of overall deprivation, for example analysis that is stratified according to SIMD (Brandner et al., 2022; Cleland et al., 2025; Macdiarmid et al., 2016), or considering target populations who are living in the most socioeconomically deprived postcodes (Blane and Basu, 2023). The tendency to consider mainly socioeconomic inequities is also observed in the grey literature, with more reports focussing on the impacts of policy on deprived or lower socioeconomic status groups than any other dimensions of inequity (see: Brennan and Ogilvie, 2015; Highland Adapts, 2023; Living Streets Scotland, 2022). Other dimensions of equity in the literature include: Age (17 papers); Vulnerability (17 papers); Disability (13 papers); Sex/Gender (10 papers); Ethnicity (8 papers); and Spatial dimensions such as rurality (7 papers).

There are several examples of work that capture a broader range of socio-demographic information. This can include information about characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, and employment status (for example Andrews, 2022; Douglas et al., 2023; Walking Scotland, 2025; Yates and Whyte, 2019). Overall, fewer papers consider the wider range of protected characteristics, with only seven of the peer-reviewed studies examining the impacts of climate policy according to age, ethnicity, sex/gender, or disability (and the majority of these studies are simply stratifying results according to demographic data they have collected). Scottish researchers have drawn attention to the fact that some important dimensions/understandings of equity impacts for specific population groups (e.g. ethnic and racial minorities) may have been overlooked when it comes to understanding vulnerability, and differences in adaptive capacity (Meer, 2025).

Vulnerability is itself an important term within this evidence base. Different studies interpret vulnerability in various ways, demonstrating that vulnerability as a concept is not always fixed. This reflects the multitude of ways that a wide range of policy actions might be experienced by different people, including how and where the largest impacts or co-impacts are likely to be felt. The literature also varies in what individuals or communities are considered vulnerable to. For example, Jager et al. (2015) are concerned with vulnerability in general terms, to capture the threat of possible future harm to human well-being, while Dittrich et al. (2018) consider ‘vulnerable communities’ as places that are more exposed to river flooding. Vulnerability is also used to refer to the demographic characteristics associated with greater risk including low income, disability, childhood and old age (Dittrich et al., 2018; Douglas et al., 2023; Dunk et al., 2016).

Levels of vulnerability might be influenced by differences in exposure to either a particular climate hazard or policy response. Both can be influenced by underlying differences in susceptibility to harm and in adaptive capacity. For example, it is important to consider if a climate policy response to heatwaves considers the vulnerability of very old or very young people who are more susceptible to health risks during extreme temperatures (Dwyer et al., 2022).

Vulnerability can also be considered in relation to individuals facing employment transitions, where jobs may become obsolete because of decarbonisation. This includes workers in sectors such as the oil industry, who may be relatively well paid and not typically viewed as at high risk of health inequities, yet may still be vulnerable to significant disruption to this key building block of good health (Shapovalova et al., 2025). Additionally, vulnerability is influenced by the level of adaptive capacity within groups or communities their ability to adjust to a changing environment in ways that minimise harm or enable them to take advantage of opportunities that could positively affect health (Wan et al., 2024).

We found that more of the evidence base took a high-level view of health equity rather than providing a deep or explicit analysis. While some studies offer detailed analysis of very specific health outcomes such as mortality in different population groups (see Tieges et al., 2020, on the regeneration of Glasgow’s canals), others make broader observations about overall trends or risks as they related to health equity impacts (see Shipton et al., 2021, on the public health benefits of an inclusive economy). Rather than outlining detailed causal pathways, much of the literature highlighted the potential of these policies to generate benefits for health equity in general terms, without delving into the explicit mechanisms (for example, Improvement Service, 2021).

Studies most concerned with analysing health equity impacts pay attention to the manner of implementation and/or specific targeting of climate interventions to the needs of different population groups. This suggests that, in most cases, researchers are not always evaluating whether climate action itself is inherently beneficial or harmful for health equity, but rather how well it is targeted to ensure that those with the most to gain in health terms receive the greatest co-benefits or are protected from potential harms.

For example, by ensuring that policies designed to lower urban traffic and pollution do not unintentionally divert vehicles and emissions to neighbourhoods that already experience poor air quality and worse respiratory health outcomes) (Catalano and Congreve, 2025). Instead, findings from an international systematic review on health equity impacts in high-income countries suggest that positive health equity outcomes may be observed through the application of population health principles, viewed through an equity lens (Hjelmskog et al., 2025). Such principles include universalism (or proportionate universalism), prioritising upstream or structural transformation, tailored support or targeting of resources to those with most need/who have most to gain/who are most exposed to risk, and the degree of agency (including purchasing power) needed to access particular interventions.

We also observed an awareness of health equity, or often inequity, within the grey literature. However, this is rarely the topic of detailed evaluation. Instead, it was treated as important context to be aware of when considering the needs of particular communities. A report on inclusive environmental policy (Everyone’s Environment, 2025), for example, set out the needs of marginalised or disadvantaged groups, suggested that meeting these needs might help address health inequalities and systemic discrimination, but it did not take the assessment further by examining pathways or mechanisms through which these impacts might arise.

The evidence base we identified as part of this stocktake did not yet appear to fully incorporate meaningful assessment of health equity for different populations. In part, this is likely to the challenge of evidencing clear pathways from complex policy interventions to real world equity outcomes. However, we believe that it may have reflected the difficulty of defining and determining the boundaries of this very diverse and broad field of research activity. To keep the stocktake within a manageable scope, we included only evidence that clearly and explicitly incorporates climate policy as an input and a health or health equity impact as an outcome. Additional Scottish research that is not specifically about climate policy may nevertheless have important insights for those wishing to understand how policies can be designed in ways that might lead to fairer health outcomes.

Ongoing research

In terms of ongoing or emerging evidence, integrating health equity is an active area of research activity to which Scottish-based researchers are making a significant contribution. Some of the emerging work that we identified is engaging with the impact of various climate policies on particular population groups, including those with protected characteristics.

Research is forthcoming from the University of Strathclyde on the impacts of green choices (which refers to individuals’ choices, in this case relating to renewable energy, for example installing heat pumps or electric vehicle charging points) on people with protected characteristics (Calvillo and Martiskainen, 2025). Researchers at the University of Glasgow are evaluating the health effects of household energy efficiency measures (Warmer Homes Scotland and Area Based Schemes) on young children and older adults.^[14] We also identified Glasgow-based PhD students researching the health impacts of the energy transition for low-income renters, and the gendered health inequities of 20-minute neighbourhoods^[15]. We anticipate relevant doctoral research will emerge across other Scottish research institutions, including through active research programmes such as INHABIT^[16], and could form the focus of a future call for evidence.

Outwith Scotland, this globally relevant research agenda is also being taken forward by other institutions and researchers, and evidence from elsewhere may be helpful in supporting Scotland’s health equity ambitions. See, for example, the work of programmes such as PAICE at University College London (Policy and Implementation for Climate and Health Equity)^[17].

Adjacent expertise

The stocktake identified significant expertise and understanding within the Scottish research community on the causes and consequences of health inequity. However, this expertise, is not fully integrated as part of the climate policy-health research landscape. Researchers with this expertise may be well-positioned to apply an equity lens to a wide range of climate policies. Their expertise is likely to cover strong residual or contextual understandings of pathways to impact, including which population groups are most likely to be most affected by different adaptation and mitigation measures.

For example, two Glasgow universities and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health are part of a Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) tasked with reducing health inequities through policy.^[18] The University of Strathclyde’s Scottish Health Equity Research Unit^[19] (SHERU) produces evidence in response to key policy challenges relating to Scotland’s long-standing poor-health and health inequality outcomes. Little of SHERU’s work is explicitly related to climate action, although air pollution is a priority area (Jack, 2025). SHERU’s expertise is likely to be well matched to the challenge of evaluating health impacts of a very wide range of climate policies.

Furthermore, there is potentially a rich source of knowledge within communities and among practitioners (research, policy and the third sector) on how the impacts of climate policy are being felt, or are likely to be felt, by the different communities. This embedded understanding could be more meaningfully integrated into the wider evidence base through partnerships and collaborations with researchers and evaluation experts. Tools such as Health Impact and Health Equity Assessment Tools^[20], alongside evaluation frameworks or more participatory, pragmatic and fluid methods of evaluation such as collaborative theories of change, could bring structure and meaning to a wide range of potential case studies that are ripe for research engagement.

Stakeholder insights into health equity

We discussed the topic of health equity as part of our workshop with research stakeholders. There was strong agreement among participants that a focus on equity is a crucial priority for this research agenda. There was also consensus that measuring health equity, or generating evidence that definitively attributes health equity outcomes to specific interventions, is extremely challenging. Participants highlighted the “lack of funding of health equity as an outcome of interest of itself” (University Researcher), which could be a contributing factor towards the literature that deals with health equity only at a superficial level, or as a piece of interesting context.

Groups discussed the definitions of health equity, inequality, and disparities, and showed a range of understandings that are likely influenced by the diverse cultural, educational and disciplinary backgrounds that make up this varied research landscape. Terminology and framing can vary from study-to-study, depending on the researcher’s training and perspective. Stakeholders told us that it “would be good to understand [the] difference between health equity and [the] mechanism of health inequalities” (University Researcher). We discussed the choice to use health equity as the framing for this Scottish stocktake, with an intent to capture the element of justice and fairness that is so important to a just transition and recognised that relevant insights on equity might sometimes be framed or expressed differently.

The consideration of equity as a secondary outcome makes it difficult to pinpoint specific expertise within the climate policy research space. “The breadth of climate research does make it particularly challenging to connect with different disciplines who may be interested in health and equity” (University Researcher). Navigating this complexity is seen as a challenge for individuals or small research teams with remits that are already very broad and engage with complex systems. Instead, we heard that researchers working on climate would like to incorporate this kind of evaluation through partnership or collaboration with researchers who already have relevant expertise. Participants hoped that the future research landscape would be “one where we have a good overview of current and planned research relating to climate, health and equity and where those involved in this know each other or can find each other easily” (Public Health Researcher). We also heard that stakeholders wished to see adequate funding, and better targeting of research activity, to support work that is more closely connected to the policy development process and focused on the Just Transition and vulnerable communities.

Participants highlighted that measures of health equity exist on a spectrum, and that there is a need to capture what the “ideal” versus “realistic” measures are. Ideal measures would integrate equity dimensions where possible, as well as capturing differential impacts on different populations. It was suggested that, to achieve this, multiple perspectives are needed, including on how to visualise data in ways that speak widely to different audiences with a diverse backgrounds and levels of understanding. We heard that a wide range of evidence sources could contribute to this, but that the valuable link between them would be “health equity at the centre” (Policy Stakeholder).

Suggestions were made about increasing equity within the research landscape, for example by equally valuing diverse sources of knowledge and understanding, including lived experience. Within universities, PhD and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are recognised as having significant expertise. This is not always high profile and therefore risks being overlooked. Stakeholders demonstrated a strong appetite for a research network that would bring these different kinds of expertise together under a coherent, equity-driven framework.

Groups discussed the overarching challenge of generating evidence that articulated the causal logic and pathways linking climate policies to health equity outcomes. Challenges are to be expected when trying to evaluate complex, real-world interventions that did not necessarily have linear outcomes. Discussions highlighted that many researchers have a deep contextual understanding of how policy interacts with health equity outcomes, for example the impacts of huge employment shifts during the Covid pandemic. Drawing on this expertise, researchers can make judgements about the impact of major transitions on different population groups, including vulnerable groups. We discussed how this knowledge could be incorporated into flexible, pragmatic evaluation methods, such as collaborative or participatory Theory of Change (TOC) processes, with the potential to identify both process and outcome indicators that might signal progress towards improving health equity.

Suggestions from stakeholders included undertaking health (equity) impact assessments on climate policy, conducted by those with health equity expertise as part of interdisciplinary teams. Health equity experts could make meaningful assessments without detailed knowledge of the climate science. This kind of assessment or evaluation could potentially be linked to a “coherent overarching model of change” (University Researcher) which stakeholders suggested is needed.

Building a network to strengthen research and policy connectivity

Summary

From the perspective of the stakeholders that we engaged in this project, the research and evidence landscape whilst full of potential lacks visibility and is fragmented.

A co-ordinated and integrated research network is needed to strengthen research-policy connectivity that is additive and aligned with existing structures (for example, Scotland Beyond Net Zero). To add value, this should be underpinned by agile governance and provide shared digital tools, improved data linkage, two-way dialogue and create clear pathways for the rapid translation of evidence into policy and incentivise interdisciplinary collaboration.

While this project focused on mapping research expertise within Scotland’s Higher Education Institutions, practitioners are an essential part of the wider climate – health ecosystem. Their applied knowledge will be important for any future work and integral to networks that seek to integrate research, policy, and practice.

Characteristics of the research landscape

A core aim of the project was to map where relevant expertise exists in research institutions in Scotland and to lay the foundations for an expert climate and health network. In this section we outline how a network that strengthens research-policy connectivity could be developed, building on contributions made at the stakeholder workshop. This is set in the context of acknowledging and respecting existing research activity and networks, and reflecting the observations made by workshop attendees.

As part of a plenary discussion at the workshop, participants were invited to describe the existing research landscape at the intersection between climate policy and health outcomes in a single word or phrase (Figure 4). These responses painted a picture of a dynamic but emerging research ecosystem. One which is messy, highly varied in quality and integration, and marked by both structural challenges and significant unrealised potential.

In addition to characterising the current research landscape, the stakeholder workshop provided a valuable opportunity to explore how engaged those attending felt with Scottish Government policy making in this area (Figure 5), those working in other disciplines, and researchers working in this area from institutions outwith Scotland.

More than half the respondents felt neutral, engaged or very engaged with Scottish Government policy making in this area. Notwithstanding the perceived degree of current connectivity, those attending expressed a collective desire to be better connected and networked both with policymakers and each other, within Scotland and beyond. Discussions with senior Scottish Government researchers also underlined a gap between government research needs and academic knowledge production.

Exploring the mapping of researcher expertise with stakeholders helped to make visible the many relevant networks that could be connected and leveraged to strengthen the research landscape and policy maker-researcher-practitioner connectivity. Participants identified 24 networked projects or structures as relevant. Any future network should be cognisant of existing networks and additive in its contribution. In particular, Scotland Beyond Net Zero^[21] was highlighted as a multi-institutional network-based coalition of researchers that could support future activity. It is jointly hosted by the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Building a future network

As part of the final session of the workshop, participants were invited to consider and visualise what a future research landscape could look like. They were also invited to share their thoughts on what would help to strengthen research-policy connectivity. The attributes of this idealised future shared by participants are summarised in Table 4.

A wide range of suggestions were made in response to the question, “What do you think would be helpful in building strong links between research and policy making in Scotland?”. Individual responses were summarised into a set of design considerations which could create an enabling environment that would enhance research-policy connectivity as follows:

• A network that fosters trust, shared purpose, and open communication;
• Regular forums that enable ongoing relationship building;
• Shared digital platforms to find people, evidence and data;
• Transparent, structured pathways for evidence into policy;
• Aligned incentives and timeframes for meaningful collaboration for researchers; and
• Greater inclusion of communities in evidence and policy processes.

Feedback from attendees at the workshop suggested that the stakeholder workshop itself should be a seed for relationship building and the formation of a network a legacy from this project. At the session we explored what those participating wanted most from a network if one were to be established. Desired attributes included:

• Enabling people to stay informed and keep abreast of developments and be better connected to relevant evidence;
• Sharing knowledge and engaging in constructive challenges;
• Connection to diverse expertise; provision of safe and supportive spaces for engagement and mentorship; and
• Access to resources, opportunities and prospective collaborations.

Conclusion and recommendations

In measuring the impact of climate policy on health and health equity outcomes, Scotland is making a substantial contribution to the rapidly expanding evidence base and international policy sphere. There are opportunities to address identified evidence gaps that could enhance policy development and evaluation tailored to Scotland’s unique context. While robust and varied, the research landscape remains fragmented and requires integration and development to effectively support the measurement requirements expected of the forthcoming CCP and to support the need for updated health indicators in 2027 to enable monitoring and evaluation of the Scottish National Adaptation Plan (SNAP3).

From the perspective of the stakeholders that we engaged in this project, the research and evidence landscape whilst full of potential lacks visibility and is fragmented. There is a collective desire amongst researchers to be better connected and networked with policymakers and each other, within Scotland and beyond. This requires structured support to bridge the perceived gap between government research needs and academic knowledge production.

To generate meaningful, policy-ready evidence, it is crucial that the research landscape is supported by shared definitions, common metrics, collaboration across disciplines and sectors, practitioner involvement, and systems-based approaches. Based on the rapid review we conducted and stakeholder input, we make ten recommendations:

1. There is a need to develop shared understanding of concepts that sit at the heart of this research-policy nexus. These include health, health outcomes, health equity, vulnerability, and resilience. There is an urgent need to clarify and then test conceptual pathways between climate actions and health/equity outcomes through systems-based models and theories of change.
2. Future monitoring and evaluation frameworks could benefit from incorporating more diverse forms of measurement, that help to capture complexity and dynamic change, including process, progress, and intermediate outcome indicators.
3. Efforts to develop monitoring and evaluation frameworks should consider indices of vulnerability (such as the Net Zero Vulnerability Index), or new evaluation tools that help to understand different climate vulnerabilities and steer interventions based on their context and populations, to improve place-based and population-based resilience.
4. There is an opportunity to strengthen the evidence base by targeted commissioning of research to address clear evidence gaps. Some of the gaps are topical e.g. marine conservation, water quality, and waste; some relate to the quality and quantity of health specific evidence that is currently insufficient for policy development and monitoring. The evidence base may also be strengthened by focusing on leverage points (such as housing) that sit at the intersection of climate policy action with multiple policy areas.
5. To combat the often-superficial engagement with health and health equity in the literature, commissioning research that examines differential impacts across protected characteristics, alongside socio-economic and place-based disadvantage, would strengthen understanding of how climate policies affect different population groups and help ensure that just transition approaches address intersectional disadvantage.
6. Consideration of health and health equity impacts could be incorporated into impact assessments of relevant climate policies and plans to promote the use of all possible policy levers for health.
7. A coordinated, additive network aligned to existing structures (e.g. Scotland Beyond Net Zero) is needed to reduce fragmentation and low visibility within the research landscape. Such a network needs agile governance, shared tools, better data linkage, and two-way dialogue to accelerate evidence into policy and incentivise interdisciplinary collaboration. The regular publication of Scottish Government research priorities would be a key enabler.
8. Network building should create further links between Scotland’s community of health equity researchers and those whose focus is on the implementation of adaptation and mitigation interventions in the Scottish policy context.
9. Engaging with UK-wide and international research will help identify lessons and best practice for measurement. Aligning a future Scottish climate-health research-policy network with similar developments in Wales, for example, and enabling active exchange between them, would accelerate and amplify future knowledge exchange.
10. Understanding of the health and health equity impacts of climate policy could be enriched by further engagement with practitioners and communities outside formal research institutions, who hold valuable applied, place-based, and lived experience insights into the pathways through which these policies affect health and health equity.
    

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Appendix A: Examples of live grants (March 2026)

Appendix B: Measurement table (identified metrics and measures)

Tools and evaluation frameworks

We identified a small number of relevant interactive resources, which could be helpful for understanding the health effects of climate action. These tools often use data that is readily available, and examples of useful tools are summarised in the table below. These have been curated as an illustrative rather than an exhaustive list, given the rapid growth and development of this research area.

Appendix C: Typology overview

Overview:
The Boyd typology provided a practical and structured framework for organising this rapid review. It was selected to inform the literature search strategies and because it offers a consistent way to categorise climate mitigation and adaptation actions across sectors and hazards. However, as with any organising framework, it has limitations. Some relevant areas of scholarship such as law, finance, education, or cross‑cutting policy domains do not map neatly onto the typology’s categories. There is also some overlap between categories, and terminology does not always align with language used in practitioner or disciplinary settings. Despite these constraints, the typology enabled a coherent and systematic approach for the purposes of this study, while the limitations are important to acknowledge when interpreting the findings. This section outlines the extended typology as it was used for this study.

Typology of climate mitigation and adaptation actions

Adapted from Boyd et al (2023) Climate mitigation and adaptation action in the UK and devolved nations – A typology. [Data Collection]The full typology detail is available at: https://doi.org/10.5525/gla.researchdata.1563

Update: the typology was sense-checked by the review team (Lucidity and University of Glasgow) and steering group (CXC, Scottish Government, Public Health Scotland) for relevance to the Scottish policy context in October 2025. For pragmatic reasons and time constraints, only very minor changes and additions were made. Two new categories were added for this review (Community and Social Resilience, and Greening the Health Sector), with brief descriptions provided below.

*Note the typology is not an exhaustive list of every policy and action implemented or endorsed but instead captures the types of policy and action that might be relevant in high-income settings and provides examples.  Many broad areas of climate action will fall into more than one category, or overlap (for example policy actions termed as nature-based solutions).

Community and social resilience

One of the key outcome areas of SNAP3 in Scotland is Communities and the aim is to build community resilience to climate hazards (e.g. flooding, wildfire, coastal change) though regional adaptation partnerships and support for locally-led action focused on communities vulnerable to climate impacts. Local authorities will act as leading anchor institutions for collaborative multi-sector partnerships both locally and regionally (examples include Climate Ready Clyde and Highland Adapts). Further areas of action and adaptation support include: locally-led adaptation; community resilience; new and existing buildings; culture and historic environment; and coastal communities. The Scottish Government has committed funding for a national network of climate action hubs, and Community Climate Action Plans, facilitated by Keep Scotland Beautiful, are part of a programme that supports communities to design and implement climate action plans that help them adapt to a changing climate and reach net zero. Community Wealth Building (CWB) is also a key pillar in Scotland’s ambitions to become a Wellbeing Economy and to achieve a just transition to net zero. This economic model prioritises resilience, sustainability, equality, and prosperity, for an economy that is fair, green, and inclusive. The National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4), adopted in 2023, further embedded CWB principles into National Planning Policy 25, therefore integrating CWB into Scotland’s broader policy framework. Scotland’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES) is offering financial support for community energy generation and energy efficiency improvements, including specific funding for capacity building and development support.

Greening the health sector

Globally, the health sector (and health services) is estimated to be responsible for approximate 5% of GHG emissions (NHS Scotland’s emissions are estimated to exceed 1.7 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually^[26]). NHS Scotland’s 2025 climate emergency and sustainability annual report outlines its commitment to reducing its environmental impact and adapting its infrastructure and services to address the risks presented by climate change. Actions include reducing emissions in vehicle fleets, medical gases, building energy, and within the supply chain (sustainable procurement). More effective and sustainable prescribing and use of inhalers, reducing waste and more effective waste management (including circular economy practices) and more sustainable construction of healthcare facilities are also part of this ambition. The National Green Theatres Programme’s (NGTP) vision is to embed sustainability into every clinical and managerial decision across NHS Scotland, to be implemented and reported through Scotland’s 22 health boards. NGTP measures may result in carbon savings through more efficient practices in energy, waste and water.

Appendix D: Stakeholder workshop

Overview and purpose

A stakeholder workshop was held in Glasgow on the 13^th of January 2026. This brought together 28 researchers, policy specialists, members of the steering group, and project team to:

• Explore the emerging findings from the evidence review.
• Identify research gaps and priorities.
• Consider how health impacts are, or could be, measured in the context of climate and health policy, exploring barriers and opportunities to meaningful measurement.
• Characterise and discuss the current research landscape and opportunities to strengthen research-policy connectivity through network-based approaches.

Engaging with the emerging findings from the review

Participants engaged with the emerging findings and discussion questions from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Several participants noted the difficulty of offering fully informed reflections given the limited time available. Those attending recognised the relevance of the evidence to their own areas, while at the same time observing that both the review and workshop discussions only partially touched the specifics of their fields.

Participants were invited to consider the extent to which the evidence review had highlighted areas of research that they were involved in or were aware of and there was also discussion about whether work was highlighted that they were previously unfamiliar with. The responses suggested that while many researchers are working on health‑related impacts, they may not routinely classify their work through the climate lens of mitigation and adaptation. This aligns with reflections from the evidence review, where the distinction between mitigation, and/or adaptation focused research was often ambiguous, and connections between climate actions and health inequalities were more implicit than explicit. The discussions at the session reinforced an observation from this review that public health researchers appear more likely to integrate climate considerations into their work than climate‑focused researchers are to incorporate health outcomes.

An important function of the workshop was to try and capture gaps in the evidence and emerging findings. The discussion highlighted several areas for further consideration. These were helpful in expanding the peer review and grey literature that was screened. From the outset it was recognised by both participants and the review team that some relevant materials proposed at the stakeholder workshop sat on the margins of the inclusion criteria. Examples of potential questions/gaps suggested by those who attended the sessions, are extracted and categorised below.

An important aspect of the session was inviting participants to share their thoughts in response to the following question: “How would you expect health outcomes to be measured with regards to the impact of climate policy? Do you have any examples?”.

The individual responses to this question were notably limited, with a substantial proportion (more than half) of participants providing no answer. This absence was itself considered informative, suggesting both the difficulty of specifying appropriate indicators, and a degree of uncertainty among respondents. Among the small number of substantive responses, reflections emphasised the challenges of attributing long‑term health outcomes to climate policy interventions and the value of approaches such as theories of change to articulate expected pathways to impact. The table discussions highlighted the prospective value of process and progress indicators as well as outcome indicators that could support these pathway type approaches.

It was suggested that there is a lack of well‑developed conceptual frameworks or systems‑based models to support attribution of health outcomes from climate policy, with measurement approaches often limited, generalised or insufficiently precise to enable meaningful evaluation. Participants also noted that meaningful assessment requires indicators that operate across multiple time horizons and account for direct, indirect, upstream and downstream effects. The discussion further highlighted that while policymakers may favour clear metrics, such as mortality or life expectancy, these are not always feasible in the context of climate policy, reinforcing the need for a more nuanced conceptualisation. Overall, the conversation underscored that there appears to be limited established best practice in this space and suggested that future work may benefit from developing a more coherent framework for defining, selecting and operationalising health‑related indicators linked to climate action.

Opportunities to strengthen research-policy connectivity

As part of a plenary discussion participants were invited to describe the existing research landscape at the intersection between climate policy and health outcomes in a single word or phrase (see Figure 4 in main report). This language paints a picture of a dynamic but immature research ecosystem, messy, highly varied in quality and connections, and marked by both structural challenges and significant unrealised opportunity

The stakeholder workshop provided a valuable opportunity to explore how engaged those attending felt with:

• Scottish Government policy making in this area, 
• Those working in other disciplines,
• Researchers working in this area from institutions outwith Scotland

Responses were variable with more than half the respondents feeling neutral, dis-engaged or very disengaged from Scottish Government policy making in this area. Notwithstanding the perceived degree of current connectivity, those attending expressed a collective desire to be better connected and networked both with policymakers and each other, both within Scotland and beyond.

Exploring the mapping of researcher expertise with stakeholders helped to make visible the existence of at least 24 relevant networks that can be connected and leveraged to enhance the research landscape and policy maker-researcher-practitioner connectivity. Future networks developed in this space should be both cognisant of existing fora and seek to be additive in their contribution. Scotland Beyond Net Zero^[27] was highlighted as a multi-institutional network-based coalition of researchers that could enable future activity.

As part of the session, participants were invited to consider and visualise what a future research landscape looks like that enables the meaningful measurement of the health and health equity ambitions of Scotland’s climate policies. They were also invited to share their thoughts on what would help to strengthen research-policy connectivity. The attributes of this, and the gap between this idealised future and observations in relation to the status quo are summarised in the table that follows.

A wealth of suggestions was made in response to the question “What do you think would be helpful in building strong links between research and policy making in Scotland?”. These have been summarised into a set of design considerations which would create an enabling environment that would enhance research-policy connectivity as follows:

• A network that fosters trust, shared purpose, and open communication
• Regular forums with ongoing relationship building
• Shared digital platforms to find people, research, and needs, building on the output from this review
• Transparent, structured pathways for evidence into policy
• Aligned incentives and timeframes for meaningful collaboration for researchers
• Greater inclusion of communities in evidence and policy processes

Feedback from attendees at the workshop suggested that the stakeholder workshop itself should act as seed for relationship building and the formation of a network as a legacy from this project. Workshop contributions articulated what those participating wanted most from a network if one were to be established. This included enabling people to stay informed and keep abreast of developments and be better connected to relevant evidence; sharing knowledge and engaging in constructive challenge; connection to diverse expertise; provision of safe and supportive spaces for engagement and mentorship; access to resources, opportunities and prospective collaborations.

Stakeholder workshop attendees

The list below details the participants who attended the researcher stakeholder event held on the 13^th January in Glasgow (sorted alphabetically by surname).

Appendix E: Methodology

Overview

The evidence stocktake process consisted of three stages: the mapping review of the literature, desk-based expertise mapping and the stakeholder workshop. A call for evidence augmented this process. We viewed these activities as complementary and iterative and each was designed to inform the other. For example, our screening of both peer-reviewed and grey literature became a crucial source of information in mapping stakeholders. The stakeholder mapping formed an essential component of the workshop design (both to draw up an invitation list, and for structuring our activities and discussions). The workshop itself was an opportunity to engage and inform stakeholders, and to identify and compile important information and evidence that may have been missed, in the mapping exercises (research literature and stakeholders). More detail on our approach to these activities is set out in this appendix.

Mapping review of the literature (Peer and non-peer reviewed)

Our objectives for the mapping review were as follows:

1. Develop a comprehensive search strategy to identify relevant peer-reviewed and grey literature
2. Search and screen the literature according to our inclusion criteria
3. Extract data from the relevant literature to capture
   1. Bibliographic information
   1. Description and category of the climate action(s)
   1. The recorded impact of the climate action on health and health equity
   1. Examples of measurement/indicators used for evaluating health outcomes
4. Interpret, categorise, and summarise the data to provide a narrative overview
5. Highlight trends and gaps in the evidence in line with our typology of climate actions
   

Inclusion criteria (PECOS)

Through discussion with our steering group, the inclusion and exclusion criteria for both peer-reviewed and grey literature were agreed as outlined in the table below.

Search strategies and data extraction

Our search strategy was developed with support from an Information Scientist at the University of Glasgow library. We searched the Medline, Web of Science, and Scopus databases to identify relevant peer-reviewed literature.

Returned peer-reviewed studies were imported to EPPI-Reviewer software for abstract screening, duplicates were removed, and papers selected for full text screening were downloaded as PDFs. Downloaded studies were then screened in full by one reviewer, with any studies that were unclear discussed by at least two reviewers.

We manually searched for grey literature using key words in an internet search engine (Google) and targeted websites (initially identified through a list of organisations with membership of one or more Scottish Government Cross-Party Groups with relevance to climate change). The grey literature search was conducted using the following key words: climate adaptation; climate mitigation; just transition; net zero; health; health outcomes; health inequality/inequalities; health equity; and wellbeing. Grey literature documents were reviewed to identify activity relating to climate policy and health outcomes. Searches were specifically targeting those reports which included measurement of health outcomes. To identify any further key literature, we conducted a snowball search: 1) a review of the references and sources used in these documents; 2) citation follow-up of reviews included from the broader search above and peer reviewed literature; and 3) stakeholder engagement. The grey literature search identified key policy related documents alongside primary studies which were included (e.g. Niddrie road, Glasgow: Tenement retrofit evaluation). Included grey literature studies were then imported as PDFs into EPPI-Reviewer for coding.

Data extraction was carried out by six members of the research team and all records were checked for accuracy by a single researcher (AH). Data was extracted for: Bibliographic information (author, title, date, location, format/type of evidence); Description of climate action/policy; Categorisation of the climate action/policy (based on typology); Impact on health and health inequality outcomes; Degree of focus on health (primary, secondary, footnote); Domain(s) of health equity/inequality considered (e.g. population groups); Examples of measurement (indicators and/or evaluation frameworks) used to demonstrate the health/health equity impacts. The extraction and coding framework was iteratively refined by the wider research team. Due to time constraints, no formal quality assessment was undertaken.

Search results

The number of studies returned by our searches are shown in Figure 6.

Evidence gap map

Using the finalised code sets developed in EPPI-Reviewer we produced (an) evidence gap map(s) using EPPI-mapper software. The interactive map(s) illustrate(s) the distribution of evidence according to the climate action typology and type of measurement. It facilitates quick access to topic-specific references as well as highlighting where little or no evidence was identified.

Call for Evidence

The call for evidence is reproduced below. This was shared on the CXC website, Linkedin and sent out by email.

Call for Evidence: Measuring the Impact of Climate Policy on Health and Health Equity Outcomes in Scotland

Summary

As part of a Scottish Government funded project, commissioned through ClimateXChange and delivered in collaboration by Lucidity Services limited and the University of Glasgow, we are inviting submissions of evidence, data, and case studies that demonstrate how climate change mitigation and adaptation policies in Scotland are affecting health outcomes and health equity.

This call for evidence will support Scottish Government policy development including the forthcoming CCP 2026-2040, implementation of SNAP3 2024–2029 to achieve a Just Transition towards net zero, and the health and equity goals of Scotland’s Population Health Framework.

This call for evidence runs until 16^th January 2026

Call for Evidence Description

Climate change presents one of the most significant challenges to health and wellbeing in Scotland. The ways in which Scotland adapts to and mitigates climate change, through policies that reduce emissions, enhance resilience, and support a just transition, can have wide-ranging impacts on health outcomes and inequalities.

Policies that aim to reduce carbon emissions or increase climate resilience can influence the social, environmental and economic determinants of health. These impacts may be direct (e.g. through air quality improvements or energy efficiency schemes) or indirect (e.g. through changes in employment, housing, transport, or access to green space). Understanding these relationships is essential for developing climate policy that supports population health and ensures equitable health outcomes for all communities in Scotland.

This call for evidence seeks contributions that will help identify, collate and connect existing or emerging research on the effect of climate policy, and interventions, on health and health equity in Scotland, and how this is being measured/evaluated.

Background to this Call for Evidence

The Scottish National Adaptation Plan (SNAP3) 2024–2029 sets out actions to strengthen Scotland’s resilience to climate change, supported by a monitoring and evaluation framework. This framework recognises gaps in evidence and indicators to assess the health impacts of climate policy, particularly in relation to health equity. Alongside the forthcoming CCP 2026-2040 and Population Health Framework, this period represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to maximise the health and justice potential of achieving a just transition in Scotland, through climate action that influences the building blocks of health as well as the fundamental causes of health inequalities.

Currently, there is no consolidated evidence base on how Scottish climate policies affect health and health equity. Addressing this gap will support effective climate and health policy design, monitoring, and evaluation across adaptation, mitigation, just transition, and sustainable health equity priorities.

The findings from this call will contribute to a stocktake of evidence and the development of an expert climate and health network in Scotland. This work is commissioned on behalf of ClimateXChange and directly supports Scottish Government policy making around climate change adaption, mitigation, just transition and health.

Who Should Contribute

We welcome research submissions from a wide range of stakeholders working across national (UK and Scotland), regional and local governance, NHS boards, NGO, charity and third sector, community groups, the private sector, and academia.

What we are looking for and how to respond

We are looking for evidence, data, case studies, or examples of ongoing or completed work that explore, consider or relate to how climate adaptation/mitigation actions or interventions affect health and health equity outcomes in Scotland (and how these outcomes are measured). Your research may therefore relate to the differential impacts on health, and the factors that shape our health, on different population groups in Scotland.

We are particularly interested in submissions that include:

• Measurable outcomes, indicators, or metrics
• Lessons learned from evaluation or monitoring
• Research evaluating qualitative data and/or lived experience
• Examples of partnership or cross-sector collaboration

Submissions might include (but are not limited to):

• Empirical studies or evaluations assessing the health or health equity impacts of specific climate policies (e.g. transport, housing, energy, food systems, or environmental resilience)
  
• Data sources, indicators, or measurement approaches used to assess the health impacts of climate policy
  
• Case studies or pilot projects demonstrating good practice in evaluating health outcomes from climate interventions
  
• Unpublished reports produced by government, local authorities, research institutions, or third-sector organisations
  
• Ongoing research (with early findings or plans for measuring health impacts)
  
• Evidence on health equity impacts, particularly how policies affect high-risk or vulnerable groups and communities of place
  

How to Respond

Please submit your evidence, data, or case study either by completing the online submission form [follow this link: Measuring the Impact of Climate Policy on Health and Health Equity Outcomes in Scotland – Fill out form] or directly by email to CXC1Q28@lucidityservices.limited

If you have questions about the suitability of your submission, please contact CXC1Q28@lucidityservices.limited with “Climate Policy and Health Call for Evidence” in the subject line.

The deadline for responses is 16^th January 2026.

Next Steps

All submissions will be reviewed and synthesised as part of a broader evidence-gathering exercise. Findings will inform a summary report describing:

• Current evidence and data sources on the health impacts of climate policy in Scotland
• Gaps and opportunities for future monitoring and evaluation
• Best practice examples of measuring policy impacts on health and equity
• Opportunities for collaboration and the development of a Scottish Climate and Health Network

Contributors may be invited to participate in follow-up workshops or expert discussions to support this work.

Additional Information

Any personal data related to submissions will be handled in accordance with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Lucidity Services Limited is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under registration number ZB305267. 

Appendix F: Register of expertise

The register of expertise is accessible via the Polinode map on the ClimateXChange website.

Mapping expertise (production of the register)

Experts were identified through an iterative process involving desk-based research, interviews, and consultations. The primary purpose of the mapping was to create a comprehensive database of active research expertise in climate policy and health outcomes and their measurement. The mapping of expertise had three key aims:  

• To assess and map the extent of research expertise across Scotland with understanding of how climate adaptation and mitigation policies impact health and health equity.   
• To generate a map of active research alongside relevant expertise on the health impacts of climate action in Scotland.   
• To support the wider stock take of what evidence exists or is in development to measure the impacts of climate policy on health and the building blocks of health in Scotland. 

This work began with an initial sift of publicly available information through institutional websites, staff profiles, and existing research grant sites. A jumping off point was Public Health Scotland (PHS) climate bulletins where a list of relevant climate change and health publications are given. The typology from the literature review was used to guide our search terms, and we sifted through university profile data to snowball information. After review with the steering group, our search expanded to include those working in relevant areas relating to the wider building blocks of health.

Inclusion criteria

This was a non-systematic review, and expertise-stakeholders are included based on active involvement in current, or recently finished, research grants, and/or a minimum of two publications relevant to this research. Experts weren’t just confined to academic circles, and the registry includes those from independent research organisations, public and third sector and think tanks.

In attempt to filter and organise the expertise registry, a layering system has been created to arrange stakeholders and expertise in a tiered system of relevance (Figure 7). Stakeholders and expertise closest to the specific mapping aims are assigned to layer one – that is those whose work specifically involves the use of measurement of health outcomes from climate adaptation and mitigation policy. Layer two and three represent those whose work is either directly (layer 2) or indirectly (layer 3) relevant to the measurement of health outcomes from climate policy. Many of those whose work resides in layers two or three can make supporting contribution to research or policy development and may represent an opportunity to steer their work towards measurement and evaluation of health outcomes in the context of climate policy.

Visualising expertise (production of the Polinode® interactive map)

The visualisation of the expertise register is stored online7 through Polinode software and is publicly accessible. Polinode has enabled a visualisation of the map and gives distinct views to each layer and categorisation. The register of expertise underpins this visualisation and is a resource in its own right and is accessible from the CXC website. The stakeholder map represents a snapshot of activity at the point at which the research for this review was undertaken. At present, there are no current plans/resources to maintain it on an ongoing basis, but any future research network set up may wish to develop this further.

Appendix G: Literature overview (data extraction tables)

Peer-reviewed literature

Data and publication URLs available here: Final data extraction overview

Key: A/M (Adaptation/Mitigation)

References included in the extracted data table

1. Andrews N. (2022). The Emotional Experience of Members of Scotland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change. Frontiers in Climate, 4.
2. Graham Baker, Rebecca Pillinger, Paul Kelly, and Bruce Whyte (2021). Quantifying the health and economic benefits of active commuting in Scotland. Journal of Transport and Health, 22.
3. Blane David N and Basu Nayanika. (2023). Tackling climate change and health inequalities in primary care. Family Practice, 40(3), pp.498-501.
4. Boyle Neil Bernard, Jenneson Victoria, Okeke-Ogbuafor Nwamaka, Morris Michelle A, Stead Selina M, Dye Louise, Halford Jason C G, Banwart Steven A. (2024). Connected Food: First Steps for an Ambitious National Food Strategy. Nutrients, 16(19).
5. Brandner Magdalena M E, Fyfe Claire L, Horgan Graham W, Johnstone Alexandra M. (2022). Self-Reported Purchasing Behaviour, Sociodemographic Predictors of Plant-Based Protein Purchasing and Knowledge about Protein in Scotland and England. Nutrients, 14(21).
6. Buckingham, S. et al. (2023). Greenhouse Gas and Ammonia Emission Mitigation Priorities for Uk Policy Targets. Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering, 10(2), pp.268-280.
7. Campbell Aileen, Yousaf Humza, Brannen Roy, Gray Paul, Hunter Graeme, Mutrie Nanette, and Murray Andrew. (2019). Tackling vehicle emissions and physical inactivity. Scottish Government doubles active travel budget. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53(8), pp.466-467.
8. Cleland E., McBey, D., Darlene, V., McCormick, B., and Macdiarmid, J. (2025). Still eating like there’s no tomorrow? A qualitative study to revisit attitudes and awareness around sustainable diets after 10 years. Appetite, 206, pp.107799.
9. Dick, J., Carruthers-Jones, J., Carver, S., Dobel, A., and Miller, J. (2020). How are nature-based solutions contributing to priority societal challenges surrounding human well-being in the United Kingdom: a systematic map. Environmental Evidence, 9.
10. Dittrich R, Ball T, Wreford A, Moran D, and Spray CJ. (2019). A cost-benefit analysis of afforestation as a climate change adaptation measure to reduce flood risk. Journal of Flood Risk Management, 12(4).
11. Dogbe Wisdom, Huang Kaizhe, and Revoredo-Giha Cesar. (2025). Impacts of a minimum pricing policy on high fat, sugar and sodium (HFSS) foods: Environmental, dietary and welfare analysis. Economics and human biology, 58, pp.101514.
12. Douglas, M., Teuton, J., Macdonald, A., Whyte, B., and Davis A.L. (2023). Road space reallocation in Scotland: A health impact assessment. Journal of Transport and Health, 30.
13. Dunk, RM, Satyal P, and Bonaventura M. (2016). A Novel Impact Assessment Methodology for Evaluating Distributional Impacts in Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Policy. Implementing Climate Change Adaptation in Cities and Communities: Integrating Strategies and Educational Approaches, (World Symposium on Climate Change Adaptation), pp.75-98.
14. Dwyer Ian J, Barry, Sarah J E, Megiddo Itamar, and White Christopher J. (2022). Evaluations of heat action plans for reducing the health impacts of extreme heat: methodological developments (2012-2021) and remaining challenges. International Journal of Biometeorology, 66(9), pp.1915-1927.
15. Fronzek Stefan, Honda Yasushi, Ito Akihiko, Nunes Joao Pedro, Pirttioja Nina, Raisanen Jouni, Takahashi Kiyoshi; Terama Emma; Yoshikawa Minoru; Carter Timothy R. (2022). Estimating impact likelihoods from probabilistic projections of climate and socio-economic change using impact response surfaces. Climate Risk Management, 38.
16. Goonesekera SM and Olazabal M. (2022). Climate adaptation indicators and metrics: State of local policy practice. Ecological Indicators, 145.
17. Gordon JE and Barron HF. (2012). Valuing Geodiversity and Geoconservation: Developing a More Strategic Ecosystem Approach. Scottish Geographical Journal, 128(3-4), pp.278-297.
18. Haf S, Parkhill K, McDonald M, and Griffiths G. (2019). Distributing power? Community energy projects’ experiences of planning, policy and incumbents in the devolved nations of Scotland and Wales. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 62(6), pp.921-938.
19. Harrington Deirdre M, Bardid Farid, Cory Katherine, Dixon James, Dodd Sarah, Ferguson Neil, Roberts Jennifer J and Bonner James. (2024). (Two) Wheels on the Bus: Road User Perceptions of a Bike Bus and How This Links to Addressing Global Health Challenges. Journal of Physical Activity and Health, 21(12), pp.1382-1390.
20. Henderson F, Bennett B, Dohain-Lesueur R, and Helwig K. (2025). It’s not really their problem: Reactive institutional community engagement and flood policy implementation. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 116.
21. Higney, A., and Gibb, K. (2024). Net zero retrofit of older tenement housing – The contribution of cost benefit analysis to wider evaluation of a demonstration project. Energy Policy, 191.
22. Hjelmskog Annika, Boyd Jennifer, Stevenson Amy, Pollack Roxana, Elsenbroich Corinna, Heppenstall Alison, Toney Jaime, Winterbottom Jo, and Meier Petra. (2025). The effect of climate mitigation and adaptation policies on health and health inequalities: a systematic review. The Lancet. Planetary health, 9(7), pp.101277.
23. Jager J, Rounsevell M, Harrison P, Omann I, Dunford R, Kammerlander M, and Pataki G. (2015). Assessing policy robustness of climate change adaptation measures across sectors and scenarios. Climatic Change, 128(3-4), pp.395-407.
24. Kennedy Emily, Vint Karen, Mair Alpana, Wilson Iain, Rose Lesley, Eastop Fiona, and Law Stuart. (2025). Quality prescribing strategy for respiratory conditions in Scotland: improving patient care and promoting environmental sustainability. The International Journal of Pharmacy Practice, 33(5), pp.534-540.
25. Koronka J, Ovando P, and Vergunst J. (2022). Understanding values beyond carbon in the Woodland Carbon Code in Scotland. Trees Forests and People, 9.
26. Li Sen, Gilbert Lucy, Vanwambeke Sophie O, Yu Jianjun, Purse Bethan V, and Harrison Paula A. (2019). Lyme Disease Risks in Europe under Multiple Uncertain Drivers of Change. Environmental Health Perspectives, 127(6), pp.67010.
27. Lucas K and Pangbourne K. (2014). Assessing the equity of carbon mitigation policies for transport in Scotland. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 2(2), pp.70-80.
28. Mabon, L. (2023). At the margins of the international community, but inside global knowledge and policy flows? How cities in Taiwan and Scotland position themselves within intergovernmental rhetoric on nature-based solutions. Nature-Based Solutions, 4.
29. Macdiarmid Jennie I, Douglas Flora, and Campbell Jonina. (2016). Eating like there’s no tomorrow: Public awareness of the environmental impact of food and reluctance to eat less meat as part of a sustainable diet. Appetite, 96, pp.487-493.
30. Macdiarmid J I. (2022). The food system and climate change: are plant-based diets becoming unhealthy and less environmentally sustainable? The Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 81(2), pp.162-167.
31. MacDonald MA, de Ruyck C, Field RH, Bedford A, and Bradbury RB. (2020). Benefits of coastal managed realignment for society: Evidence from ecosystem service assessments in two UK regions. Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science, 244.
32. Malden, S., McDougall, C.W., Ward Thompson, C., Wendelboe-Nelson, C., Ross-Perez, A., Clemens, T., Mason, S., Villegas-Diaz, R., Hoadley, A., Hunter, A., Jepson, R., and Williams, A.J. (2025). Evaluating the health and well-being effects of increasing biodiversity within multiple small parks in Edinburgh, UK: a protocol for a mixed-methods, longitudinal, pre-post natural experiment. BMJ open, 15(9), pp.e101061.
33. McBey, D., Watts, D., and Johnstone, A.M. (2019). Nudging, formulating new products, and the lifecourse: A qualitative assessment of the viability of three methods for reducing Scottish meat consumption for health, ethical, and environmental reasons. Appetite, 142.
34. McCartney Gerry, Hensher Martin, and Trebeck Katherine. (2023). How to measure progress towards a wellbeing economy: distinguishing genuine advances from window dressing. Public Health Research and Practice, 33(2), pp.
35. Meyerricks S and White RM. (2021). Communities on a Threshold: Climate Action and Wellbeing Potentialities in Scotland. Sustainability, 13(13), pp.
36. Mvula A, Prager K, and Geris J. (2025). Some love them, others hate them: Understanding farmers tree planting decisions in Scotland. People and Nature.
37. Nneli, A., Revoredo-Giha, C., and Dogbe, W. (2023). Could taxes on foods high in fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) improve climate health and nutrition in Scotland? Journal of Cleaner Production, 421.
38. Reynolds, C.J., Horgan, G.W., Whybrow, S., and Macdiarmid, J.I. (2019). Healthy and sustainable diets that meet greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and are affordable for different income groups in the UK. Public Health Nutrition, 22.
39. Richie Cristina (2023). “Green informed consent” in the classroom, clinic, and consultation room. Medicine, health care and philosophy, 26(4), pp.507-515.
40. Ross Heather and McCartney Gerry. (2025). Renoviction and health: an emerging research agenda. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 79(4), pp.239-241.
41. Seaton Anthony. (2022). Air pollution: What is it and what we must do. The journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 52(3), pp.267-272.
42. Shapovalova Daria, Bender Keith A., Bone and John, and Potts Travis. (2025). A place-based approach to measuring a just transition: Evidence from the north-east of Scotland. Energy Research and Social Science.
43. Shipton Deborah, Sarica Shifa, Craig Neil, McCartney Gerry, Katikireddi Srinivasa Vittal, Roy Graeme, McGregor Peter, and Scobie Graeme. (2021). Knowing the goal: an inclusive economy that can address the public health challenges of our time. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 75(11), pp.1129-1132.
44. Smith Pete, Singh Pramod K, Ballal Vedant P, Cherubini Francesco, Diaz-Jose Julio, Duchkova Helena, Gupta Himangana, Hori Masakazu, Ito Akihiko, Khan Shabana, Llope Marcos, Tirado Maria Cristina, Tourinho Luara, Vale Mariana M, Xu Xiyan, Chudasama Harpalsinh, Eriksen Siri H, Mason-D’Croz Daniel, Phang Sui Chian, Srivastava Yash, van Huysen Tiff L, Ricketts Taylor, Herrero Mario, Harrison Paula A, and McElwee Pamela D. (2025). Impacts of Climate Change Interventions on Biodiversity, Water, the Food System and Human Health and Well-Being. Global Change Biology, 31(9), pp.e70444.
45. Tieges Zoe, McGregor Duncan, Georgiou Michail, Smith Niamh, Saunders Josie, Millar Richard, Morison Gordon, and Chastin Sebastien. (2020). The Impact of Regeneration and Climate Adaptations of Urban Green-Blue Assets on All-Cause Mortality: A 17-Year Longitudinal Study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(12).
46. Wan Kai, Hajat Shakoor, Doherty Ruth M, and Feng Zhiqiang. (2024). Integrating Shared Socioeconomic Pathway-informed adaptation into temperature-related mortality projections under climate change. Environmental Research, 251(Pt 2), pp.118731.
47. Wardle Jennifer, Sorathia Aslam, Smith Pete and Feliciano Diana. (2024). Environmental, social and economic perceptions of local food production: a case study of Aberdeenshire farmers’ markets. Scottish Geographical Journal, 140(1-2), pp.233-247.

Data extraction grey literature

Key: A/M (Adaptation/Mitigation)

References included in the grey literature data extraction table:

1. Brennan, J., and Ogilvie, F. (2025). Health Impact Scoping Report: Proposed Edinburgh North-South Tram Extension, NHS Lothian.
2. Cleaner Air for Scotland Climate Change Sub-Group. (2016). Synergies and tensions between climate change and air quality actions.
3. Community Land Scotland. (2022). Owning our Future.
4. COSLA Healthier Scotland. (2014). Let’s Get Scotland Walking.
5. Dow K. (2025). Links between Climate Change and Health in Scotland. SPICe (Scottish Parliament Information Centre) Available at: https://digitalpublications.parliament.scot/ResearchBriefings/Report/2025/7/22/43f04848-fb71-4c5c-b568-2481bf656130
6. Everyone’s Environment. (2025).  Making environmental policy inclusive in Scotland. ERCS. Available at: https://www.ercs.scot/resources/everyones-environment-scotland/
7. Gibb, K. et al. (2023). Niddrie Road, Glasgow: Tenement Retrofit Evaluation. Glasgow: Available at: https://housingevidence.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Niddrie-Road-v4.pdf.
8. Harkins, C. (2022). Evaluation of Glasgow City Council Parks and Greenspace: Wee Green Grants Participatory Budgeting Processes 2019-2020. GCPH.
9. Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland (The ALLIANCE.) (2025). Draft Climate Change Plan Scrutiny 2025 Call for Views ALLIANCE Response.
10. Highland Adapts. (2023). Nature Climate Health. Available at: https://www.thinkhealththinknature.scot.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Agenda-Item-6-Climate-Nature-Health-Guidance-for-Community-Partnerships-06.06.23-1.pdf
11. Highland Community Planning Partnership. (2024). Highland Green Health Partnership Annual Report.
12. Improvement Service. (2021). Elected Member Briefing Note: Nature-based Solutions. Available at: https://www.improvementservice.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/26434/EM-Briefing-Nature-Based-Solutions.pdf
13. Improvement Service. (2025). Child Poverty and Climate Change.
14. Just Transition Commission. (2021). Just Transition Commission: A national mission for a fairer, greener Scotland. Available at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/transition-commission-national-mission-fairer-greener-scotland/.
15. Living Streets Scotland. (2022). Getting Scotland Walking: The Case for Action.
16. McCartney, G. et al. (2025). Evidence review to support the development of a Wellbeing Economy strategy in Scotland. Post Growth Economics Network, pp. Available at: https://www.postgrowtheconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/PEN-WP_2025-01.pdf.
17. Mitchell, R. and Finton, B. (2022). Green Health Partnerships in Scotland – evaluation of the first three years.
18. Mobility and Access Committee for Scotland. MACS Annual Report 2022-2023. Edinburgh: Transport Scotland, Available at: https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/mobility-and-access-committee-for-scotland-annual-report-2022-2023/.
19. Muirie, J. (2017). Active Travel in Glasgow: What we’ve learned so far. GCPH.
20. Nature Scot. (2025). Realising the Potential of Scotland’s Natural Health Service in Practice. Available at: https://www.nature.scot/doc/realising-potential-scotlands-natural-health-service-practice.
21. Public Health Scotland and Adaptation Scotland; Improvement Service. (2023). Working together to build climate-resilient, healthy and equitable places. Available at: https://adaptation.scot/app/uploads/2024/09/climate-adaptation-and-health-inequalities-briefing.pdf.
22. Scottish Communities Climate Action Network. (2024). Rapid literature review of impacts of severe weather and effects of long-term climate related issues on communities. CAG Consultants.
23. Scottish Parliament Cross Party Group on Sustainable Transport. (2025). Mind the Gap: Tackling Transport Inequalities in Scotland. Available at: https://transform.scot/2025/06/17/mind-the-gap-new-inquiry-reports-transport-system-excluding-majority-of-scots/.
24. Scottish Government. (2025). Making the Case for Nature: Insights from Scotland’s Natural Capital Analyses.
25. Scottish Parliament Cross Party Group on Sustainable Transport. (2023). Fossil-Free Future: Accelerating Scotland to Zero-Carbon Public Transport. Available at: https://transform.scot/our-work/our-projects/fossil-free-future/.
26. Walking Scotland. (2025). The Power of Walking.
27. Walking Scotland. (2025). Scottish Walking and Wheeling Survey 2025.
28. Woodland Trust Scotland. (2024). Trees and Woods: At the heart of nature recovery in Scotland.
29. Wray, E. (2020). Access to Bike Schemes in Scotland. Edinburgh
30. Yates Gregor et al. (2018). Weathering Change: Community Resilience in the face of climate change. GCPH.
31. Yates, Gregor and Whyte, Bruce. (2019). Bikes for All Evaluation. Glasgow: Available at: https://www.gcph.co.uk/latest/publications/258-bikes-for-all-widening-access-to-cycling-through-social-inclusion
32. Zamuruieva, I., Payne, C., Wolstenholme, R., Casey, J., Connor, B., and Cameron-Smith, A. (2023). Land Use and Climate Change Adaptation in Scotland: Insights. Adaptation Scotland. Available at: https://adaptation.scot/app/uploads/2024/09/land-use-and-climate-change-adaptation-report-digital-v2.pdf
33. Zeidler Liz. (2023). The Shared Ingredients for a Wellbeing Economy. Available at: https://carnegieuk.org/publication/the-shared-ingredients-for-a-wellbeing-economy/
34. Zero Emissions Social Housing Taskforce (ZEST). (2021). Achieving Net Zero in Social Housing.

How to cite this publication:

Hjelmskog, A., Heslop, E., Murphy, B., Lester, S., Heslop, M., Ayala, P., Booth, I., Maclaren, A. and Ponce Hardy, V. (2026) Measuring the impact of climate policy on health and health equity outcomes in Scotland, ClimateXChange.

© The University of Edinburgh, 2026
Prepared by Ipsos UK on behalf of ClimateXChange, The University of Edinburgh. All rights reserved.

While every effort is made to ensure the information in this report is accurate as at the date of the report, no legal responsibility is accepted for any errors, omissions or misleading statements. The views expressed represent those of the author(s), and do not necessarily represent those of the host institutions or funders.       

This work was supported by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division of the Scottish Government (CoE – CXC).

ClimateXChange

Edinburgh Climate Change Institute

High School Yards

Edinburgh EH1 1LZ

+44 (0) 131 651 4783

info@climatexchange.org.uk

www.climatexchange.org.uk

If you require the report in an alternative format such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.

FOOTNOTES

1. https://publichealthscotland.scot/population-health/environmental-health-impacts/climate-emergency/health-impacts-of-climate-change/impact-on-the-building-blocks-of-health-and-wellbeing/ ↑
   

2. https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/working-together-to-build-climate-resilient-healthy-and-equitable-places-a-briefing-for-local-government-and-partners ↑
   

3. https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-climate-change-plan-2026-2040/ ; https://www.gov.scot/policies/climate-change/ ↑
   

4. https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/CCC-letter-to-Minister-Hardy-15-October-2025.pdf ↑
   

5. https://www.gov.scot/policies/climate-change/just-transition/ ↑
   

6. https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-population-health-framework/ ↑
   

7. https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/healthy-life-expectancy-2022-2024/ ↑
   

8. https://app.Polinode.com/networks/explore/6965dcd70e6646ca68b7de77/698db273c13825f5e96e87e3 ↑
   

9. For the purposes of this rapid review, we identified an expert as those with at least two relevant publications and/or are working on an active grant directly related to the project brief. Inclusion in our register was based on a desk-based review of the material which may not accurately reflect the full expertise held by individuals. ↑
   

10. https://publichealthscotland.scot/healthcare-system/system-monitoring-accountability-and-quality-of-care/prescribing-data/national-therapeutic-indicators-ntis/ ↑
    

11. Applied here as the Place Standard with a Climate Lens: https://macchub.co.uk/knowledge-base/scotland/place-standard-tool-with-a-climate-lens/ ↑
    

12. https://www.changingtheenvironment.org/our-work/gallant/ ↑
    

13. https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres-projects-groups/pathfinder-initiative ; https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/research-projects/2024/sep/policy-and-implementation-climate-health-equity-paice ↑
    

14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgQiAMjhPzk ↑
    

15. https://www.gla.ac.uk/pgrs/amystevenson/ ; https://www.gla.ac.uk/pgrs/annitaitto/ ↑
    

16. https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/rdoherty/phd-project-inequalities-in-outdoor-and-indoor-air-pollution-in-the-uk-and-implications-for-health-equalities-march-30th-deadline/ ↑
    

17. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/research-projects/2024/sep/policy-and-implementation-climate-health-equity-paice ↑
    

18. https://www.hdrcglasgow.com/ ↑
    

19. https://scothealthequity.org/ ↑
    

20. https://publichealthscotland.scot/resources-and-tools/health-strategy-and-outcomes/health-impact-assessment-hia/about-health-impact-assessment/ ; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-equity-assessment-tool-heat ↑
    

21. https://scotland-beyond-net-zero.ac.uk/ ↑
    

22. A recording of the launch session is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcsiaBlpxxc ↑
    

23. https://www.gla.ac.uk/explore/sustainability/cop28/headline_1022188_en.html ↑
    

24. Accompanied by a peer-reviewed article and a report published by Policy Bristol. ↑
    

25. Interactive tool available online https://priestleycentre.shinyapps.io/climatecobenefitsportal/ ↑
    

26. https://www.gov.scot/publications/nhs-scotland-climate-emergency-sustainability-annual-report-2025/ ↑
    

27. https://scotland-beyond-net-zero.ac.uk/ ↑
    

28. Full dataset is available for download here: https://zenodo.org/records/5705687 ↑

Photo by David Dvořáček on Unsplash

Climate adaptation policy has traditionally been framed as an approach to managing risk and avoiding loss, but this framing is changing. Across Scottish and European policy, adaptation is increasingly recognised as an economic opportunity that can support resilience, innovation and new markets.

This report provides evidence on potential economic opportunities links to climate adaptation in Scotland, how these markets are likely to evolve over time, and where Scotland has – or could build – a competitive advantage.

Key findings

• There is only limited and scattered evidence about the economic opportunities linked to climate adaptation in Scotland. This means we could not reliably measure the size or growth potential of individual opportunities, or compare their relative importance.
• The findings identify areas of potential opportunity and where future efforts might be focused. They do not estimate economic value and should not be used on their own to decide priorities or investment.
• Climate adaptation could create economic opportunities across 14 sectors of Scotland’s economy.
• The strongest opportunities are likely to come from goods, services and expertise that help organisations manage climate risks such as flooding, overheating, water shortages and supply chain disruption.
• Three sectors stand out as priorities:
  • the built environment, including building retrofit, flood resilience, drainage, climate-informed design, risk analytics and nature-based solutions.
  • food and agriculture, including climate-resilient crops, water management, digital farming technologies, advisory services and landscape-scale land management.
  • finance and insurance, including climate risk analytics, new insurance products, support for climate reporting, and place-based lending and investment.
• Scotland’s strongest opportunities will likely come from combining technical expertise, reliable data, skilled workers and coordinated local action.

The opportunities across the sectors, and within the prioritised sectors, are illustrated in this visual summary.

Recommendations

• Improve data, standards and independent assurance so resilience measures are recognised in planning, insurance and financial decision-making.
• Develop the workforce needed for long-term adaptation, including technical, analytical and local delivery skills.
• Provide clear, consistent and long-term policies that support investment in climate resilience.
• Shift incentives away from short-term, lowest-cost decisions towards long-term climate resilience.
• Support larger-scale, place-based projects to reduce risk and attract investment.
• Strengthen collaboration between government, businesses, investors and local partners to grow Scotland’s adaptation economy.

For further information, please read the full report.

If you require the report or annex in an alternative format, such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.

Visual summary of findings

Research completed: May 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7488/era/7321

Executive summary

Aims

Policy has traditionally framed climate adaptation as managing risk and avoiding losses. This framing is changing. Across Scottish and European policy, adaptation is increasingly recognised as an economic opportunity that can support resilience, innovation and new markets. Our research responds to Scottish Government interest in better understanding these economic opportunities. We provide evidence on:

• where economic opportunities linked to climate adaptation and Scotland’s changing climate may arise
• how these markets are likely to evolve over time
• where Scotland has, or could build, a sustained competitive advantage

Our analysis synthesises existing Scotland-specific literature and insights from 15 interviews with stakeholders from the built environment, food and agriculture, and finance and insurance sectors. It aims to provide a broad characterisation of Scotland’s adaptation economy overall, with a deeper dive into further detail for some priority sectors.

Limitations

The evidence base for climate adaptation economic opportunities in Scotland is limited and fragmented, which constrains the strength of conclusions that can be drawn. There is very little Scotland-specific data on market size, structure, or growth, and UK-level evidence is also sparse and largely focused on adaptation costs rather than opportunities. Most available data on market dynamics is global in scope and not specific to adaptation as a distinct area of economic activity. As a result, it was not possible to robustly quantify the scale or growth potential of individual opportunities, or to compare their relative importance.

To address these gaps, the analysis draws on a combination of global evidence, proxy indicators (such as company activity and sector trends), and qualitative interviews with stakeholders. While this provides useful insight into emerging market signals and practical considerations, it relies on assumptions about how global trends may apply to Scotland and, in some cases, on a limited number of perspectives. Interview findings are therefore indicative rather than representative.

Assessment of international competitive advantage is also constrained by a lack of comparable data on other countries’ capabilities and market positions. As a result, conclusions in this area are exploratory and based on alignment between Scotland’s existing strengths and areas of emerging global demand, rather than detailed competitor analysis. Overall, the findings should be understood as identifying areas of potential opportunity and strategic direction, rather than providing a quantified assessment of economic value or a definitive basis for prioritisation or investment decisions.

Findings

The economic opportunities

From our literature review, we identified a broad range of economic opportunities associated with climate adaptation across Scotland. In total, these opportunities span 14 sectors of the economy where adaptation is expected to drive demand for new goods, services, and technologies.

Three sectors stood out as particularly significant and were prioritised for further analysis due to their strategic importance and cross-cutting relevance within the wider policy landscape: The opportunities across the sectors, and within the prioritised sectors, are illustrated in the accompanying visual summary.

Built environment: Climate adaptation activity in the sector is driven by immediate risks such as intense rainfall, surface water flooding, and overheating, creating demand for retrofit, drainage, and climate-informed infrastructure design. Potential economic opportunities for Scotland centre around providing services, skills, and coordinated delivery in areas including flood resilience, retrofit of existing building stock, climate risk analytics, and nature-based solutions.

Food and agriculture: Climate adaptation within agriculture is focused on managing volatility in rainfall, temperature, and water availability, which in turn impact business continuity, yield stability, and resource security. Potential economic opportunities for Scotland include developing climate-resilient crops, water management expertise, digital agri-tech and advisory services, and landscape-scale land management models. These goods and services provide marginal economic gains, but durable value, when embedded within farm systems and rural food and drink supply chains.

Finance and insurance: Climate change is already impacting asset values, insurance eligibility, and systemic risk, with flooding the dominant hazard in this sector. Analytics, modelling, and disclosure are driving current market activity. Potential economic opportunities for Scotland lie in climate risk analytics services, insurance model innovation, and pioneering place-based lending and investment models that incentivise building resilience.^[1]

Market evolution

Whether climate adaptation opportunities emerge in the short or long term largely depends on how quickly climate risks translate into clear market signals (such as regulation, insurance pricing, or immediate operational costs) and whether the required technologies, skills, financing models, and governance structures are in place. Based on the available data, our research suggests that the following areas may see growth:

• Built environment: Flood and drainage solutions, responding to climate hazards and increased infrastructure investment (for new climate-ready assets and maintenance of existing).
• Food and agriculture: Targeted nature and water stewardship pilots, mainly place-based and project-led, to mitigate supply chain and operational risks; incremental agricultural adaptation, where actions reduce short-term costs or risks driven by climate change impacts (e.g. water availability or flooding).
• Finance and insurance: Risk analytics and disclosure services, driven by finance, insurance and regulatory demand (ISSB/TNFD^[2]); Early resilience standards and signals (including performance evidence for resilience features, emerging certification approaches and insurance-led incentives), which improve visibility of adaptation performance.

Some opportunities are long term (ten years and beyond) due to the requirement for structural changes in the economy to realise their full potential, such as more consistent policy signals, mainstreaming of standards, and availability of specialist skills. If the necessary market infrastructure is put in place, we find that new or substantially expanded markets in Scotland could include:

• Resilience-linked insurance and lending, in which premiums and lending terms reward businesses with lower exposure to climate-related risks
• Large-scale retrofit programmes
• Catchment-scale and place-based delivery of nature-based solutions and water management programmes
• Maturing ecosystem service and nature-based markets (dependent on stable metrics and demand)
• Climate-resilient forestry and land portfolios, attracting long-term investment.

Opportunity areas where Scotland could build sustained competitive advantage

The available data and existing research base severely limited our ability to draw conclusions about those climate adaptation services or technologies that could be opportunities for Scotland to build a sustained competitive advantage internationally. A robust competitor analysis of Scotland’s potential areas of growth would require data for these markets in Scotland as well as internationally, which we were unable to identify.

Recommendations

Due to the emerging nature of climate adaptation and the limitations in the available evidence base, it is not currently possible to robustly quantify the scale of the economic opportunity for Scotland or to prioritise opportunities based on comparative economic value. Instead, this research provides a structured assessment of where opportunities are likely to arise, and the conditions required for them to develop. Within these constraints, the analysis identifies a set of opportunity sectors where climate risks are already translating into market signals and where Scotland has relevant capabilities. These findings are supported by a combination of literature and stakeholder insight, although in many cases they should be understood as informed judgements rather than definitive conclusions.

The research suggests that Scotland’s potential lies in deepening services and technologies which are already helping the country adapt to climate change. By building on areas of strength, Scottish businesses can develop integrated capabilities and systems that respond to domestic climate pressures and can be adapted and exported over time. Areas such as retrofitting buildings, water management at catchment scale, climate risk analytics, and new financial models relating to natural capital and adaptation represent plausible pathways but require further evidence to assess their scale and competitiveness. This study shows that public sector actors can accelerate economic adaptation opportunities by acting as market enablers by:

• Improving data quality, standards and independent assurance to ensure resilience measures are recognised and rewarded in planning, insurance, and financial decision-making.
• Developing a skilled workforce aligned with long-term adaptation needs, including technical, analytical and place-based delivery capabilities.
• Providing consistent, long-term policy signals that shift incentives away from least‑cost and short‑term decisions.
• Enabling project aggregation and coordinated, place-based delivery models to build scale, reduce risk, and improve investor confidence of adaptation projects.

Adaptation is unlikely to generate rapid or easily measurable economic growth in the short term. However, it represents a durable and growing area of economic activity, closely linked to the physical impacts of climate change and therefore likely to become more material over time. There is an opportunity for Scotland to position itself as a place that develops and demonstrates effective adaptation approaches. Realising this opportunity will depend on strengthening the evidence base, validating emerging opportunities, and addressing the structural barriers identified in this study.

Introduction and purpose

Purpose

Policy context

Climate change is already affecting Scotland’s economy. While adaptation has traditionally focused on managing risk, Scottish and UK policy increasingly recognise it as an economic opportunity that can support resilience, innovation and market development. This shift is reflected in the Third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (UKCCRA3) (Defra, 2022), and Scotland’s National Adaptation Plan 2024-2029 (SNAP3) (Scottish Government, 2024). These frameworks acknowledge rising climate-related costs while highlighting opportunities for new services, technologies and business models that support adaptation and respond to climate-driven changes in demand and production.

Why this study was needed

There is growing analysis of Scotland’s climate mitigation economy, particularly linked to net zero and the energy transition. However, there has been less attention on climate adaptation as an economic opportunity. Existing work is fragmented across sectors and regions. Much of it focuses on risks, costs, or specific adaptation actions, rather than on how adaptation may shape markets, competitiveness, and economic activity. This gap may be partly due to missing quantitative data, but it also reflects how adaptation has been framed in research and policy to date. Adaptation is not commonly examined as an economic opportunity in its own right, particularly at the macro level, across multiple sectors. Our research responds to a Scottish Government policy interest in better understanding these opportunities. We provide evidence on where economic opportunities linked to climate adaptation may arise, how opportunities could evolve, and what this means for policy and delivery bodies.

Research questions

Our research set out to address the following research questions and objectives:

1. What are the economic opportunities resulting both from climate adaptation and changes in Scotland’s climate?
2. How are Scottish and international markets for climate adaptation goods and services expected to evolve over the short term (five years) and long term (10+ years)?
3. In which climate adaptation markets does Scotland have or could build a sustained international competitive advantage?
4. Based on the future opportunities identified, provide an assessment of Scotland’s international competitive advantage and potential economic growth.

Research process

Due to the nature of climate adaptation as an emerging and novel space, we developed and revisited our project methodology in an agile way, in collaboration with the project steering group. This section provides an overview of the methodology and research journey of this project, including key decisions which changed the course of the project and have implications for results. A detailed methodology is given in Appendix A Detailed methodology and assumptions.

Setting the scope: What we mean by the “adaptation economy”

For the research, we have defined the adaptation economy as goods, services, technologies and delivery models that reduce impacts, or enable responses to the impacts of climate change. This includes both activities that build resilience to climate risks, such as drainage, or climate monitoring services, and opportunities arising from Scotland’s changing climate, such as shifts in land suitability or production conditions.

Our definition draws on, but does not replicate, earlier work, such as the report on the Adaptation Economy of the Glasgow City Region (k-Matrix, 2019), that focused on measuring existing economic activity linked to extreme weather. In contrast, our research is forward-looking and exploratory, recognising emerging and evolving markets that are not captured in current economic statistics. It is not intended to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of all adaptation-related activity.

Mitigation-only activities, which target a reduction in CO₂ emissions, are out of scope unless they materially enable resilience of adaptation outcomes (e.g. retrofit activities with clear adaptation co-benefits). As a result, opportunities related to decarbonisation or renewable energy were excluded, as they were more aligned to climate mitigation.

We consider two broad time horizons:

• Short term: approximately the next five years
• Long term: ten years and beyond

These horizons reflect likely phases of market development rather than forecast certainty, with uncertainty increasing over longer timeframes.

Methodology overview

Our research adopted a structured synthesis approach, ensuring that findings drew on multiple independent sources. Our approach reflects the fact that adaptation markets are still emerging. Quantitative data is often limited, but behavioural signals, regulatory shifts, insurance priorities and operational impacts provide strong, credible indicators of how and where economic value is likely to emerge. Our approach was broken down into the following steps:

Phase 1: Synthesising existing global, UK, and Scotland‑specific literature, sector and market analyses. We reviewed sources including academic, grey and policy literature for similar and overlapping opportunities. In consultation with the steering group, we selected three sectors for further analysis: Built Environment, Food and Agriculture, and Finance and Insurance (see next section Results of evidence review and three focus sectors).

Phase 2: A synthesis of available market evidence (at Scotland, UK, or international level, depending on availability) for the shortlisted opportunity areas, supplemented where necessary by additional targeted searches. Rather than attempting formal market sizing, the analysis focused on developing qualitative market narratives, covering:

• Key demand drivers (e.g. regulation, insurance, operational disruption)
• Barriers and enabling factors
• Short-term (around five years) and long-term (10+ years) growth potential

Phase 3: Validating the findings from above through 15 semi‑structured interviews with practitioners across the Built Environment, Food and Agriculture, and Finance and Insurance sectors. We used industry insight to sense-check, contextualise, and challenge findings in the literature, as well as add perspectives on demand drivers and barriers for scaling.

Phase 4: Thematic analysis of interviews and integrating findings from literature and interviews.

Results of evidence review and three priority sectors

We sought to understand which are the economic sectors for which climate adaptation is most relevant, based on how frequently different sectors are mentioned within climate adaptation research and publications. From the evidence review, we identified 64 specific climate-adaptation economic opportunities (i.e. climate adaptation services and goods; see Appendix B Detail on outputs of literature analysis). These opportunities related to 14 economic sectors. Figure 1 shows the number of opportunities associated with each sector.

Once we had completed the analysis summarised in Figure 1, we considered how best to focus the remainder of our research. We prioritised three sectors for further analysis, with steering group input, based on the following:

• Excluding mitigation-based activity: We deemed opportunities that fell under the definition of “climate mitigation” to be out of scope for this work; this included the energy sector, where opportunities were predominantly related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
  
• Merging similar sectors: We combined similar sectors, as opportunities and dependencies were shared across them; for example, agriculture and food and drink became Food and Agriculture, as most interventions in these supply chains are land-based and overlapping. Within Professional Services, we identified two opportunities: engineering and environmental consulting, and financial services and insurance. In consultation with the steering group, we drew out financial services and insurance as its own sector, to reflect the cross-sectoral attributes and emerging technologies within the field. Engineering and environmental consultancy features were explored within in the Built Environment sector.
  
• Prioritising emerging and under-researched sectors: Forestry was excluded as it was felt that there is good existing evidence for the adaptation opportunities in this sector (Beauchamp, 2018) (Forestry and Land Scotland, 2021) (Forestry Commission, 2023) and some woodland-based interventions were captured as opportunities within Agriculture and Finance and Insurance sector.
  

To summarise, the report prioritises three sectors identified through the literature review as offering strong potential for adaptation-related opportunities for Scotland, which are key areas of policy interest. These are:

Built Environment: Scotland has a large and long-lived asset base and infrastructure stock which is exposed to climate risks. Long-term investment decisions drive demand for adaptation solutions.

Food and Agriculture: Highly sensitive to climate conditions. Changes in temperature, rainfall, and pests create both risks and niche opportunities across land use and supply chains.

Finance and Insurance: Key system levers for pricing climate risk, incentivising investment, and shaping adaptation outcomes across the wider economy.

The organisations of stakeholders interviewed for each sector are given in Table 1

Strengths and limitations of chosen approach

Approach taken and evidence base

Our approach sought to balance a Scottish-specific perspective with a forward-looking assessment of emerging markets, while recognising the limitations of available data. We aimed to ground the analysis in Scotland’s specific climate risks, economic structure, regulatory environment, and asset base, rather than relying on generic global narratives. However, in practice, there is very limited Scotland-specific evidence on climate adaptation economic opportunities, particularly in relation to market size, structure, and growth. This constrained the extent to which a fully evidence-led, place-based assessment could be undertaken.

Given these limitations, we combined desk-based research with qualitative interviews to build a more complete picture. The literature review drew on a wide range of sources, including academia, financial institutions, consultancies, government agencies, industry bodies, NGOs, and think tanks. However, the evidence landscape is fragmented and uneven. Most available analysis focuses on climate risks and adaptation costs, rather than economic opportunities (Beauchamp, 2018). Where market data does exist, it is typically global in scope and not specific to adaptation as a distinct category of economic activity (Foyn & Skinner, 2024). There were a few standout exceptions to this, which are described in the list below, under Implications and considerations for future research.

The use of qualitative interviews helped to partially mitigate these gaps (providing insight into procurement dynamics, insurance-led behaviour, and supply chain responses), but only to a limited extent. While these interviews were valuable in providing context and grounding, they are not statistically representative and, in some cases, reflect individual or sector-specific perspectives rather than a clear consensus. In several instances, the analysis necessarily draws inferences from a limited number of viewpoints, and these should be interpreted as indicative rather than definitive.

A further component of the approach was a forward-looking assessment of market formation. Given the lack of historical economic data, the analysis focuses on drivers of future demand (such as climate risk, regulatory change, and investment trends) rather than attempting to quantify existing markets. This reflects the reality that adaptation markets are still emerging and not systematically measured.

Limitations and confidence in findings

A central limitation of this research is the lack of robust quantitative data. It was not possible to estimate the scale, value, or growth trajectories of individual opportunities in a consistent or comparable way. As a result, the analysis cannot determine the relative importance of different opportunities or provide a clear sense of their economic contribution. Where Scottish or UK-specific data was unavailable, global market trends and proxy indicators (such as company reports or sector-level forecasts) were used to inform the analysis. While these provide useful context, they rely on assumptions about how global dynamics may be applicable to Scotland, which are plausible but not empirically validated.

There are also significant constraints in assessing international competitive advantage and export potential. A rigorous assessment would require detailed comparative data on other countries’ capabilities, market structures, and investment pipelines, which was not available. As a result, our assessment is based on an asset-based lens, considering where Scotland’s existing strengths may align with emerging global demand, and on identifying international contexts with similar climate risks or infrastructure challenges. While this provides a useful starting point, it remains exploratory and does not constitute a comprehensive competitor analysis. Confidence in findings related to competitive advantage is therefore relatively low.

Relying on information in this report

Based on the available evidence, our research identifies the types of economic opportunities that are likely to emerge in response to climate change, the sectors in which these opportunities are most likely to arise, and the key drivers shaping market development. It also provides an initial assessment of where Scotland’s existing assets and capabilities may position it to participate in these emerging markets. However, the study cannot robustly quantify the scale or value of these opportunities, compare their relative importance, or provide a definitive assessment of Scotland’s competitive advantage internationally. In all cases, findings should be understood as informed judgements based on partial evidence, rather than as conclusive results.

These limitations have important implications for how the findings should be used. The analysis is best understood as identifying areas of potential opportunity and informing strategic direction, rather than providing a basis for detailed prioritisation, investment decisions, or economic forecasting. There is currently insufficient evidence to support a more granular or quantitative assessment.

Implications and considerations for future research

Most sources on future economic opportunities related to climate change adaptation were global in scope and not granular enough to provide a basis to make claims about the outlook for Scotland. However, our literature review did include some exceptions to this, sources which investigated specific Scottish industries or regions under climate change future scenarios, and evaluated opportunities, not just risks and costs:

• The k-Matrix study for the Glasgow City Region is one of the few examples attempting to quantify adaptation-related economic activity in a Scottish context and is therefore referenced frequently throughout our report. However, it represents a static snapshot and is not easily comparable with other sources, nor has it been updated over time (k-Matrix, 2019).
• The ClimateXChange report “Scoping and sizing the Scottish Adaptation & Resilience (Climate Change) (A&RCC) Economy: An overview of methods” provides a solid starting point for how to go about an economy-wide assessment but highlights major data gaps which have not yet been addressed (Bonaventura, 2018).
• The ClimateXChange report “Economic opportunities in Scotland’s net zero and climate adaptation economy” provides an economy-wide, “updated coherent assessment of key potential opportunities for Scotland.” However, it is broad in scope, including mitigation, and does not provide in-depth sector analysis (O’Gorman, et al., 2024).
• The Highlands Adapts report “Highland Climate Risk & Opportunity Assessment” and accompanying Sector Reports on Energy, Food and Drink, and Forestry and Timber are exemplary of the type of focused analysis which could form the basis for a more accurate economy-wide assessment. These sources give specific monetary figures for costs and benefits arising from climate change for the region and key sectors (England, et al., 2024) (Hunt, et al., 2024).

These are the sort of investigations and sources which would patch the gaps in the available evidence. By evaluating the known and unavoidable impacts of climate change on specific Scottish industries or regions, and in particular any emerging advantages or opportunities. These are the building blocks by which a future economy-wide review could provide a more robust and accurate picture of the opportunities for Scotland, which would address the limitations faced in this report.

Addressing these gaps would require a step change in the evidence base. This could include more systematic measurement of adaptation-related economic activity in Scotland, targeted market studies for priority sectors, and comparative analysis of international competitors. There is also a need for improved integration of climate risk data with economic and sectoral data, as well as more structured engagement with industry and investors. While some of these gaps could be addressed through further research, others reflect the early-stage nature of adaptation markets and may take time to resolve.

Economic opportunities for Scotland: Findings from priority sectors

We identified Built Environment, Food and Agriculture, and Finance and Insurance as the three priority sectors with economic opportunities. For each, we describe the main adaptation-related economic opportunities, how these markets could develop, and examples of technologies or services within which Scottish businesses could have potential to export internationally.

Table 2 summarises the opportunities associated with each priority sector and indicative timescales for each. Short-term opportunities are those which can be taken up at present; Long-term opportunities require further market or infrastructure development to scale and achieve their full value or potential; Opportunities which span both timescales can be taken up now and will likely continue to be important into the future.

Timeframes for opportunities

Adaptation opportunities tend to develop in the short term where climate risks are already visible, affecting the bottom line, and supported by established delivery mechanisms. For example, flood resilience, drainage upgrades, climate risk analytics, and advisory services are expanding quickly because extreme weather events, insurance pressures, regulatory standards, and infrastructure investment pipelines are already creating demand. In contrast, opportunities that require new valuation frameworks, institutional coordination, or longer-term behavioural change (e.g. nature-based solutions, landscape-scale land management, or resilience-linked finance) tend to develop more gradually. These markets depend on enabling conditions such as credible metrics, financing mechanisms, supportive policy frameworks, and skilled delivery networks. As a result, the pace of growth in the adaptation economy is shaped less by the existence of climate risk itself and more by how effectively that risk is translated into investable projects, regulatory requirements, and scalable business models.

Short-term growth is in established services markets (next five years). Over the longer term, growth in adaptation markets is likely to depend on governance, standards, and investment frameworks, rather than rapid technological change. This evolution offers economic potential, particularly where Scotland leverages its natural assets, scientific capabilities, and policy frameworks to build competitive niches. Scotland’s strongest potential lies in high-value services (e.g. climate data and analytics) and emerging natural capital models through domestic delivery and exports, while addressing skills and standards gaps.

Built Environment

Sector context and climate drivers

Buildings and infrastructure are long-lived, capital-intensive assets that are already exposed to changing weather conditions. Climate risks are affecting the performance, insurability, and value of buildings and infrastructure. The condition of existing buildings is a critical vulnerability, particularly older and historic stock that is often not windproof or watertight, increasing repair costs, insurance risk, and barriers to reuse.

“And then there is a reality that by the time we get to 2050, 80% of the buildings in Scotland will already have been built, so we need to make sure we are using them much better. It is not a good use of resources to continually demolish and build new […] We do not need to build new in the edge of towns and face issues with disconnection and transport” (Quote from interviewee from Built Environment Forum).

Interviews consistently emphasised that surface water flooding and intense rainfall are “here and now” risks, shaping immediate demand for flood resilience, drainage, and asset protection measures, while overheating is recognised as an emerging concern in Scotland, particularly in schools, housing, and public buildings. Longer‑term risks such as sea‑level rise and coastal change are recognised but are often deferred in decision‑making, even though interviewees noted that the scale of future investment required to adapt to rising seas will be substantial. These pressures directly shape short‑term investment priorities and create sustained demand for adaptation in retrofit, infrastructure upgrades, and design standards.

Economic opportunities

Previous literature identified the built environment sector as the largest climate change adaptation sub-sector in Scotland, with total sales value at £131.1m in 2016-17 (k-Matrix, 2019), while Trittip et al. estimate the addressable global market for resilient buildings by 2030 to be USD $400 – 500 billion (Trittip, et al., 2025).

Interview and literature evidence points to four core adaptation‑related opportunity clusters where climate risk is already translating into economic activity or credible future markets. Growth in the built environment adaptation economy comes primarily from services, skills and coordinated delivery, rather than from new products alone. Scotland’s opportunity lies in turning domestic adaptation challenges into exportable expertise.

Flood resilience and drainage solutions	Nature based and hybrid solutions in the built environment
Retrofit for climate resilience	Climate risk data, assessment and advisory services

Flood resilience and drainage solutions

What the opportunity is: Goods and services that reduce flood damage and disruption. This includes sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), property-level flood resilience measures, permeable paving, drainage upgrades, and hybrid grey-green infrastructure.^[4]

Evidence base: Flood resilience is one of the most consistently cited adaptation opportunities in the Scottish literature (Bonaventura, 2018) (England, et al., 2024) and in 2016-2017 was estimated to make up 18% of Scotland’s adaptation and resilience economy, with sales estimated at £80.4m (k-Matrix, 2019). For more than 15 years, the Scottish Government has committed £47 million annually to local authorities and an additional £150 million since 2020 over the course of parliament for flood risk management actions (Scottish Government, 2024). Flood management and water‑related services was identified as one of the most mature segments of built‑environment adaptation. Whilst quantitative evidence was not identified in the literature, interviewees noted that SuDS and permeable paving “are definitely happening” (interviewee from Built Environment) and that flood and drainage solutions are already established in Scotland. Interviewees described flood events and insurance requirements as key triggers for action, particularly in urban areas with surface water challenges. A market study by FloodRe estimated that the Property Flood Resilience sector in the UK is £20-25 million, in which approximately £13-16 million constitute residential market and £7-9 million from commercial and institutional work (Flood Re, 2023).

Flood and drainage solutions are already embedded in infrastructure programmes, local authority pipelines, and utility investment. This reflects the immediacy of surface water flooding, repeated flood events and regulatory pressure on local authorities and infrastructure operators. For example, the 2025 National Standards mandate runoff hierarchies and multi-functional designs for all major developments (Webber, 2025). Scotland’s National Flood Resilience Strategy (2024) is also expected to sustain demand through asset protection and local authority mandates (Scottish Government, 2024). This creates a relatively stable, long‑term market for civil engineering, design services, equipment, and maintenance.

Timescale: Short term – Happening now but tailing off over the longer term as flood resilience measures are mainstreamed in built-up environments.

Who captures value: Value is captured primarily by engineering consultancies, landscape and drainage specialists, construction SMEs, with strong spillovers into digital monitoring, modelling, and maintenance services. Much of the employment impact is local, with potential for scaling through frameworks and programmes.

Nature‑based and hybrid solutions in the built environment

What the opportunity is: Use of nature‑based solutions, including green (e.g. green roofs walls and woodland) and blue (wetlands) as well as hybrid (grey and blue/green infrastructure) in urban or rural settings to manage flood risk, heat, and water quality at building, neighbourhood, and catchment scales.

Nature‑based solutions can deliver multiple benefits (risk reduction, public realm, biodiversity, amenity), making them attractive in principle. However, interviewees emphasised that these solutions rarely “stack up” at individual project level, meaning economic value emerges most clearly when delivered as programmes or systems rather than discrete assets.

Evidence base: A report by the Green Finance Institute (2021) estimated a £20 billion spending gap for Scotland to meet nature-related outcomes^[5] from 2022-2032, in which £9 billion is for climate mitigation through bio-carbon such as woodlands creation or peatland restoration. The spending gap for natural flood management^[6] is £354 million for the UK ​(Green Finance Institute, 2021)​ ​(UKGBC, 2022)​. Interviews repeatedly highlighted strong conceptual support for nature‑based solutions, alongside clear constraints relating to valuation, funding models, and time horizons. Interviews highlighted planning capacity and coordination as both constraints and opportunities.

Timescale: Long term – Already happening (albeit at smaller scale than flood resilience and drainage solutions) and have strong policy and conceptual support but scaling them into mainstream delivery models is a long-term process. Market growth depends more on institutional change, including planning regulations, funding models, skills, and delivery networks pointing to gradual transition.

Who captures value: Environmental consultancies, landscape designers, maintenance services (i.e. public works, responsible for maintaining green infrastructure features in good condition), engineers, monitoring and data providers, and land-based supply chains, with long-term potential for finance and insurance involvement as valuation methods improve.

Retrofit for climate resilience

What the opportunity is: Retrofitting (or ‘climate proofing’) existing buildings to improve resilience to flooding, wind, moisture ingress, and overheating. This includes fabric‑first measures,^[7] drainage upgrades, ventilation and shading, and building‑specific flood resilience measures.

Evidence base: Around 80% of UK’s 2050 building stock already exists (LETI, 2021), with Scotland having a particularly large share of pre‑1919 and historic buildings (Reguis, et al., 2023). While quantitative data on markets are lacking in the literature, interviewees described retrofit as a “huge and unavoidable” opportunity for Scotland, with demand spread across towns, cities, and rural areas. Retrofit activity supports local and regional supply chains, skilled trades, and small and medium‑sized enterprises and creates long‑duration demand rather than one‑off projects. Retrofit remains one of the most important levers for decarbonising with £1.5 billion allocated by the UK government to support fuel-poor households. In response, local authorities are establishing regional partnerships for local, place-based retrofit strategies that deliver wider benefits such as resilience, health, and employment outcomes (UKGBC, 2025).

The literature highlights retrofit as a central pathway for delivering adaptation alongside mitigation (Garnett & Nissen, n.d.) (O’Gorman, et al., 2024), with 29 million homes in the UK requiring retrofitting before 2050 (UKGBC, 2025). Interviewees highlighted that many buildings are not windproof or watertight, increasing repair costs and leading to cascading damage with each storm. Interviewees emphasised that adaptation is already happening through retrofit but is rarely labelled as such. Retrofitting for climate adaptation, such as ensuring property-level flood resilience, is largely reactive, following damage or failure, rather than as part of planned investment.

Timescale: Short term and ongoing – Already happening, with demand set to increase as extreme weather events become more commonplace to 2050 and beyond.

Retrofitting the existing building stock for overheating, wind and water tightness, and flood resilience is widely recognised as a long-term, high-impact market. The literature highlights the scale of this challenge across the UK and Europe. In the UK, 29 million homes will need retrofitting before 2050 to align with net zero but also to ensure climate change resilience. This is expected to generate 500,000 high skilled jobs (UKGBC, 2025). Interviewees described retrofit as a “slow-burn” opportunity that depends on sustained programmes, skills development and alignment with decarbonisation policy.

Who captures value: Skilled trades, conservation specialists, retrofit practitioners, designers, materials suppliers, and local construction firms.

Climate risk data, assessment and advisory services

What the opportunity is: Services to assess climate exposure and resilience of infrastructure, buildings or portfolios. This includes risk screening, scenario analysis, performance assessment and assurance. Involves integrating future climate risk data into the design, appraisal, and upgrading of infrastructure, including transport, energy, water, and public assets.

As climate risks increasingly affect insurance pricing, lending decisions and asset valuation, demand is growing for credible, decision-ready information. These services sit upstream of physical adaptation and influence investment decisions. This drives sustained demand for climate data provision and analysis, climate risk assessment, engineering consultancy, design assurance, and asset management services.

Evidence base: An economic study estimated Met Office climate risk insights will deliver benefits worth £56 billion to the UK economy in the next 10 years (Met Office, 2024). Advance warning of extreme weather events and better understanding of climate change impacts support planning decisions for economy and industry, and 21.4% of the value of these benefits support climate adaptation activities. Interviewees highlighted growing demand from asset owners, insurers and developers for site- and asset-level risk information. Interviewees gave concrete examples of infrastructure already being modified to reflect future conditions, such as raising bridge heights to account for increased fluvial flows. Disclosure frameworks and risk assessments (including TCFD‑related processes^[8]) are creating demand for climate analytics and assurance that influences infrastructure renewal pipelines. The literature identifies data and analytics as a core enabling activity for adaptation investment (Climate Change Committee, 2025) (OECD, 2025).

Timescale: Short term and ongoing – Increased demand noted by interviewees as this sector represents a bottleneck within decision-making. A relatively new sector set to grow in coming years.

• Global climate risk advisory is expected to reach $9.2 billion by 2032 (18.2% CAGR) (GII, 2025).
• Global climate risk analytics market is projected to reach $8.4 billion by 2033 (19.5% CAGR), with Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance accounting for 29% of demand (Sharma, 2025).
• Climate financial data and analytics estimated at $468 million (2022) growing to $1.3 billion by 2028 (19% CAGR) (Foyn & Skinner, 2024).
• Predictive climate risk analytics market is projected to grow to $988 million by 2034 (10.9% CAGR) (Global Insight Services, 2025).

Who captures value: Professional services firms, data and analytics providers, engineers and specialist consultancies. These services have export potential and are not tied to local delivery.

Market outlook

Short term

In the short term, adaptation activity in the built environment is driven by visible risk, regulatory and disclosure pressures, and existing investment pipelines. Flood and drainage solutions, climate‑informed infrastructure design, and professional services linked to data-led risk assessment are already scaling. Much of this activity occurs without being labelled as “adaptation,” instead appearing as best practice, risk management, or compliance. Public procurement and infrastructure owner programmes are major drivers of demand, while household‑level retrofit remains more reactive and uneven.

Long term

Over the longer term, interviewees anticipate structural shifts rather than rapid market take‑off. These include the mainstreaming of district‑ and neighbourhood‑scale retrofit, integration of grey and green/blue infrastructure, and greater use of data, sensors, and digital twins to manage assets under changing climate conditions. Nature‑based solutions and catchment‑scale approaches are widely seen as essential but dependent on institutional reform and new funding models. Long‑term growth is therefore expected to be durable but gradual, driven by asset ageing, climate risk escalation, and changes in insurance and finance.

Competitive advantage and export potential

Why Scotland?

Contextual advantages: Scotland’s heritage remains one of its most valuable assets, generating £6 billion for Scotland’s economy in 2023 (Built Environment Forum Scotland, 2023).It is estimated that £6.6 billion would be needed to convert Scotland’s historic residential buildings to low carbon heating, and 10,000 new jobs would be needed in the next decade to maintain and adapt Scotland’s traditional building stock. Historic Environment Scotland assessed climate change as “very high” risk in their 2023-2024 report, leading to irreversible loss of heritage over time (Historic Environment Scotland, 2024). Interviewees framed this not only as a challenge but as a potential advantage: developing effective adaptation approaches for complex, historic stock creates knowledge and capability that is relevant to many other regions:

“If we’re talking about competitive advantage for Scotland specifically, I definitely see retrofitting as a good example of that […] anything to do with working within the confines of a historic built environment […] anything that we’re doing around retrofitting and building climate adaptation into that, that type of setting is something that we could then export to any a number of European countries that potentially have the same those same challenges.” (Interviewee from Built Environment)

Scotland also faces high rainfall, variable weather, and growing flood risk, making it a credible testbed for resilience solutions.

Capability advantages: Four interviewees highlighted that Scotland has a strong base in engineering, professional services, education, and place‑based governance alongside active networks in the water and built environment sectors. Interview evidence highlights opportunities to develop specialised skills in retrofit, conservation, flood management, and systems‑based water approaches. However, multiple interviewees also stressed that skills shortages are already leading to reliance on imported expertise, indicating that capability is a limiting factor if not addressed.

Limits to competitiveness

While interviewees agreed that Scotland has strengths in this sector, this is not the same as having a clear competitive advantage on the international stage. All European nations have historic building stock and many will be facing similar effects of climate change: Built Environment services will be scaling up overseas and this market could become a busy space. Interviewees were explicit that Scotland is unlikely to compete directly with countries such as the Netherlands on engineered flood defences, nor on mass manufacturing of adaptation products. If there is an opportunity to be an early mover and establish a competitive advantage, it will be in services, skills, system design, and delivery models, particularly where these are proven domestically.

“[in reference to Scottish Government’s hydro nation strategy] “We can develop the jobs and export the skills or sell services abroad… I’ve done that a number of points in my career where we’ve delivered big programs of work that are international.” (Interviewee from Built Environment)

What is exportable?

Potential to export could be explored in:

• Professional and advisory services in engineering, design, and climate risk assessment
• Integrated delivery models for flood management and catchment-scale approaches
• Skills and expertise based on experience with complex building stock and high-rainfall climates

Several interviewees suggested that Scotland could develop approaches domestically and then export them to the north of England, Ireland, and Nordic countries, where climate conditions and building forms are similar.

Food and Agriculture

Sector context and climate drivers

Climate variability is already affecting productivity, costs, and operational decisions within the Scottish food and agriculture sectors, even where overall conditions remain comparatively favourable. Interviewees highlighted increased rainfall volatility, more frequent flooding, hotter and drier summer periods, and changing seasonal patterns as the risks most directly shaping farm‑level behaviour and supply‑chain impacts. Climate change affects agriculture through compound effects, for example, drought, flooding, and heat interacting with soil conditions, water availability, pests, and logistics.

While some longer‑term changes may increase suitability for new crops, interviewees stressed that short‑term adaptation is driven primarily by business continuity, yield stability, and resource security, rather than speculative expansion.

Economic opportunities

Agriculture and forestry were previously estimated to make up 4% of Scotland’s adaptation and resilience economy at £19m in 2016-2017 (k-Matrix, 2019). However, growth in demand for agri-tech has led to an increase in the forecast for the addressable global market for 2030, estimated to be USD $175-200 billion (Trittip, et al., 2025). Evidence from interviews and the literature points to four core adaptation‑related opportunity clusters in agriculture. These are not large, uniform markets, but distributed and heterogeneous opportunities, often embedded in farm management, advisory services, and agri‑tech.

Across agriculture, the evidence suggests growth comes from managing volatility rather than expanding output. Adaptation generates distributed economic value through advisory services, agri‑tech, and land management rather than large standalone markets. Scotland’s opportunity could lie in translating its research base, land assets, and reputation for innovation into services and models that support both domestic resilience and supply international market niches.

Climate-resilient crops and agricultural inputs	Water management and on-farm resilience measures
Digital agri-tech, data, and advisory services	Land-based and landscape-scale adaptation approaches

Figure 3: Economic opportunities in the Food and Agriculture sector

Climate‑resilient crops and agricultural inputs

What the opportunity is: Development, testing, and adoption of drought‑ and heat‑tolerant crop varieties, improved seed genetics, and inputs that enhance resilience while maintaining yields and disease resistance.

Yield volatility represents a direct financial risk for farmers and downstream processors, particularly in key Scottish sectors such as malting barley. Interviewees noted that even short periods of atypical weather can materially affect yields and quality, creating risks several seasons ahead. Adaptation therefore centres on risk management rather than maximising output, favouring incremental but widespread uptake of resilient varieties.

Evidence base: The James Hutton Institute is recognised internationally for its research in developing resilient crop varieties. Total UK market value of varieties from the centre was approximately £37.4 million in 2024, with export numbers as well; the value of varieties grown and sold across Europe was estimated at £93.4 million (James Hutton Institute, 2025). Interviewees described active experimentation with new barley varieties and crop diversification, often led by research institutions and producer groups. However, trade‑offs between resilience, yield, and disease resistance were repeatedly highlighted, indicating steady but cautious market development. The literature review also consistently identified climate‑resilient crops as a clear adaptation opportunity (Bonaventura, 2018) (Hunt, et al., 2024) (k-Matrix, 2019).

Timescale: Long term – Developing, piloting, and scaling (i.e. adopting across farms) new varieties is a process that takes years of research.

Who captures value: Seed companies, plant breeders, agri‑research institutions, advisers, farmers, with indirect benefits for food and drink supply chains and rural economies.

Water management and on‑farm resilience measures

What the opportunity is: Technologies and services that improve water efficiency, storage, drainage, and flood management, including irrigation management, water attenuation ponds, improved drainage, and soil practices that retain moisture while reducing flood risk.

Interviewees consistently identified water as a critical and under‑recognised constraint within Scottish agriculture, particularly during dry summer periods when abstraction limits and supply interruptions begin to affect production. Flooding, meanwhile, disrupts grazing, harvests, and logistics, increasing costs and insurance exposure.

Evidence base: The literature review identified water management as a core adaptation opportunity (Bonaventura, 2018) (k-Matrix, 2019). However, there is a lack of market data on water management or monitoring technologies in the UK. Global market size for smart agriculture technologies is expected to surpass USD $43.7 billion by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate of 10.2% from 2022-2030 (El-taibi, et al., 2024). The Scottish Government launched the Future Farming Investment Scheme in 2025 with an indicative a budget of more than £21 million (Scottish Government, 2025). It is likely this scheme will continue for 2026 with an indicative budget of £14.25 million although details are not confirmed (Farm Advisory Service, 2026). Whilst this funding is not specifically targeted for water management technologies, it is a positive direction towards higher uptake of such technologies among farmers. Interviewees suggested that farmers have a growing interest in on‑farm water storage, adaptive drainage,^[9] and land management approaches that address both drought and flooding. However, uptake remains uneven due to cost, regulatory complexity, and uncertainty around future water availability.

Timescale: Short term and ongoing – Already happening, with demand set to increase as extreme weather events become more commonplace to 2050 and beyond.

Agricultural adaptation is expected to continue through practical, incremental changes – such as crop varieties, timing, water management and on-farm efficiency – particularly where these reduce immediate costs or risks. Demand is strongest where adaptation aligns with productivity, cost reduction or supply-chain requirements, rather than being framed as adaptation alone.

Who captures value: Civil and environmental engineering services, agricultural consultants, contractors, equipment suppliers, and specialist advisers, with strong place‑based employment impacts.

Digital agri-tech, data, and advisory services

What the opportunity is: Use of digital tools, sensors, and data analytics that support climate-informed decision-making, such as weather forecasting, soil and crop monitoring, pest and disease surveillance, and water-use accounting.

Interviewees emphasised that the volume of data available to farms is increasing rapidly, driven by retailer, wholesaler, and regulatory demands. Adaptation creates additional demand for interpretation and decision‑support, rather than raw data alone. This shifts the opportunity toward service‑based models that reduce risk and improve efficiency.

Evidence base: The global addressable market for agri-tech more generally is estimated to reach USD $175-200 billion (Trittip, et al., 2025). Private investment in UK agri-tech has grown around £0.8 billion in 2022 (Royal Bank of Scotland, 2022) and worth over £13 billion (Barclays, 2025). Interviews highlighted growing uptake of sensors and digital platforms among larger farms and supply‑chain leaders, alongside persistent barriers for smaller operators. The literature consistently identifies digital agri-tech as a short‑term adaptation enabler, particularly where it supports water efficiency, protects harvest from adverse weather, and increases yields.

Timescale: Short-term adaptation enabler – Already happening on large farms, with demand set to increase as extreme weather events become more commonplace to 2050 and beyond.

Who captures value: Agri‑tech firms, software providers, advisory services, data and analytics firms, and consultants, with potential spillovers into skills development and higher‑value rural employment.

Land‑based and landscape‑scale adaptation approaches

What the opportunity is: Landscape‑ and catchment‑scale approaches to applying interventions such as agroforestry, shelterbelts, soil restoration, and integrated land use that reduce exposure to flooding (i.e. natural flood management), erosion, drought, and heat.

These approaches offer resilience benefits across multiple farms and land uses, but require deployment at larger scales, rather than farm‑by‑farm investment models. Economic value arises over longer time horizons through yield stability, reduced losses, and co‑benefits for biodiversity, water, and downstream infrastructure.

Evidence base: Nature markets offer a financial mechanism to support the adoption of landscape- and catchment-scale approaches. While various biodiversity/carbon codes are in development (e.g. Hedgerow Carbon Code, UK Farm and Soil Carbon, agroforestry code, Woodland Water Code and saltmarsh code to name a few), they are not likely ready for widescale market uptake in the near future. There is a lack of valuation data for nature markets in the UK, but The Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code offer established markets for these approaches. Total value of WCC units sold was approximately £7.58 million while PC at £4.69 million in 2024^[10] (Woodland Carbon Code, 2025). In the short term, nature-based and water stewardship markets are expected to grow through place-based pilots rather than full mainstream adoption. Interviewees highlighted growing interest in measurable propositions linked to water quality, flood mitigation and ecosystem services. The literature similarly suggests that early growth is likely to be project-led, supported by blended finance and public co-investment, rather than driven by mature private markets. Interviewees widely supported collaborative, landscape‑scale adaptation, but noted that current incentive structures and schemes favour fragmented action.

Timescale: Medium term and ongoing – Already happening, but further support or infrastructure needed to achieve needed scale.

Who captures value: Farmers, land managers, environmental service providers, rural contractors, and, where coordination exists, regional economies through shared outcomes.

Market outlook

Short term

In the short term, adaptation activity in agriculture is characterised by incremental, low‑regret measures: changes in crop choices, timing of inputs, water management, and use of advisory and digital services. Demand is driven primarily by risk reduction and cost control, maintaining consistent yields rather than seeking higher output levels. Uptake is strongest among larger or more integrated businesses responding to supply‑chain requirements, while smaller farms face capital and capacity constraints. A UK report by Barclays highlighted key barriers slowing down the uptake of transformative technologies; 45% of farmers surveyed cited unclear return on investment and 41% mentioned high up-front cost. Majority (71%) also highlighted more clarity on long-term policy support is needed to drive adoption (Barclays, 2025). Overall market growth is therefore moderate and uneven, with advisory and service‑based models expanding faster than hardware‑intensive investments (i.e. physical technology deployed on farm).

Long term

Over the longer term, interviewees anticipate structural shifts in land use, crop suitability, and water dependency, coupled with greater reliance on controlled environments^[11] and integrated land management. Climate change may also alter comparative advantage for certain crops and forestry, although these may also face challenges of water availability, pests, and disease. Long‑term growth is therefore shaped less by expansion and more by reconfiguration toward resilience, with gradual development of landscape‑scale approaches and supporting services.

Competitive advantage and export potential

Why Scotland?

Capability advantages: Evidence indicates that Scotland has a strong base in agricultural research, advisory services, and co‑operative structures, which supports experimentation with resilient crops and practices (Sutherland, et al., 2023). However, data on the market size of research or advisory services is not readily available. A relevant example would be The James Hutton Institute which delivered research worth £221.3 million to the UK food and drink sector (James Hutton Institute, 2025).

Scotland’s increasing flood risk and strong regional partnerships creates favourable conditions for developing integrated catchment adaptation approaches within agricultural landscapes. These involve bringing neighbouring farms together to deliver water-related interventions at the scale required to influence downstream water quality and quantity outcomes. Interviewees repeatedly described Scotland as a potential testbed for replicable models that combine analytics, governance, delivery, and finance. The exportable element is the service model, rather than individual interventions. Interviewees emphasised that knowledge and skills, rather than scale, underpin any competitive advantage, particularly in advisory‑led and data‑driven services.

Limits to competitiveness

Although 65% of Scotland’s land area is used for agriculture, most of this is only lightly farmed and not suitable for growing crops^[12]. Interviewees commented that Scotland is unlikely to compete on scale or cost in global agricultural commodity markets. Climate adaptation is therefore not expected to generate large new production exports, and physical inputs or technologies are often sourced internationally. However, the Scottish agricultural sector has deep experience in farming techniques which are resilient to variable climate and produce high-quality outputs under these conditions:

“Scotland can’t compete at the scale needed to influence global commodity markets, but we can excel in niche, premium segments. We have favourable conditions, strong skills, and the ability to deliver quality and service efficiently.” (Interviewee from Food and Agriculture)

What is exportable?

Export potential lies primarily in:

• Advisory, research, and data‑driven services
• Models for water stewardship and land‑based adaptation
• Integrated approaches linked to premium and resilient supply chains

These forms of value are knowledge‑intensive rather than volume‑based and depend on proven domestic application.

Finance and Insurance

Sector context and climate drivers

Physical climate risks are already material to asset values, insurability, and balance sheets. These risks increasingly translating into wider economic vulnerability.

Interviewees identified flooding as the dominant and fastest‑growing hazard, particularly surface water flooding affecting property and infrastructure, with interviewees noting that “flood is the number one peril, the number one hazard in the UK,” and that “the biggest growing risk is surface water […] rapid flash flooding.” Heat, drought, wildfire, and nature degradation are emerging as financially material. For example, “some of the whisky [distilleries] were asked to stop abstracting […] impacted their bottom line,” while rising water temperatures mean it is “far too hot for the fish […] puts a lot of stress on them.”

Unlike other sectors, finance and insurance are exposed not only to direct losses but also to systemic risk, including asset devaluation, withdrawal of insurance coverage, and potential capital flight from high‑risk locations. These dynamics are already shaping demand for climate risk analytics, disclosure, and risk management services, and over time are expected to reshape how capital is allocated.

Economic opportunities

Available evidence indicates a sizeable and expanding market for finance and insurance services related to climate adaptation. Scotland’s sustainable finance sector supports over 71,000 jobs and £3.9 billion in exports (O’Gorman et al., 2024). Globally, climate-related risk transfer and insurance could reach USD $25–35 billion by 2030 (Trittip, et al., 2025), against adaptation finance needs exceeding USD $1.1 trillion this decade (Garnett & Nissen, n.d.).

Evidence from interviews and the literature points to four core adaptation‑related opportunity clusters in finance and insurance. These are primarily enabling markets: they do not deliver physical adaptation directly, but shape the scale, speed, and direction of investment across the economy.

Adaptation markets in finance and insurance grow where climate risk is translated into pricing, regulation and investment decisions. Scotland’s opportunity lies in contributing specialist analytics, advisory and place-based finance capability to global markets, while supporting domestic testbeds that demonstrate how resilience can be recognised and rewarded financially.

Climate risk analytics and catastrophe modelling	Risk transfer and insurance innovation
Resilience-linked lending and investment	Nature and place-based finance models

Figure 4: Economic opportunities in the Finance and Insurance sector

Climate risk analytics and catastrophe modelling

What the opportunity is: Analytics, modelling and advisory services that quantify physical climate risks at asset and portfolio levels. This includes catastrophe and flood modelling, scenario analysis, stress testing and decision-support tools for use by asset managers and investors.

This is a mature and immediate adaptation‑related market within finance and insurance. These services underpin underwriting, reinsurance purchasing,^[13] capital allocation and regulatory compliance. Regulatory and investor pressure has made climate risk analysis mainstream in parts of the sector, generating steady demand for data providers, consultants, actuaries, and analytics firms. Demand is strongest at portfolio and strategic level, where institutions seek to understand exposure across asset classes and geographies. As climate risks intensify, demand for more granular, location-specific and forward-looking analysis is increasing.

Evidence base: Climate risk analytics are a core enabling market for adaptation, driven by disclosure requirements and prudential regulation (Financial Conduct Authority, 2025) (OECD, 2025). Interviewees noted that stress testing, catastrophe modelling, and flood risk analytics are already embedded in financial practice. Growing risk disclosure and reporting compliance requirement promote strong short‑term revenue potential for consulting services in this sector. While updated market data is not available for UK or Scotland, global trends suggest climate intelligence solutions to grow by around 15% over the next five years (BCG, 2025).

Regulation, disclosure frameworks and supervisory stress testing is driving demand from financial institutions, insurers, large corporations and public bodies (GII, 2025). Recent supervisory guidance from the Bank of England requires integration of climate scenario analysis into capital planning, reinforcing this trend (Bank of England, 2025).

Interviewees confirmed that these services are already mainstream in parts of finance and insurance, and increasingly relevant to infrastructure owners and developers: “The Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures [TCFD], for example, most of our private sector and many of our public sector clients are engaging with that sort of TCFD framework”^[14]. This is a mature, export-oriented market that enables downstream adaptation investment, even where physical adaptation is not yet taking place.

However, both interviews and literature highlight a persistent gap between risk identification and investment decisions (Reinders, et al., 2025), limiting downstream capital mobilisation. Despite increasingly sophisticated scenario exercises, many institutions still struggle to translate location-specific and supply-chain risks into financial decisions, with one participant noting that “risks may be identified, but they are not reflected in credit risk assessments.” Closing this gap, through better data, geospatial analytics, and decision-ready tools, is critical for managing exposure and for unlocking capital flows into adaptation and nature-based resilience across Scotland’s economy.

Interviewees emphasised that the UK has strong global capability in this area, with London acting as a hub serving international markets. Interviewees described the “UK is probably the global leader in flood modelling… many other countries use UK flood models.” Climate risk analytics offers high-value, globally tradable services in modelling, advisory, financial technology, and professional analytics, with spillovers into Scottish universities, data firms, and consultancies.

Timescale: Short term and ongoing – Mature and immediate market, already embedded within disclosure requirements and regulation at UK Govt and EU level supporting strong short-term revenue potential. Room for growth over the long term as climate-risk disclosures become mandatory for more organisations and as this service expands to include decision support tools.

Who captures value: Specialist modelling firms, consultancies, data providers and professional services. Much of the value is export-oriented and not tied to domestic deployment alone.

Risk transfer and insurance innovation

What the opportunity is: Products and mechanisms that transfer or pool climate risk, including parametric insurance,^[15] catastrophe bonds^[16] and emerging resilience-linked insurance structures. Insurance‑led approaches that incentivise or support adaptation, including risk‑based pricing, resilience‑linked incentives, build‑back‑better programmes, and emerging standards to verify resilience measures.

Insurance is a key transmission mechanism through which climate risk becomes visible and actionable. With high insurance penetration^[17] in the UK, insurers are uniquely positioned to influence behaviour across households, infrastructure owners, and businesses. Traditional indemnity insurance is under strain from rising losses and reinsurance costs. New risk transfer mechanisms help maintain insurability while creating new financial products and advisory services. Where resilience reduces losses, insurers benefit directly through lower claims and more stable portfolios.

Evidence base: Interviewees emphasised that flooding is already the number one peril in the UK insurance market, with rising reinsurance costs and increasing concern about long-term insurability. The Association of British Insurers recorded a payout of £585 million for home weather-damages in 2024 (ABI, 2025). According to an interviewee, “Costs doubled a couple of years ago… demand for reinsurance expanded by 50% over three years.” While many insurers currently respond by withdrawing from high-risk areas, examples such as Build Back Better and the development of Flood Performance Certificates demonstrate operational models that translate risk into action. Interviewees described parametric insurance and catastrophe bonds as areas of active experimentation internationally.

Timescale: Medium term and ongoing – Experimentation at this stage but with several innovative models poised for expansion.

Who capture value: Insurers, reinsurers, brokers, capital markets actors and specialist structuring advisers, data providers.

Resilience-linked lending and investment

What the opportunity is: Financial products that reflect adaptation measures in pricing, lending decisions or investment strategies, such as resilience-liked bonds, mortgage incentives for resilient buildings or resilience-adjusted credit risk assessments.

Because climate risks affect asset performance and default risk, lenders and investors have incentives to recognise and reward resilience. This creates demand for verification, metrics and assurance services. While adaptation finance remains significantly underdeveloped compared to mitigation, interviewees emphasised strong latent investor interest, particularly among long-term asset owners such as pension funds and insurers who are exposed to long-duration climate risk. Where adaptation can be linked to revenue streams, avoided losses, or asset value protection, it becomes investable.

Evidence base: A consistent long-term signal across interviews is the expectation that resilience will increasingly influence insurance pricing, underwriting and lending decisions. As affordability and insurability pressures increase, verified resilience measures are likely to matter more. The planned transition away from mechanisms such as Flood Re represents a potential step change, creating stronger incentives for adaptation and clearer market signals (Flood Re, 2024) (Rackley, 2024).

Interviewees noted that while risks are increasingly assessed, they are not yet systematically reflected in pricing or credit decisions. Interviews highlighted that adaptation is often constrained by weak monetisation and unclear business models. Literature evidence supports this, noting growing experimentation with resilience bonds, nature‑based finance, and blended structures, alongside persistent challenges around measurement and standardisation (Climate Financial Risk Forum, 2025). A total of 720 sustainable bonds were issued from 2015-2025 worth £422 billion at the London Stock Exchange. Of this, 4% constituted climate change adaptation which translate to approximately £16.88 billion funding for adaptation activities globally (LESG, 2025).

Timescale: Medium to long term – Underdeveloped at present, with investor interest and demand latent rather than clear and demonstrated.

Who captures value: Banks, asset managers, insurers, and specialist advisory firms providing verification and assessment services.

Nature-based and place-based finance models

What the opportunity is: Financial models that invest in adaptation outcomes through nature‑based solutions (e.g. flood mitigation, water stewardship, landscape‑scale resilience, ecosystem services) and link multiple beneficiaries to shared outcomes.

Nature‑based approaches are increasingly recognised as essential for managing flood, water, and systemic risk. From a finance perspective, their economic appeal lies in multi‑benefit and multi‑revenue potential, particularly where they are bundled with mitigation and biodiversity benefits or where flooding or water risk threatens downstream assets and infrastructure. Examples included continuous cover forestry and projects “selling ecosystem services… mainly about flood mitigation.” These approaches can generate income from carbon, biodiversity, and resilience, while supporting rural jobs, project developers, verification services, and financial intermediaries. Scotland can capture both domestic delivery and exportable expertise:

“We know that degraded peatland is a flood risk. We know that it contributes to poor water quality. We also know that it’s a huge emitter of greenhouse gases. So you know, doing something at a landscape level with peat and creating a template or replicable model is something that we could potentially export elsewhere, but even without thinking about exporting that skill and that model, the kind of the local job creation, the local green growth that could results from that is a big opportunity” (Interviewee from Finance and Insurance)

These models offer potential pathways to finance adaptation where direct revenue streams are weak, by bundling resilience with other monetisable outcomes.

Evidence base: Interviewees described active experimentation with place-based models, outcome-based contracts, and ecosystem service markets. Interviewees described emerging models that pool investors around shared risks, such as “mapping multiple revenue streams” for water and land management. These approaches can unlock projects that would not be viable for a single actor (i.e. for infrastructure or for water provision sectors, but possible if co-funded by both) and support local supply chains and resilience-focused advisory markets. However, interviewees note that valuation tools and investor familiarity remain limited.

Investor interest in climate-resilient forestry and diversified land portfolios is expected to grow over time. Climate change may alter comparative advantage across Europe: Literature suggests that changing climate conditions may strengthen Scotland’s relative position in timber production. The warmer climate may have a positive impact on tree growth in Scotland in areas not limited by water. Climate resilient tree varieties will be needed to cope with changes to nutrient availability and risks from pests, diseases, wildfire, and windthrow (ClimateXChange, 2018). Interviewees highlighted Scotland’s potential to benefit from relative climate suitability, land availability and growing demand for resilient timber and natural capital assets. Interviews highlighted Scotland’s scale, space and low population density as a competitive advantage alongside investor interest in diversified, resilient land portfolios. Sustained advantage depends on proving investable models with credible metrics.

Timescale: Short term and ongoing – Happening now and poised for growth. Nature-based solutions could transition from pilots to more established markets over the longer term, but only if standards, metrics and demand stabilise. The literature emphasises the need for policy certainty and credible measurement, while interviews caution that without these conditions, markets are likely to remain fragmented.

Who captures value: financial intermediaries, fund managers, project developers, monitoring and verification services, environmental consultancies, advisors and land-based delivery partners, often through place-based pilots.

Market outlook

Short term

In the short term, adaptation‑related activity in finance and insurance is concentrated in analytics, disclosure, and risk management, rather than large‑scale capital deployment. Demand is driven by regulation, investor scrutiny, and rising payouts by insurers, with flood risk dominating. Insurance‑led resilience programmes and early adaptation finance pilots are emerging but remain limited in scale. Most financial responses involve portfolio reallocation or risk avoidance rather than direct investment in physical adaptation.

Long term

Over the longer term, interviewees anticipate structural change as climate risks increasingly affect insurance affordability, mortgage markets, and asset values. This includes greater differentiation in pricing based on verified resilience (with assets exposed to greater risk becoming more expensive to insure, and vice versa), growth in resilience‑linked finance, and deeper integration of adaptation into lending and investment decisions. Milestones such as the transition away from Flood Re are expected to create stronger incentives to recognise verified resilience measures (Flood Re, 2024) (Rackley, 2024). Nature‑based and place‑based finance is expected to mature gradually, contingent on improved metrics, standardisation, and institutional coordination. Market growth is therefore expected to be progressive rather than exponential, shaped by risk escalation and institutional learning.

Competitive advantage and export potential

As quantitative data is limited in the review, we drew on stakeholder interviews to suggest areas where Scotland might sustain or build competitive advantage, as well as the evidence base for respective sectors in Section 3.

Why Scotland?

Contextual advantages: While Scottish specific data is lacking, Scotland could potentially benefit from being part of the deep and globally connected UK financial and insurance system. The UK has a well-established international competitive advantage in insurance, reinsurance, and climate risk analytics. The UK’s high insurance penetration presents an opportunity to influence adaptation and insurance initiatives. For example, Build Back Better is described by one interviewee “as one of the more effective climate adaptation programmes in the world.” With Scotland’s established research centres and regional land-use partnerships, there is likely a strong potential of domestic testbed opportunities for adaptation finance and risk management approaches.

Capability advantages: The UK has a well-established global position in climate risk analytics and catastrophe modelling, underpinned by strong scientific institutions and financial market infrastructure.

“UK is probably the global leader in flood modelling… many other countries use UK flood models…speaks to strong scientific and research institutions.” (Interviewee from Finance and Insurance)

Within this ecosystem, Scotland’s competitive advantage lies in applied data analytics. Interviewees pointed to growing institutional capacity in place-based finance, transition finance coordination,^[18] and climate risk expertise. The UK’s high prevalence of insurance across business and the general public increases the leverage of market signals, meaning that the UK insurance sector has more influence than in other nations. Scotland’s relatively small size and strong networks can support experimentation and coordination of novel finance and insurance mechanisms, particularly at regional scale. Scotland has a recognised concentration of capability in space and earth observation data, data science and environmental research, supported by strong university–industry links and a growing space sector cluster (Scottish Affairs Committee, 2025) (Scottish Development International, 2025). Scotland is well positioned to support growth in data-led adaptation services, advisory capability, and place-based finance models, especially where these link to domestic demonstrator projects. However, several interviewees cautioned that skills, data, and investment pipelines remain fragile, limiting the pace of scaling.

Limits to competitiveness

Interview evidence suggests that Scotland is unlikely to compete with major global financial centres. Much of that value will continue to accrue to London and other global hubs. However, these global hubs will be a key market for the several supporting services and expertise areas which Scotland is developing.

What is exportable?

Export potential lies in:

• Climate risk analytics, modelling, and advisory services
• Insurance‑linked adaptation frameworks and standards
• Place‑based and systemic investment models that can be adapted to other regions

These exports are primarily knowledge‑ and service‑based. Place-based models may be transferable to other regions facing similar flood, water, and infrastructure risks. Delivering credible domestic examples is viewed as a prerequisite for exporting expertise. Competitive advantage depends on strengthening links between risk analysis, real-world adaptation and financial decision-making.

Scotland’s Adaptation Economy: Emerging themes, barriers and opportunities

This section brings together evidence from the targeted literature review and stakeholder interviews. It highlights patterns that recurred across multiple sectors which have benefits deriving from adaptation, including those outside of the three sectors prioritised in this research.

The evidence reviewed for this study indicates that climate adaptation in Scotland is best understood as a cross-cutting economic system rather than a set of isolated, sector-specific responses to climate risk. Economic opportunities linked to climate adaptation consistently cuts across infrastructure, land use, finance, skills, governance, and data systems, rather than being confined to a standalone sector.

Stakeholder interviews reinforce this perspective. Interviewees rarely described adaptation demand emerging independently within a single sector. Instead, they highlighted how physical climate impacts are translated into economic activity through a series of interlinked mechanisms: impacts on assets and operations feed into insurance pricing, financial risk assessment, regulatory standards, disclosure requirements, and public funding rules. These in turn shape demand for services, technologies, and delivery models. Markets form where these mechanisms align, rather than simply where climate risks exist.

This system-level framing helps explain why some adaptation-related activities are already maturing, while others remain underdeveloped. The translation of exposure to risk into marketable goods and services depends on several types of market signals and infrastructure. It also provides the rationale for structuring the report by sector while drawing out common market dynamics, barriers, and enablers that operate across the economy.

Our analysis identified several recurring themes that appear consistently across sectors in both the literature and interview evidence. These themes do not describe individual opportunities, rather, they explain the conditions under which adaptation-related economic activity emerges and scales.

Separating adaptation from mitigation

Across sectors, interviewees reported that mitigation still drives targets, regulation, investment decisions and business narratives. Adaptation is often treated as risk management or embedded within existing activity. It is seldomly framed as an economic opportunity.

This is unsurprising, given that mitigation is found to still dominate policy and global investment, with global climate finance reaching $1.3 trillion for mitigation compared to just $76 billion for adaptation in 2022 (OECD, 2025). The literature review also consistently highlights an overlap between mitigation and adaptation activity (Bonaventura, 2018) (O’Gorman, et al., 2024). Many adaptation opportunities identified originate in net zero contexts, with a subset linking directly or indirectly to adaptation. Retrofit, resilient construction, and forestry, for example, are repeatedly identified as opportunity areas with both mitigation and adaptation value. The interviews highlighted that some organisations appear to be taking adaptation-relevant actions without using “adaptation” language.

It is positive that there is overlap between mitigation and adaptation activity, as both are crucial to our global response to climate change. Interventions which address both can represent cost-effective climate action. However, it is also worth highlighting the specific economic opportunities available through adaptation, because markets are more likely to scale when activity is explicitly named, measured and linked to investment criteria and standards. What this suggests is that a short-term priority is to make existing adaptation-relevant activity more visible, investable and scalable.

“Resilience bonds and funds present significant gaps in their current structure, particularly in risk assessment. More work is needed to develop robust frameworks that accurately evaluate and price resilience-related risks.” (Interviewee from Finance and Insurance)

Demand strengthens when risks are made visible

Across sectors, awareness of climate risk does not reliably translate into adaptation action. Instead, demand is activated when risks become disruptive to operations, affect finances, or are regulated. High upfront costs, uncertain returns, and diffuse benefits inhibit voluntary investment (Randall, et al., 2023) (World Economic Forum, 2025), while price signals and regulatory requirements are more effective triggers (Trabacchi & Mazza, 2015). For example, in the built environment, post-event repairs, insurer requirements, and regulatory changes drive action. In agriculture, yield loss, water scarcity, and input cost volatility prompt adaptation. In finance and insurance, reinsurance pricing and capital requirements convert climate risk into immediate economic signals:

“A major storm would be a disruptor […] It was in the sixties, in Glasgow, there was a huge storm and it changed building regulations. It affected a lot of tenements. So, I feel like unfortunately we are quite reactionary […] Insurance could be a driver” (Interviewee from Built Environment).

Relatedly, interviewees highlighted difficulties in precisely measuring climate risk, performance or resilience benefits. They described gaps in data and a lack of consistent ways to evidence resilience features or monetise benefits. This limits demand, slows investment decisions and weakens incentives.

“Financial institutions conduct significant stress testing on adaptation, but it is not fully accounted for, often due to data limitations. The focus tends to be on physical impacts and fiscal footprints within the UK, rather than considering the broader value chain. From a financial perspective, adaptation risks are still under-recognised, even within frameworks like GFI [Green Finance Institute] and TCFD [Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures], where mitigation dominates the agenda. This brings us to resilience and the question of how to monetise its benefits. That is where the finance sector will start to engage, and it may involve highlighting co-benefits for nature as well” (Interviewee from Finance and Insurance).

The literature review also identified digital solutions and data as cross-cutting enablers, with opportunities in monitoring, modelling, early warning systems and decision support (Bonaventura, 2018) (Garnett & Nissen, n.d.) (k-Matrix, 2019). While these may represent a bottleneck, improving data coverage and resolution can be foundational to wider adaptation delivery.

This suggests that price and compliance signals tend to shift behaviour faster than awareness alone. Insurance and finance can act as transmission mechanisms, translating climate risk into incentives and investment demand. Our research suggests that high-growth potential sits in enabling markets, such as risk analytics, certification, monitoring, assurance and decision tools. These markets help unlock downstream spending in retrofit, infrastructure and land-based adaptation.

Monetisable co-benefits enable rapid scaling

Interviewees described adaptation as difficult to fund when it relies only on avoided losses. They reported stronger business cases where adaptation unlocks cost savings, revenue generation, mitigation benefits, productivity gains, or nature and place-based co-benefits (e.g. carbon sequestration, visual amenity). A place-based approach is one that leads by recognising the unique assets, opportunities and constraints inherent in a specific place. This means putting people, communities, and local context at the heart of decision-making (Scottish Government, 2019). In the context of climate change adaptation, this means understanding specific adaptation opportunities possible in each local area or community and how these can be implemented to reduce inequalities and maximise co-benefits (Griffith & Nicholls, 2024). Some of the strongest opportunities are likely to be where resilience is delivered alongside other monetisable outcomes. Visible risk may trigger interest, but bundled value propositions are what unlock scale.

“The project involves mapping multiple revenue streams. such as carbon credits, biodiversity net gain, and heat networks. while addressing issues like water runoff into a loch. This systemic investing approach, which integrates nature-based solutions with financial returns, could accelerate progress” (Interviewee from Finance and Insurance).

Flood and water risks are consistent entry points

Flooding and water security were the most tangible risks for Scotland discussed across sectors in interviews. They are experienced as immediate and measurable climate risks across the Scottish economy.

In addition, both the literature and interviews identify a wide range of adaptation opportunities spanning resilient agriculture and food systems (Hunt, et al., 2024), energy and infrastructure resilience (O’Gorman, et al., 2024), drought and water scarcity (Bonaventura, 2018) (Hunt, et al., 2024) (k-Matrix, 2019), digital and data-driven service (Bonaventura, 2018) (k-Matrix, 2019), ecosystem restoration (Bonaventura, 2018), wildfire risk (Trittip, et al., 2025), and nature-based solutions (O’Gorman, et al., 2024). Adaptation opportunities in these areas are less developed than those for flooding and water security.

This suggests that water-related adaptation is a “gateway market,” because it is measurable and already operationalised. It can also act as a platform for broader adaptation investment, including catchment-scale approaches and nature-based solutions. This is important to bear in mind when considering the priority sectors of this report: Water-related adaptations, where relevant, are often most immediate and can be a “way in” to further scale opportunities within diverse economic sectors.

Maximising Scotland’s potential economic growth through adaptation to climate change

This section sets out what the evidence suggests public sector actors can do most effectively to enable adaptation markets to develop and scale. Government can shape markets through setting clear signals, reducing uncertainty, enabling coordination and supporting investability. These enabling conditions are relevant across sectors.

Where market development is being constrained

Across interviews, adaptation‑related markets are constrained less by technical feasibility and more by institutional, political, and economic factors that suppress demand, slow investment, and prevent scaling. Interviewees consistently pointed to a set of inter‑locking constraints that help explain why adaptation markets remain fragmented, reactive, and unevenly developed. This aligns with recent climate adaptation research, which points to gaps in signals, standards, skills and coordination as primary barriers to scaling adaptation investment, rather than a lack of technical measures (Frontier Economics, 2022) (Global Center on Adapataion & Climate Policy Initiative, 2024).

Short‑termism in political and investment decision‑making: A dominant constraint is the misalignment between long‑term climate risk and short‑term political and financial cycles. While adaptation measures often deliver value over decades, public budgets, political incentives, and investment appraisals tend to prioritise short‑term affordability and immediate returns. This encourages reactive responses to climate impacts rather than planned, preventative investment, and limits the willingness of decision‑makers to commit to measures whose benefits extend beyond electoral or funding cycles.

Weak and inconsistent policy signals for adaptation: Policy frameworks were widely described as favouring mitigation over adaptation, with adaptation requirements often implicit, inconsistent, or weakly enforced. Where standards exist, they are frequently framed as minimum compliance rather than drivers of quality or resilience. In the built environment, this results in developers delivering only what is required to secure planning approval, rather than investing in more resilient solutions whose benefits accrue over time or to other parts of the system.

Fragmented responsibility and governance: Market development is further constrained by unclear allocation of responsibility for managing climate risk. Flooding, drought, sea‑level rise and asset protection are often perceived as the responsibility of public bodies, while private actors optimise for short‑term profitability. This fragmentation weakens incentives for private investment in adaptation and discourages system‑wide approaches, particularly in areas such as water management, retrofit, and nature‑based solutions that require coordination across multiple actors.

Financial barriers and undervaluation of resilience: A recurring theme is the difficulty of making the case for adaptation investment within existing appraisal and funding frameworks. Long‑term avoidance of damage, co‑benefits for health, heritage, ecosystems, and local economies, and reductions in systemic risk are not consistently valued or monetised. As a result, business cases tend to default to “least‑cost” solutions, even where higher‑quality, more resilient options would deliver greater long‑term value. This particularly constrains nature‑based solutions and retrofit, which often rely on revenue funding and ongoing maintenance rather than one‑off capital expenditure.

Regulatory complexity and risk aversion: While regulation is intended to manage risk, interviewees highlighted that complex and conservative regulatory environments can unintentionally limit innovation. In sectors such as water and the built environment, multiple standards, approvals, and compliance requirements can slow experimentation, discourage piloting, and privilege familiar engineering solutions over newer or hybrid approaches. Even where policy intent is supportive of innovation or nature‑based solutions, delivery can stall due to regulatory uncertainty or lack of confidence in novel approaches.

Skills and capacity constraints: A lack of specialist skills and expertise was identified as a practical constraint on market development. Limited access to conservation professionals, retrofit specialists, water system experts, and adaptation practitioners reduces the quality of decision‑making and can lead to sub‑optimal outcomes, including unnecessary demolition of buildings that could otherwise be adapted. Skills shortages act as both a delivery bottleneck and a missed economic opportunity.

Several interviewees suggested that Scotland could develop approaches domestically and then export them to the north of England, Ireland, and Nordic countries, where climate conditions and building forms are similar.

Lack of stable innovation and collaboration infrastructure: Several interviewees noted the absence of long‑term, sector‑specific innovation infrastructure, such as hubs, testbeds, or protected spaces for collaboration. While ideas and technical capability exist, the effort required to navigate fragmented support mechanisms, short‑term funding, and intellectual property risks discourages innovation and limits Scotland’s ability to develop and scale exportable adaptation solutions.

Complexity and uncertainty in adaptation pathways: Finally, adaptation decisions are often constrained by their complexity and interconnected impacts. Measures taken to address one risk (for example, water storage) can introduce new challenges (such as water quality or environmental impacts), increasing perceived risk and slowing decision‑making. This reinforces the need for systems‑based approaches but also raises the bar for evidence, coordination, and governance.

These constraints explain why adaptation markets are currently evolving slowly and unevenly. Addressing them requires not just new technologies, but reforms to finance, governance, skills development, standards, and investment narratives that enable adaptation to be planned, valued, and delivered at scale.

Enabling conditions across sectors

Interview evidence indicates that the pace and scale of adaptation market development will depend less on new technologies and more on the institutional and policy conditions that enable existing solutions to be deployed at scale. Several enabling conditions emerged consistently across sectors, pointing to the role government can play as a market shaper rather than a direct provider.

Data, standards, and decision‑ready intelligence: The availability of trusted climate risk data, such as flood risk mapping, already supports better decision‑making in parts of the economy. Government can strengthen this enabler by enabling access to high-quality climate data and is translated into practical tools that planners, developers, asset owners, and SMEs can readily use. Governments can also take actions to improve the visibility of resilience features at asset and system level. This reduces uncertainty for investors, insurers and asset owners and creates space for new products, services and financing models to emerge.

Skills, expertise, and institutional capacity: A recurring theme is the importance of timely access to specialist expertise. Interviewees consistently emphasised that the availability of specialist skills is a decisive factor in whether adaptation opportunities generate economic value within Scotland or are captured elsewhere, with skills shortages already leading to imported expertise, missed regeneration benefits, and constrained export potential. However, where accredited conservation, retrofit, or flood‑resilience professionals are available, decisions tend to preserve and adapt assets rather than default to demolition or short‑term fixes. Government can act as an enabler by supporting skills pipelines, accreditation schemes, and shared access to specialist expertise, turning a delivery bottleneck into a source of economic opportunity and job creation. Long-term programmes provide the demand certainty needed to build workforce capacity.

Clear, stable policy signals that reward resilience: Adaptation markets respond poorly to uncertainty. Interviewees emphasised that stable and credible policy signals, rather than frequent reform or ambiguous guidance, are essential for investment and innovation. Stable regulatory expectations, aligned planning and infrastructure standards, and strengthening the emphasis on “best value” rather than “least cost” in planning and regulated sectors can help reward resilience, long‑term asset protection, and multi‑benefit solutions. Where signals are clear, businesses are more likely to invest early and develop services that meet future demand. Where they are unclear or short-term, markets remain reactive and fragmented.

Valuation, monetisation, and finance alignment: Adaptation investment scales most effectively where resilience benefits can be valued and monetised. Government can enable this by supporting the development of valuation methods, performance standards, and business‑case frameworks that capture avoided losses, long‑term savings, and wider social and environmental benefits. Aligning public funding rules, appraisal methods, and finance mechanisms with these approaches would help adaptation compete for capital alongside mitigation.

Alignment of public and private incentives: Although adaptation risks often materialise in the public realm, many of the levers for action sit with private actors. Government can enable markets by aligning incentives across planning, insurance, lending, and regulation, for example by supporting standards that allow insurers and financiers to recognise and reward resilience. Where risk is visible in pricing, investment in adaptation becomes more immediate and commercially rational

Innovation infrastructure and testbeds: Interviewees highlighted that Scotland has the technical capability to innovate, but lacks stable, long‑term innovation infrastructure in areas such as water management, retrofit, and nature‑based solutions. Government support for dedicated hubs, testbeds, and collaborative spaces, with clear pathways for piloting, learning, and scaling, can lower barriers to innovation and help develop exportable adaptation solutions.

Systems‑based and place‑based delivery: Many adaptation opportunities only become viable when delivered at scale or as part of a wider system. Government can act as an enabler by supporting place‑based and catchment‑scale approaches that bring together multiple actors around shared risks and benefits. Coordination reduces transaction costs, improves investability and supports markets that depend on scale rather than isolated projects.

Clarity of roles and responsibilities: Unclear allocation of responsibility for managing climate risk weakens incentives for private action. Government can enable market development by clarifying expectations and accountability across public bodies, developers, and asset owners, reducing the scope for risk to be externalised onto the public sector. Clear responsibility supports more consistent standards and stronger demand for adaptation solutions.

Narrative, communication, and public engagement: Finally, adaptation becomes easier to implement and sustain when it is framed around tangible benefits, such as comfort, safety, affordability, heritage, and community wellbeing, rather than abstract future risk. Government‑led communication and engagement can help normalise adaptation as part of everyday decision‑making, strengthening political durability and upstream demand in planning and design processes.

These enabling conditions highlight that government’s most effective role is to provide clarity, stability, coordination, and capability. By shaping the rules, incentives, and infrastructure around adaptation, government can unlock market‑led delivery, supporting both domestic resilience and the development of export‑ready expertise.

Where action could have most impact

Taken together, the evidence points to a number of high-leverage enabling conditions where public sector action can unlock value:

• Clear signals and standards that create predictable demand.
  
• Data and metrics that make resilience visible and investable.
  
• Skills and delivery capacity aligned to long-term need.
  
• Coordination and aggregation at place and system level.
  

By focusing on enabling conditions rather than individual projects, public sector actors can help adaptation markets move from reactive responses to sustained economic activity.

Conclusions

We set out to understand the economic opportunities arising from climate adaptation and Scotland’s changing climate, how these markets are likely to evolve, and where Scotland has or could build a sustained international competitive advantage. Drawing on targeted literature and stakeholder interviews, the findings point to a clear conclusion: climate adaptation is already shaping economic activity in Scotland, but its market activity and potential is only partially visible.

Scotland-specific data on the economic opportunities arising from climate adaptation is severely limited. There is little to no data on market size, structure, or growth for the opportunities identified, and UK-level evidence is also sparse and largely focused on adaptation costs rather than opportunities. Most available data on market dynamics is global in scope and not specific to adaptation as a distinct area of economic activity. As a result, it was not possible to robustly quantify the scale or growth potential of individual opportunities, compare their relative importance, or confidently identify areas of competitive advantage. Findings should therefore be treated as areas of potential opportunity warranting further investigation, rather than guaranteed growth areas.

However, by narrowing the focus of this report to three priority sectors and integrating insights from industry stakeholders, our research provides an exploration of some sectors of the Scottish economy which are already seeing opportunities through climate change adaptation. By exploring these with stakeholders and comparing across all three, this report represents a useful early look at potential barriers and enablers to realising economic growth for Scotland via adaptation to climate change over the short and longer terms. A summary of the sectoral opportunities is provided in Figures 5 and Table 3.

Figure 5: A bar chart displaying the number of mentions of specific economic opportunities from climate change adaptation found as part of our literature review, categorised by economic sector.

6.1 Areas of opportunity for priority Scottish economic sectors

In the Built Environment, demand is driven by immediate physical risks (particularly flooding, rainfall intensity and overheating), creating activity in retrofit, drainage, climate-informed design, and nature-based solutions. In Food and Agriculture, adaptation is centred on managing volatility in weather and water availability to protect yield stability and business continuity, with opportunities in resilient crops, water management, digital agritech, advisory services, and landscape-scale approaches. In Finance and Insurance, physical climate risks are already material to asset values and insurability, generating demand for analytics, modelling, insurance innovation, and emerging place-based finance models that incentivise resilience.

Across these sectors, several common themes emerge. First, growth is concentrated in services (e.g. data, skills, and coordinated delivery models), rather than in physical goods (e.g. large-scale manufacturing or commodity expansion). Second, markets strengthen when climate risk affects the bottom line, for example through insurance pricing, asset valuation, regulation, or operational disruption. Third, Scotland’s potential competitive advantage lies in leveraging domestic climate pressures as testbeds to develop exportable expertise in analytics, retrofit, water and land management, and resilience-linked finance. Adaptation therefore presents a distributed economic opportunity, spanning the boundaries of traditional sectors and built on knowledge, capability, and systems integration, rather than single technologies.

6.2 Market evolution over time

Our research highlighted both markets that are already moving, as well as markets that are dependent on longer-term system change. In the next five years, growth is most likely in climate risk analytics and disclosure support, flood and water-related services and delivery, and incremental, practice-led adaptation in agriculture. These markets are responding to rising costs, insurance pressures and regulatory expectations. Over the longer term, adaptation markets are likely to become more structural and embedded throughout wider economic systems. This includes resilience-linked pricing in finance and insurance, large-scale retrofit programmes, catchment-scale delivery models and more mature ecosystem service markets. These opportunities depend less on new technology and more on governance, skills, standards and investable project pipelines.

6.3 Implications for economic growth

Taken together, the findings suggest that adaptation-related growth in Scotland is most likely to come from:

• High-value services, including analytics, engineering, advisory and finance structuring
• Skilled trades and SMEs involved in retrofit, drainage, monitoring and land management
• Rural and regional employment linked to landscape-scale management, nature restoration and water stewardship

The limited availability of data meant we were unable to determine sectors or opportunities which might constitute areas of competitive advantage for Scotland, nor were we able to confidently identify export markets. However, based on Scotland’s existing strengths, potential opportunity areas to export internationally would likely be skewed towards skills, professional services, delivery models, and integrated approaches, rather than standardised products or large‑scale manufacturing. However, developing areas of competitive advantage for Scotland on the international stage will depend on whether enabling conditions are put in place, such as action on skills, standards, data, and investment models. Without these, many opportunities will remain fragmented or localised.

6.4 What this means for policy

For policymakers, the central implication of this research is that the pace and scale of adaptation-led economic growth will depend less on new technologies and more on the institutional conditions that enable existing solutions to scale. The most powerful role for government is as a market shaper:

• Providing stable and credible policy signals
• Embedding resilience into standards, procurement and appraisal
• Strengthening access to high-quality, decision-ready climate data
• Investing in skills and accreditation pipelines
• Supporting place-based coordination that aggregates projects into investable programmes.

By aligning public funding rules, planning, insurance, lending and regulatory frameworks so that resilience is visible, valued and rewarded, government can convert climate risk into predictable demand. If these enabling conditions are put in place, adaptation can shift from reactive risk management to a durable source of economic activity, innovation and exportable expertise, positioning Scotland not just to withstand climate change, but to assume a leadership role in shaping resilient economies.

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Appendices

Appendix A Detailed methodology and assumptions

We conducted this study between October 2025 and January 2026. It employed a four-phase, mixed-methods approach designed to identify, prioritise and assess climate adaptation–related economic opportunities in Scotland. The methodology combined a targeted literature review, market data synthesis, stakeholder engagement, and thematic analysis. Each phase is described below.

Appendix A.1 Targeted literature review and opportunity identification

We undertook a targeted rapid review of key Scotland-specific literature on the adaptation economy to establish an initial evidence base. Sources included England et al. (2024), k-Matrix (2019), O’Gorman et al. (2024), Bonaventura (2018) and early insights from the forthcoming UK’s Fourth Climate Risk Assessment carried out by the Grantham Institute LSE (Gannon, 2026). These sources were selected given their relevance to Scotland’s adaptation economy.

Additionally, we conducted a targeted search of academic and grey literature published within the last four years using the search terms “Scotland”, “climate”, “adaptation”, and “economy”. This supplementary search focused particularly on identifying innovation-led adaptation opportunities, emerging technologies, and developing commercial areas relevant to Scotland.

We used the Adaptation Scotland programmes 15 Key Consequences of Climate Change as a biophysical framework to assess the evidence. For each source, references to economic adaptation opportunities were recorded and systematically mapped against the relevant climate consequences. This included opportunities that were explicitly framed as adaptation, as well as activities primarily described as mitigation, environmental management or innovation, but which have clear adaptation relevance when considered through an adaptation lens. We used a data extraction template to support this process of systematically extracting evidence from the literature and to help identify and shortlist significant opportunities and sectors. Further details on this can be found in Appendix B Detail on outputs of literature analysis.

To review the mapped opportunities and sectors, we organised an interim workshop with the steering group. This collaborative session enabled collective sense checking and consensus building on priority sectors and opportunities to be taken forward. We prioritised sectors based on recurrence across sources, relevance to Scotland’s economy, evidence of current or emerging market activity, and potential for scalability or export. The priority sectors for subsequent stages of the research were Built Environment, Food and Agriculture, and Finance and Insurance.

Appendix A.2 Market data synthesis and narrative scenario development

For the prioritised opportunity sectors identified in Phase 1, we extracted available market data from the reviewed literature and initial publication sources. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collated, with a focus on addressing the study’s research questions. Key variables included the nature of the opportunity, indicative market size, short- and long-term growth potential, sources of competitive advantage, and relevance to export markets.

We synthesised the extracted data into concise summaries for each opportunity area. Due to limited and largely outdated quantitative data, structured qualitative assessment was used to contextualise market dynamics and trends. Narrative descriptions were developed to articulate future scenario pathways for each sector. These scenarios were designed to provide background context for the stakeholder interviews conducted in Phase 3.

Appendix A.3 Stakeholder engagement

We conducted semi-structured interviews in November 2025 with 15 stakeholders – five from agriculture, five from built environment, and five from finance and insurance. In the sample, six interviewees were from representative bodies in food and agriculture and the built environment, whereas the rest were from private companies. Participants were recruited to reflect a broad mix of perspectives, including business and industry leaders, economic development agencies, and trade bodies. We also sought stakeholders from innovative or emerging adaptation areas, and to capture cross-sectoral opportunities.

Stakeholder recruitment utilised network-based and snowball sampling approaches to reach organisations that were not already engaged in previous research commissioned by ClimateXChange. Participants were provided with a participant information sheet, consent form, and the interview questions in advance of the interview. All participants gave informed consent. Participants were given the option to be named or to remain anonymous, in any quotations used. All data collected was processed and stored in line with GDPR rules.

We conducted interviews online from 11 November to 5 December 2025 using Microsoft Teams. Interviews were recorded and transcribed via Teams and stored securely in SRUC’s SharePoint server. Each interview lasted around 60 minutes. Interview topic guides were designed to validate findings from the desk-based research, explore market barriers and enablers, and elicit perspectives on market growth and export potential. Questions were also designed to examine adaptation solutions in practice, alongside insights into constraints with scaling, commercialisation, and market uptake. Further details on the interview guide are detailed in Appendix C Interview guide.

Appendix A.4 Thematic synthesis and reporting

We developed a coding framework to support interview coding and thematic analysis of interview transcripts as shown in Appendix D Coding framework and thematic analysis approach. Analysis focused on identifying convergent and divergent themes related to the research questions. The analysis also highlighted cross and sector-specific themes.

Findings were structured primarily by sector to address the themes below:

• Emerging adaptation-related economic opportunities
• Short-term and long-term market potential
• Scotland’s current or potential competitive advantage
• Barriers and enablers

Themes were developed iteratively, integrating findings from interview coding with patterns identified in the literature review to ensure conclusions reflected both evidence streams. Upon agreement from the steering group, a case study on weather and earth observation data solutions was used for a deeper dive on market potential for the sector. The final format and structure of report was agreed in consultation with the steering group during the analysis phase.

Appendix B Detail on outputs of literature analysis

We developed a structured data extraction template to systematically capture evidence from the literature review. Each row in the resulting template represented a single, discrete, adaptation-related economic opportunity identified within a source. Where a publication referenced multiple opportunities, these were recorded as separate rows.

For each opportunity, the template captured:

• Bibliographic metadata (e.g. source title, author, publication year, source type);
• Contextual information (geographic scope, sector and sub‑sector);
• A qualitative description of the adaptation opportunity.

We mapped each opportunity to relevant climate risks and biophysical drivers using the Adaptation Scotland programme’s 15 Key Consequences of Climate Change framework. Additional fields captured temporal characteristics (short‑term versus longer‑term hazards, opportunity type, and strategic relevance to Scotland (direct, indirect, or export‑oriented). Other attributes that were recorded included barriers and enablers, associated risks, and the frequency with which similar opportunities appear across the literature. We applied an initial prioritisation score to shortlist sectors and opportunities. The quality of available market evidence was also assessed for each opportunity (quantitative, qualitative, or no market data).

Due to the content size of the file, it is not feasible to be attached with this report. A summary of findings is displayed in Appendix B.1 below which details examples of opportunities identified in the literature alongside the frequency of mentions and corresponding sub-sector.

Appendix B.1 Summary of data collected from literature review

Appendix C Interview guide

Our interviews were based around aa core set of overarching questions (see Appendix C. 1). These questions were adapted for each interview to reflect sector-specific contexts and to explore the most relevant adaptation-related opportunities in greater depth.

During interviews, we presented participants with a summary table of adaptation opportunities identified for their specific sector during the desk-based review. This was used to prompt discussion on future growth potential, market dynamics, demand drivers, barriers, and enablers.

To minimise research fatigue and avoid duplication, the project team conducted background research on the participating organisations and reviewed relevant publications and prior outputs where available. This allowed interviews to focus on areas of greatest relevance and insight.

Appendix C.1 Interview Guide

Appendix D Coding framework and thematic analysis approach

We developed a coding framework to assess the climate risk, adaptation, strategic responses, and identified economic adaptation opportunities across the financial services, agriculture/food and built environment sectors.

The framework organises interview data across five core themes: sector and regulatory context, climate risks, adaptation strategies, innovation and opportunities, barriers and enablers, market and strategic outlook, and competitive advantage. We created an additional level of sub-theme for each data point to summarise specific insights or findings from interview quotes which allowed quicker identification of common themes for cross-sectoral analysis.

Appendix D.1 Coding framework

How to cite this publication:

Barthelmess, V., Naidu, T., Vester, S., and Stevens, B. (2026) ‘ Exploring opportunities to build a climate resilient economy ‘, ClimateXChange.

© The University of Edinburgh, 2026. Prepared by SAC Consulting on behalf of ClimateXChange, The University of Edinburgh. All rights reserved.

While every effort is made to ensure the information in this report is accurate as at the date of the report, no legal responsibility is accepted for any errors, omissions or misleading statements. The views expressed represent those of the author(s), and do not necessarily represent those of the host institutions or funders.

This work was supported by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division of the Scottish Government (CoE – CXC).

ClimateXChange

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If you require the report in an alternative format such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.

1. Place-based lending involves financial models that invest adaptation outcomes through nature‑based solutions (e.g. flood mitigation, water stewardship, landscape‑scale resilience, ecosystem services) and link multiple beneficiaries to shared outcomes. ↑
   

2. International Sustainability Standards Board and Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures. ↑
   

3. Appendix B.1 includes a table which details the unique opportunities and sub-sectors identified in the literature. It should be noted this does not accurately represent the economic size of the opportunities. Some opportunities are also cross-sectoral. For instance, water management and flood resilience is a significant sector in Scotland but did not emerge with high number of opportunities, however some services were captured within other sectors such as agriculture and built environment.^↑

4. Grey infrastructure are “hard engineering” solutions such as dams or dikes; Green and blue infrastructure are types of nature-based solutions such as created wetlands, rain gardens, etc.; Hybrid grey-green combine natural and non-natural elements, e.g. sea walls that are designed to provide habitat (Anderson, et al., 2022). ↑

5. These outcomes are clean water, biodiversity protection/restoration, flood risk reduction, improved bio-resource efficiency, climate mitigation through bio-carbon, enhanced biosecurity, and improved access and engagement with natural environment. ↑

6. Natural flood management measures include nature restoration that enhance water flow regulation and water retention capacity of soils. ↑

7. “The fabric first approach to net zero retrofitting involves improving a building’s energy performance primarily through modifications to its physical fabric, rather than solely relying on advanced technologies and renewable energy systems. This approach is built on the principle of minimising energy demand first before any change to building services by enhancing the building envelope and employing passive design strategies” (Retrofit Information, Support & Expertise RISE, 2024). ↑

8. See for details: Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.↑
   

9. Climate adaptive drainage (also known as controlled drainage) is the practice of managing the drainage of cultivated fields to raise the water table (to the degree possible, and not to the detriment of crops currently growing) to enhance aquifer recharge and store water in fields for use in drier months (Lucia , et al., 2024).↑

10. Statistics published in March 2025 indicated a total of 282,215 units for WCC and 187, 291 units for PC were sold as Pending Issuance Units (i.e. units that are due to be verified by an independent body). The data was calculated using average prices of £26.85 for WCC and £25.04 for PC in 2024. ↑
    

11. Controlled environment agriculture includes protected growing under structures such as polytunnels and glasshouses, and often includes smart technologies for monitoring and remote management of glasshouses right through to vertical farming, where fresh produce is grown in stacked layers under LED lighting (Highlands and Islands Enterprise, 2026). ↑

12. Results from the Scottish Agricultural Census: June 2025 – gov.scot ↑

13. “Due to the size and complexity of some risks, some insurers take out their own, additional insurance – as added protection for themselves. When insurers insure a risk again, it’s called reinsurance” (Lloyd’s, 2025). ↑

14. The TCFD has now been integrated into the International Financial Reporting Standards ↑

15. “Also known as event or index-based insurance, parametric [insurance] products trigger payouts when specific conditions are met, such as certain levels of rainfall or wind speed […] Ultimately, these attributes strengthe the resilience of vulnerable communities. Unlike traditional insurance, which is based on the actual losses sustained, parametric insurance is linked to a specified event. This expands the scope of coverage and addresses gaps that conventional policies often leave unprotected” (World Economic Forum, 2025). ↑

16. “A catastrophe bond is a financial instrument that transfers financial risk connected with exposure to natural disasters to capital market investors. Catastrophe bonds have their origins in the aftermath of several major natural disasters that struck the United States in the 1990s and caused the insurance and reinsurance industry to reevaluate their methods” (London School of Economics and Political Science, 2024). ↑

17. Insurance penetration is the total of premiums written for both life and non-life insurance business as a percentage of GDP. It provides a measure of how accessible financial protection is for people and businesses for certain risks for which insurers can provide coverage, or how “insured” a country’s population is (OECD, 2025). ↑

18. “Transition finance is the financial flows, products and services that facilitate an economy-wide transition to net zero consistent with the Paris Agreement. The need for transition finance will be particularly acute to support the decarbonisation of high-emitting sectors such as heavy industrial sectors, transport, energy, agriculture and the built environment.” (The Global City, 2026). ↑

Scotland’s Public Engagement Strategy for Climate Change (PES) brings together a range of programmes and initiatives designed to support public understanding, participation and action on climate change. As the strategy approaches its first full-term evaluation, this research explores how the Scottish Government can strengthen the monitoring, evaluation and communication of its impact.

The study reviews international best practice in evaluating complex public engagement strategies, assesses how monitoring and evaluation currently operates across the PES, and provides practical recommendations for developing a robust, proportionate and evidence-based approach to strategy-level evaluation.

Key findings

• Scotland’s Public Engagement Strategy is at the forefront of international practice, combining locally embedded climate engagement programmes with national policy objectives and a Just Transition approach.
• Evaluating the strategy is challenging due to its scale and complexity, with multiple programmes, audiences and outcomes operating across different sectors and geographies.
• A hybrid evaluation approach is most appropriate, combining participatory, adaptive and theory-based methods to capture the contribution of different activities and programmes.
• Existing programmes are already collecting valuable evidence, but more consistent and structured data collection could strengthen strategy-level evaluation and learning.
• Evaluation should focus on demonstrating contribution rather than proving direct attribution, recognising the limits of establishing causality in complex public engagement systems.

Recommendations

• Expand the Public Engagement Strategy’s Theory of Change to provide a stronger foundation for monitoring, evaluation and learning.
• Work collaboratively with delivery partners to develop a shared understanding of how different programmes contribute to strategic outcomes and to strengthen evaluation practice across the strategy.
• Use contribution analysis as a core evaluation approach, providing a structured way to assess how PES activities contribute to intended outcomes.
• Establish a small number of SMART targets to support monitoring, evaluation and reporting against strategic objectives.
• Continue to encourage innovation at programme level, while capturing evidence, learning and examples of effective engagement approaches across different communities and contexts.

For further information, please read the full report.

If you require the report in an alternative format, such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.

https://doi.org/10.7488/era/7322

Research completed: April 2026

Executive summary

Aims

This study was commissioned to help the Scottish Government strengthen how it assesses, evidences and communicates the impact of its Public Engagement Strategy on Climate Change (PES) (Scottish Government, 2021). The PES is an overarching framework that brings together a wide range of programmes (such as the Climate Action Hubs, Climate Engagement Fund, the Climate Policy Engagement Network, and others) to support public understanding, participation and action on climate change. In this report, we set out to address three related aims:

• to identify best-practice approaches for monitoring and evaluating complex public engagement strategies
  
• to understand how PES monitoring and evaluation currently operates in practice
  
• to provide practical, proportionate recommendations that can strengthen strategy-level M&E while remaining feasible and proportionate.

Findings

The research identified the following key findings:

• Scotland’s PES is at the forefront: Many countries run successful deliberative interventions and national awareness campaigns on climate change. However, few have attempted to deliver multi-stranded, locally embedded approaches that are tied into national Just Transition policy, like Scotland’s PES. Scotland remains at the forefront of practice in actively commissioning and operationalising a strategic-level evaluation capable of generating cumulative insights across multiple years and programmes of public engagement. See 6.3 International examples of public engagement strategies on climate change.
  
• Evaluating the PES is challenging: The PES encompasses a diverse set of interventions which operate in a complex system, designed to engage the full breadth of the Scottish public on climate change, across all sectors and geographies. The complexity poses challenges for evaluation, as the variables make it difficult to isolate the impact of the intervention. This limits the conclusions that can be drawn and the claims made about direct causality. However, there are a range of evaluation approaches, methods, and tools which are suitable and recommended for evaluations in these complex contexts. The Mid-Point Review of the PES used methods broadly in line with these approaches; however, this report provides guidance on how to implement these in a more holistic way, appropriate for full-term evaluation. See 7 First principles of evaluation in complex systems.
  
• The PES could be evaluated using a hybrid of several methods and approaches: Evaluating the PES at strategy level could benefit from embracing a hybrid design, combining a few key types of evaluation approaches and methods to suit the different scales and methods of delivery within the PES. Appropriate approaches include participatory, adaptive, and theory-based approaches such as systems mapping and contribution analysis. See 8 Key factors in evaluation design.
  
• Structured data collection can support evaluation: PES programmes are already collecting the right types of data. However, there is an opportunity to structure data collection and presentation to support a strategy-level evaluation framework. Data can be aggregated to provide evidence of impact, as well as to facilitate learning, listening, relationship-building and storytelling. See 9 Recommended approach: Applying contribution analysis to the PES at strategy level.
  
• Expectations on attributing impact must be managed: The recommended evaluation approaches have limitations in their ability to strictly attribute impacts to PES activities. As a result, there may be a gap between what stakeholders would like to know about how the PES is delivering, and what it is possible to conclude from evaluation. Future evaluators must manage expectations and communicate clearly about the thinking behind chosen approaches. Nonetheless, these approaches will enable Scottish Government to build an evidenced narrative of how the PES has contributed to its objectives. They can also capture important aspects of complex systems, which will allow Scottish Government to identify gaps and adapt the strategy accordingly. See 9.2.3 Telling the story of the PES to external stakeholders.

Recommendations for future PES monitoring and evaluation

The following recommendations will be helpful in integrating findings of this report into an updated and strengthened monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approach for the PES:

• Expand the PES Theory of Change (ToC): The PES has a high-level ToC in place. However, a more comprehensive, fully elaborated version could serve as a useful foundation for robust evaluation. A full discussion of how to approach this, including a template, has been provided in the report. See Appendix C – Using the Theory of Change as an evaluation tool.
  
• Work with stakeholders to create a common understanding of how interventions are delivering impact on the ground through expanding the current ToC. Adopting participatory methods, the Scottish Government could work with PES delivery partners to more clearly articulate how different climate engagement activities work together to deliver intended outcomes. Involving delivery partners in refreshing PES M&E could also build shared understanding, trust, and legitimacy. Scottish Government teams could help delivery partners develop ToCs for their own programmes, where these are not already in place. These would be proportionate to the scale of each programme and could be “nested” within the strategy-level ToC, articulating how programmes support strategy level and vice versa.
  
• Use contribution analysis to evaluate the PES: There are a variety of evaluation approaches and methods that could be applied to the PES, working within a Theory of Change framework. Contribution analysis provides a method to test and refine the causal pathways within the ToC for the PES or its component programmes. It does this by testing and refining the ToC, examining the strength of evidence for each causal link, integrating quantitative and qualitative data, and assessing whether rival explanations offer a better account of the change. Although it cannot offer definitive proof of attribution, it can provide reasoned and credible evidence of contribution. See 8.3 Feasible designs: Selecting appropriate evaluation approaches for the PES at strategy level.
  
• Set SMART targets: Set a small number of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) targets within the PES, including the reasoning behind the level of change targeted. These will flow from the refreshed ToC and clarify and inform evaluation questions. See 9.1 Proportionality: How can contribution analysis address the challenges of PES M&E in a feasible way?
  
• Continue to encourage and enable innovation at programme level: Continue to encourage local delivery partners to innovate in their own engagement and evaluation methods. Programmes tailored to local contexts (such as Climate Action Hubs, Climate Action Schools and Climate Engagement Fund projects) are key drivers of innovation within the PES. Capturing qualitative data on what works in these contexts represents key learning as well as powerful storytelling material, an important aspect of evaluation. See 9.2 Communicating and embedding evaluation results with PES trusted messengers and other stakeholders.

The recommendations and approaches listed above will help evaluate the different layers, scales and styles of engagement delivered across the PES. The unified framework should help clarify the PES’s programme theory, articulating how PES programmes work together in unison to support the overarching strategic objectives, creating the basis for evaluation. These recommendations are relevant for:

• the Scottish Government Climate Change Engagement team as owners of the PES
  
• delivery partners and programme leads responsible for monitoring and reporting
  
• the wider network of trusted messengers using the PES to inform their activities
  
• policy teams using public engagement insights to shape decisions
  
• analysts and evaluators preparing for the first full PES evaluation.

Together, these steps should create a clearer, more consistent and more credible account of how public engagement supports Scotland’s transition to a net zero and climate-resilient future and ensure the PES continues to learn, adapt and demonstrate value.

Glossary

Abbreviations table

Introduction

Aims of this work

The Scottish Government has identified a need to strengthen the evidence base supporting its ability to assess and communicate the impact of its climate-related public engagement activities. A range of programmes, campaigns, and partnerships contribute to delivering the Net Zero Nation: Public Engagement Strategy for Climate Change (PES) and there remains a gap in articulating how these collective efforts lead to strategic outcomes.

This project’s research questions are:

• What recommendations can be made to strengthen the approach to monitoring and evaluating the outcomes and impacts of the PES for its final review and future iteration?
  
• What can we learn about how the composite parts of the PES are currently monitored and evaluated in practice, and the opportunities to improve how progress towards outcomes and impacts is assessed?
  
• What practical tools for monitoring and evaluation could be used by both Scottish Government officials and external partners to better measure impact?

This project therefore:

• Reviewed existing literature and guidance on monitoring and evaluating public engagement and communications strategies
  
• Engaged with practitioners to assess how PES is monitored in practice
  
• Assessed how existing monitoring and reporting for PES activities align with best practice
  
• Identified gaps and opportunities for strengthening the PES Theory of Change (ToC)
  
• Provides practical recommendations, tools and templates to construct a proportionate, coherent monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system
  
• Strengthens the Scottish Government’s ability to communicate the cumulative impact of its engagement activity to internal and external audiences.

Discussions with Scottish Government colleagues have highlighted that, while the PES provides a strong overall framework, the links between understanding, participation, and acting on climate change are not yet fully articulated. In particular, there is a need to clarify the assumptions and dependencies that underpin how engagement contributes to wider system change. This work therefore provides both an analytical foundation and practical recommendations to help the Scottish Government refine its M&E approach, ensuring that the Strategy’s impact can be demonstrated more effectively across its multiple levels of delivery.

Overview of PES history, programmes & partners

The PES builds on a long-standing legislative and policy framework for climate action in Scotland. Since 2009, the Climate Change (Scotland) Act has required the Scottish Government to take action to promote public engagement and participation in climate change policy (Legislation.gov.uk, 2009). Early approaches emphasised individual responsibility for reducing emissions, encouraging personal lifestyle choices such as recycling or energy efficiency. Over time, the emphasis of engagement has evolved. The current strategy reflects a shift from individual to systemic change, focusing on the social and collective dimensions of climate action.

The development of the PES delivery encompassed several important shifts in how climate engagement activities have been coordinated and delivered in Scotland:

• The Let’s Do Net Zero (LDNZ) marketing campaign represented one of the first large-scale communications efforts under the new Strategy. Its initial focus was on building public understanding of climate change and Scotland’s national ambitions.
  
• In parallel, direct delivery grants supported organisations with existing relationships within their audiences, enabling the Scottish Government to complement other programmes with additional grants where strategically relevant, for example by continuing support to the Climate Action Schools programme.
  
• The Climate Engagement Fund was introduced to further diversify engagement, expanding support to new partners and audiences, and encouraging innovation in community-led communication and participation.
  
• The Climate Change Participation Programme was established to facilitate structured dialogue around Just Transition policy development, linking public engagement more directly to policymaking and implementation.

Rather than encouraging isolated behavioural changes, the PES aims to create the conditions for whole-of-society participation in Scotland’s transition to net zero. The framework is structured around three strategic objectives (Understand, Participate, and Act) which together provide a coherent foundation for influencing awareness, inclusion, and behaviour across diverse sectors and communities. Under the current delivery model, the PES has added additional programmes under the three strategic objectives (see Figure 1). For a full overview of the programmes and how they contribute to the overall vision of the PES, please refer to:

• Net Zero Nation: Public Engagement Strategy (Scottish Government, 2021)
  
• Climate Change – Public Engagement Strategy: Mid-Point Review (Scottish Government, 2025)

Together, these programmes represent a gradual evolution from top-down communications to a more distributed and partnership-based approach, built around trusted messengers who can translate the national strategy into local action.

The PES sits within a comprehensive policy landscape aimed at achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland by 2045, as mandated by the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 (Legislation.gov.uk, 2009). It occupies a pivotal position within this landscape, functioning as the bridge between strategic ambition and public engagement, ensuring that the transition to net zero is grounded in public understanding, legitimacy, and shared ownership. While the Update to the Climate Change Plan (2018-2032) (Scottish Government, 2020) and the Just Transition Strategy (Scottish Government, 2021) set the technical and economic pathways to net zero, and the third Scottish National Adaptation Plan (SNAP3) (Scottish Government, 2024) focuses on achieving climate resilience and adaptation, the PES provides the social infrastructure through which these policies gain public understanding, legitimacy, and participation. Its emphasis on informing, enabling, and empowering citizens ensures that climate action is not only delivered to people but with them.

By linking with frameworks such as National Planning Framework 4 (Scottish Government, 2023), the Environment Strategy (Scottish Government, 2025), the Biodiversity Strategy (Scottish Government, 2024), and the Heat in Buildings Strategy (Scottish Government, 2021), the PES embeds people-centred approaches across diverse policy domains. In doing so, it provides the framework for strengthening coherence between climate, social, and economic policy, supporting the wellbeing economy, circular economy, and National Strategy for Economic Transformation (Scottish Government, 2022). Its effectiveness depends on how well engagement is integrated into decision-making and accountability processes across government, highlighting both the strategic importance of the PES and the ongoing challenge of ensuring that participation translates into influence and impact.

Working in partnership is at the core of the approach of the PES. The PES programmes listed in Figure 1 are primarily delivered by local organisations, embedded in regions across Scotland. Crucially, the primary audience for the PES itself are these trusted messengers:

“We know that public support is crucial in order to successfully achieve the transformational societal change required to reach net zero. We also know that the government cannot be the only communicator on climate change issues. This strategy [the PES] is therefore aimed at climate change communicators – or ‘trusted messengers’ – who can more effectively engage people in their sphere of influence.” (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 4)

The PES clarifies the Scottish Government’s direction of travel, sets the tone and language around how they talk about climate change, clarifies roles and responsibilities (i.e., what the Scottish Government is doing; what trusted messengers are doing; how members of the public can contribute). This enables trusted messengers and delivery partners to be aligned and consistent in their language and actions.

This report uses “delivery partners” to refer to those groups directly funded by the Scottish Government to deliver PES programmes. These include a range of public, private, and third sector organisations, for example Keep Scotland Beautiful (Climate Action Schools), third sector organisations delivering the Community Climate Action Hubs), the recipients of the Climate Engagement Fund (wide variety), and others.

However, other potential “trusted messengers” and the full audience for the PES extends far beyond those who are funded to deliver PES programmes. For example, Zero Waste Scotland, NHS Scotland, NatureScot, and Culture for Climate Scotland all engage the public on climate change and related issues. These organisations each have their own unique strategic objectives, priorities, and audiences; however, the PES and its outputs provide a central reference regarding government messaging and strategy for how to engage the public on climate change. The PES is designed to be useful to any and every organisation who wants to facilitate these conversations with their membership or sphere of influence. Overall, the PES provides a unifying framework for Scotland’s climate engagement activity, utilising a mix of methods to reach and connect with the public, enabling a whole of society approach to the transition to a net zero and resilient Scotland.

Previous and future evaluations

The evaluation of the PES is designed as a continuous, multi-stranded process. Since its inception, the PES has been reviewed once, via the Mid-Point Review (MPR), which assessed progress against the strategy’s three objectives (Understand, Participate, Act) over its first three years (2021–2024). The MPR drew evidence from existing programme evaluations (e.g., Climate Week, Climate Engagement Fund, Hubs) and national indicators derived from the Scottish Household Survey (Scottish Government, 2025). The MPR was supported by an independent evidence review, “A review of effective public engagement on climate and implications for Scotland” (Millar, et al., 2024). This synthesised international best practice on effective engagement methods to compare what had been delivered via the PES. The Millar et al. report found that the PES’s methods, content and delivery were indeed following best practices for effective public engagement on climate change.^[1] However, a key collective finding from previous evaluations was the need to strengthen how PES activities are monitored and evaluated. The practical challenges faced in monitoring and evaluating the PES, as referenced in the MPR, are:

• “More consistency in data gathering and reporting, aligned to the PES Theory of Change, would help strengthen the conclusions that can be drawn. There is opportunity to take action on this for the remainder of the PES delivery period, and particularly for designing the end of PES review.” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 3)
  
• “Activities operate at a range of scales, with different measures of success which are difficult to aggregate or compare across.” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 10)
  
• “A clear challenge to this approach is evidencing impact on policy outcomes. Millar et al. (2025) underline the importance of policy makers meaningfully engaging with the outputs and recommendations from participatory activities and explaining to participants how these will be acted upon. It is notable that less than half (45%) of the 67 respondents to the stakeholder survey felt they had had meaningful opportunity to participate in policy development, and many commented negatively on their experience of participation. This included feelings of over-consultation and a lack of clarity on how their participation in the design-stage led to meaningful action by Scottish Government.” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 27)

“The lack of ability to track the impact of the outcomes [of Scotland’s Climate Assembly] on Scottish Government climate change policy is a significant weakness in terms of progress towards the Participate objective of the PES.” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 22)

The next iteration of the PES is not expected to represent a fundamental overhaul, but rather an evolution of the existing framework. The focus will be on strengthening the layers that sit beneath the high-level objectives, with clearer articulation of how risks, assumptions, and dependencies are identified and tested. Future evaluation efforts will place greater emphasis on coherence across programmes, ensuring that findings can be meaningfully aggregated to assess the cumulative impact of engagement activity. There will also be a stronger focus on indirect impacts and learning from partners and networks. This shift reflects a wider ambition to move beyond activity-level monitoring toward a more strategic understanding of how public engagement contributes to long-term behavioural and societal change.

Research process

This research adopted a blended approach that moved between reviewing best practice and technical guidance, exploring international examples, engaging with delivery stakeholders, and testing recommendations in a workshop. This allowed emerging insights to be tested against both established evaluation principles and the practical realities of delivering a complex, multi-stranded public engagement strategy.

While many countries now undertake climate assemblies, public dialogues or funded engagement programmes, the review found few initiatives comparable in scale, structure or ambition to Scotland’s PES. Most international examples focus on discrete deliberative processes or short-term programmes, often without a unifying strategy, shared Theory of Change or coherent evaluation framework. As a result, there is no robust or settled body of “best practice” for evaluating long-term, portfolio-based public engagement strategies on climate change. See 6.3 International examples of public engagement strategies on climate change.

This finding strongly shaped the remainder of the report: with no available standard against which to benchmark Scotland’s PES, the analysis returns to first principles of evaluating complex systems, drawing on theory-based approaches and established government guidance to develop a tailored, credible and proportionate evaluation framework for the PES.

Literature review & international comparators: Key takeaways for the findings of this report

We reviewed the relevant UK, European and international literature and guidance on evaluating government programmes and strategies. There are limited examples of international governments who have implemented strategies or initiatives similar in scale and structure to Scotland’s PES, which is world-leading in this area. As a result, this research returned to first principles of designing evaluations for policy interventions operating in complex contexts.

Methodology

Literature review

This research began with a targeted literature review of UK and international evaluation guidance, public engagement strategies and relevant research on climate engagement with the aim of determining what is feasible and proportionate for the PES. The targeted and pragmatic review identified best-practice approaches for monitoring and evaluating complex, multi-stranded public engagement strategies by focusing on 18 authoritative UK and international sources (see 6.2 Results of literature review). Findings from each source were extracted into a structured matrix and synthesised across nine sub-questions under three themes: the purpose of strategy-level evaluation (“why”), defining outcomes and impacts (“what”), and identifying appropriate M&E methods (“how”).

Alongside this work, the research examined international examples of government-led public engagement on climate change to assess whether established models or evaluation approaches could be directly transferred to the Scottish context.

Document analysis

The document analysis systematically reviewed the existing PES M&E landscape to assess current data collection practices. Primary materials included programme-level M&E templates, reporting forms, project reports, and the Net Zero Nation PES Mid-Point Review (MPR) (Scottish Government, 2025). Indicators were mapped to established Theory of Change stages from the Magenta Book and Government Communication Service (GCS) Evaluation Cycle (Inputs, Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes, and Impacts) to capture the implicit ‘programme theory’ of the PES (HM Treasury, 2020) (Government Communication Service, 2024). This comparison mapped current data flows, gaps, and the feasibility of collecting specific metrics. These findings directly inform the refreshed evaluation framework and guidance in Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E.

Interviews with key stakeholders

Semi-structured interviews added practical depth and insight from those responsible for delivering climate engagement. Fifteen participants from various PES projects and programmes were selected to share programme, project and strategy level delivery experience. Interview questionnaires (see Appendix B – Interview guide example) were co-designed with the steering group, and all interviews followed agreed ethics procedures, including informed consent. Sessions were recorded, transcribed and analysed to extract key findings and lessons learned, which were integrated into the report to support interpretation.

Workshop with Scottish Government teams

A final stakeholder workshop with Scottish Government teams validated and refined the research findings. The session focused on six M&E improvement ideas derived from earlier interviews. Two activities structured the discussion: (i) defining the metrics required to capture delivery partners’ impacts, including behavioural and outcome-level change; and (ii) an effort-versus-impact prioritisation exercise to assess feasibility and likely effectiveness. Insights from the workshop shaped both practical recommendations and the strategic context presented in the final report.

For more detail on the project methods, see Appendix A – Full project methodology.

Results of literature review

Collectively, the sources provide a comprehensive foundation for assessing monitoring and evaluation at the strategy level.

Sources were analysed using a data-extraction matrix comprising core fields applicable to all documents (including source type, jurisdiction, relevance to project, transferability to the Scottish PES context, and relevance to the research questions), alongside thematic fields tailored to different source types. Thematic fields captured information on theory of change, evaluation methods, indicators, strengths and gaps, public involvement, transferable concepts, and implications for the development of robust, context-sensitive monitoring and evaluation frameworks.

From this review of UK and international guidance and case studies in M&E and public engagement, several conclusions were drawn which affected the direction of this research and subsequent steps:

• International guidance consistently highlights that high-quality monitoring and evaluation of complex, multi-stranded programmes depends on a clear Theory of Change that articulates causal pathways from activities to outcomes and supports the development of SMART, strategically aligned indicators. For such programmes, this implies an outcome-focused, theory-based approach to evaluation that works backwards from intended outcomes to assess progress, understand how and why change occurs, and examine the contribution of multiple interventions and partnerships within dynamic systems (see next section, 6.3 International examples of public engagement strategies on climate change).
  
• UK central government guidance provides clear steers on: determining which government interventions are evaluable; when to evaluate; designing and setting the scope of evaluations. Complex, multi-stranded interventions operating in systems affected by many variables (such as Scotland’s PES) require agile, flexible approaches to evaluation. This guidance is interpreted for the context of the PES in 7 First principles of evaluation in complex systems.

As detailed above, there are few examples of international governments who have implemented strategies or initiatives similar in scale and structure to Scotland’s PES. It follows that there are few robust evaluations or precedent for evaluating interventions like PES. Therefore, the next step in the process of this research was to consider:

• What is the best practice for evaluating complex, multi-stranded government interventions more generally (i.e. not specific to public engagement and/or climate change)?
  
• What are useful examples of where this has been done?

These principles are interwoven and provide the foundation for the following chapters of this report.

International examples of public engagement strategies on climate change

In addition to searching for relevant academic, government and grey literature, the research team also reviewed international examples of government-led public engagement on climate change. The United Nations (UN) and the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) have called for national governments to engage their citizens on climate change, highlighting this as essential to achieving the pace and scale of action required and for a coordinated global response. Many nations in Europe and some further afield have engaged citizens in deliberative processes such as citizens assemblies on climate change. However, it is a finding of this research that there are few international examples of government programmes or strategies similar to Scotland’s PES, which is a long-term, cross-government, partnership-based, funded and coordinated approach to public engagement on climate change. This section discusses the international context for Scotland’s PES in more detail.

Governments around the world increasingly recognise that achieving large-scale behaviour change on climate issues requires more than one-off participation exercises: it depends on long-term public engagement that builds understanding, shifts social norms and supports people to act within their own contexts. Decades of public-health experience (another policy area with a focus on society-wide behaviour changes, such as smoking cessation, diet, road safety and physical activity) show that meaningful change emerges gradually through a combination of communication, community support and structural conditions. Climate engagement is even more complex, because people’s capacity to understand climate change, participate in solutions and take action is shaped by local values, identities, opportunities and constraints; it cannot be driven solely by top-down messaging (Climate Outreach, 2020, p. 11). Both the UN and the OECD, among others, have explicitly called for governments to engage citizens on climate change, including through participation in policy development, public awareness and inclusive processes:

Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) is a term used to refer to work under Article 6 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (“reduce the impact of climate change by enabling society to be a part of the solution”) and Article 12 of the Paris Agreement (“Parties shall cooperate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change education, training, public awareness, public participation, and public access to information”) (UNFCCC, 2025). ACE workstreams mirror the strategic objectives of Scotland’s PES, Understand, Participate and Act. The UNFCCC states that “Public participation is about long-term collaboration among different groups, as much as it is about the quality of how and the extent to which citizens partner with local and national governments to craft policies” (UNFCCC, 2025). Submissions under the UNFCCC negotiations call on Parties to “develop and implement climate policy based on inclusive stakeholder engagement and public participation processes,” explicitly linking climate policy quality with ongoing inclusive engagement (Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, 2024).

The OECD’s 2025 Engaging and Empowering Citizens for the Net-Zero Transition paper asserts that

“An effective government-citizen interface for climate action 1) provides access to transparent information and open data; 2) builds trust through clear and responsive public communication; 3) empowers and mobilises citizens at scale through people-centred policy-making based on meaningful citizen participation; and 4) empowers and sustains change through informed citizens driving environmentally sustainable behavioural shifts”, making citizen participation central to effective net-zero transitions (OECD, 2025, p. 6).

For this reason, several countries now fund programmes that build climate literacy, participation and agency through diverse, locally grounded projects rather than prescribing a uniform behavioural pathway. Approaches include deliberative processes, public consultations, awareness campaigns, participatory platforms, and other means to involve people in understanding, shaping or supporting climate policy. Place-based examples include:

Deliberative and participatory policy processes

• The Republic of Ireland convened a Citizens’ Assembly on climate change (2017) to gather recommendations on enhancing climate action, involving randomly selected citizens deliberating on climate policy measures (Knowledge Network On Climate Assemblies, 2025).
  
• Denmark established a Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Issues to involve a representative cohort of citizens in discussing climate policy and making recommendations to government (Danish Board of Technology, 2025).
  
• France organised a Citizens’ Convention on Climate where ordinary citizens were tasked with proposing measures to achieve 2030 climate targets. Austria has prepared a Citizens’ Climate Assembly to propose climate neutrality measures to government (IEA, 2021).
  
• Germany, Spain, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Finland have experimented with national or regional climate deliberative processes (cities/juries/assemblies) (Lorenzoni, et al., 2025).
  
• In the UK:
  • There was a UK Climate Assembly which ran in 2020. Over several months, Assembly members heard from experts, questioned stakeholders and discussed trade-offs before agreeing a set of recommendations covering areas such as energy, transport, food, land use and fairness. The Assembly demonstrated strong public support for ambitious climate action, provided it is fair, well-communicated and involves public participation in decision-making (Climate Assembly UK, 2020).
    
  • Scotland’s PES is mandated by the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 and was first published in 2021 (Legislation.gov.uk, 2009). Scotland’s Climate Assembly ran between 2020-21 (Andrews, et al., 2022).
    
  • Wales has a published Public Engagement Strategy of its own. It is the most similar to Scotland’s and is discussed in this section as well as Appendix D – Case studies. The Northern Ireland Executive is in the process of developing a similar document.
    
  • DESNZ recently published a policy paper “Energising Britain: Your voice in our Clean Energy Superpower Mission” (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, 2025). This is the latest statement on the UK Government’s approach to a transition to net zero and includes the intention to explore participatory policymaking and engage widely. The paper makes clear that DESNZ plan to align their approach with that of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, highlighting the leadership of these devolved nations in this space:
    • “We have sought to align our approach so that it is complementary to existing activities that are taking place across the UK. We will continue to work in partnership with the Scottish Government, Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to support work across the four nations and share both learning and resources.

Other instances of Open Government and multi-stakeholder participation

• Canada ran Generation Energy (2017-18), a large national dialogue which engaged over 380,000 Canadians in conversations about the nation’s energy future, which fed into planning. They also ran the Climate Action and Awareness Fund (2020-22), directly funding community-based climate action, discussed below (Government of Canada, 2025).
  
• Brazil’s Federal Government operates digital platforms such as Brasil Participativo to engage citizens on policy issues, including climate planning and climate action (Government of Brazil, 2025).
  
• Costa Rica created a Citizens Consultative Council on Climate Change under its Open Government Partnership plan to support climate data disclosure and public participation in policy design, including in deciding their Nationally Determined Contribution in line with the Paris Agreement (Energia, n.d.)
  
• Kenya and Sierra Leone have included multi-stakeholder processes for operationalising climate legislation and climate commitments, emphasising transparent climate information and participatory approaches (Robinson, et al., 2018).
  
• The first Global Citizens’ Assembly was held at COP26 in Glasgow. A panel of 100 members was drawn via a multistage civic lottery intended to mirror the global population. They were charged with addressing the question of “how can humanity address the climate and ecological crisis in a fair and effective way?” They deliberated for 68 hours over 11 weeks and developed the People’s Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth. Plans are now being made to create a permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly, with 10 million people participating annually by 2030, to address climate change as well as AI, global public health, and other shared issues (Curato, et al., 2023) (OECD).

Within this international landscape, Scotland’s Public Engagement Strategy is distinctive in its scale and structure: it brings together national communications, climate-action programmes, multiple grant-funding streams and community-based delivery through a wide network of partners, forming one of the most integrated national approaches to climate engagement. The PES shares the same core aims that the UNFCCC’s Action for Climate Empowerment and OECD guidance stress: raise awareness, broaden participation, and enable action. Like many international examples, Scotland uses a mix of national campaigning, deliberative processes and funded partner networks to reach different audiences. In that respect, the PES is consistent with best practice, combining top-level messaging with locally rooted delivery, and explicitly framing participation as enabling co-design and community agency.

Where Scotland differs is in scale, institutional framing and how those strands are packaged. The PES has an explicit Theory of Change and nested programmes that together form a single, government-led ecosystem for engagement. Many countries run successful one-off deliberations or national campaigns, but fewer have attempted to align sustained local delivery, grant-backed experimentation and a strategy-level ToC under a single public engagement umbrella that is intentionally nested into wider climate and just transition policy. The combination of a statutory net zero commitment for 2045, a national strategy that maps a clear logic, ring-fenced small-scale innovation funding, and a distributed hub model to deliver place-based work is unique internationally. In short, while the individual elements of the PES exist in other nations, there is nothing exactly like Scotland’s PES in terms of the specific mix of programmes and ToC. However, Scotland’s PES sits in an international context of practice that values deliberation, public dialogue and participatory policy. Its structure gives it an opportunity to lead by example, particularly if it capitalises on the current window to strengthen its programme theory and show how local experimentation feeds strategy, thereby turning international endorsement of citizen engagement into examples of cumulative impact.

Detail on M&E for international public engagement on climate change

Scotland’s PES recognises climate change as a collective societal challenge and intentionally seeks to build public understanding, participation and action. It also seeks to monitor and evaluate engagement in a way that balances standardised metrics with sensitivity to local variation, supporting iterative learning while ensuring that people feel their contribution meaningfully influences progress. The review of international examples identified two examples of public engagement approaches which provide useful case studies for Scotland’s PES. These examples are given in Appendix D – Case studies.

Among these examples, Wales is at the earliest stage of delivery but has taken the clearest step toward constructing a structured evaluation architecture. The Welsh Government’s Public Engagement Strategy is underpinned by a detailed Theory of Change developed through participatory workshops, which clarifies assumptions, dependencies and intermediate outcomes across four “green choice” themes (Welsh Government 2023 p.19). Although a full evaluation framework has not yet been finalised, Wales has already identified a range of measurable outputs including media, press and visual assets, engagement analytics, demographic insight work and other activity metrics. It has also outlined how outcome measurement will draw on existing national datasets such as the Climate Change Perceptions and Actions Survey, the Welsh Government National Survey and the Climate Action Wales Behavioural Tracking Survey.

Canada’s Climate Action and Awareness Fund represents a very different model. Rather than a unified strategy, it provides funding to diverse external organisations, resembling Scotland’s Climate Engagement Fund. Each project or programme has its own objectives, reporting requirements, and spending targets, although these are not centrally collated and stated on the Government webpage. There is no overarching evaluation framework, no shared Theory of Change and no centralised data infrastructure for public engagement outcomes. Reporting is limited to project-level activity counts and summary outputs, with little evidence of systematic feedback loops. Without national-level KPIs or harmonised indicators, Canada’s approach generates significant activity but no mechanism to understand cumulative public engagement impact or system-level change.

Saint Lucia offers the strongest example of population-level monitoring among the three cases, although its programme-level evaluation remains nascent. Its Communications Strategy draws on a long-running series of Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices (KAP) surveys, which provide baseline data on public awareness, perceptions and climate-relevant behaviours. These datasets effectively function as Saint Lucia’s headline KPIs, enabling the government to track shifts in understanding and attitudes over time. While current communications activities rely mainly on one-way information tools such as media monitoring and virtual awareness materials, the repeated KAP surveys provide a rare longitudinal evidence base against which emerging engagement efforts can be assessed. Future evaluation work linked to the National Adaptation Plan is anticipated, but systems for programme-level assessment are still developing.

Across the three examples of public engagement at national scale, Wales illustrates the importance of establishing clear assumptions, risks and delivery dependencies at the outset through structured ToC development, while also acknowledging that meaningful evaluation depends on sustained dialogue between delivery partners and the communities involved (McNamara & Foss, 2024). In contrast, Canada’s Climate Action and Awareness Fund highlights the risks of operating without a coherent strategic framework: the lack of formal feedback mechanisms, the early curtailment of the programme and concerns raised by the Office of the Auditor General about weak planning all point to a disconnect between activity and evaluative rigour (Office of the Auditor General of Canada 2021 p.29). Saint Lucia demonstrates the value of anchoring public engagement in community expectations and lived experience, with respondents emphasising the need for greater education, sensitisation and community-based research to guide adaptation practices. Taken together, these cases underline that while many countries invest in climate engagement, Scotland remains at the forefront of practice in actively commissioning and operationalising a strategic-level evaluation capable of generating cumulative insights across multiple years and programmes of public engagement.

Scotland’s PES therefore sits at the forefront of this emerging area, attempting to do what few others have yet achieved: evaluate public engagement not as isolated interventions, but as a coordinated portfolio whose combined impact can be assessed over time. This research therefore echoes the findings of the Millar et al. report: “Scotland is already leading the way – not only in having a Public Engagement Strategy on Climate Change in place, but also in seeking to review and evaluate its progress” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 3).

The absence of a clear international blueprint makes it both necessary and appropriate to return to first principles when considering how the PES should be evaluated. Where comparable strategies are limited, evaluation cannot rely on replication of existing models or indicators. Instead, it must be grounded in established guidance on how to evaluate complex, adaptive interventions operating within dynamic systems. The following section explores the complexity of the PES and its operating environment in more detail, exploring key variables and considerations relevant to the choice of evaluation approaches and providing guidance on how methods and metrics should be selected to generate credible, useful learning.

First principles of evaluation in complex systems

As detailed in 6.3 International examples of public engagement strategies on climate change, there are few examples of international governments who have implemented strategies or initiatives similar in scale and structure to Scotland’s PES. It follows that there are few robust evaluations or precedent for evaluating interventions like the PES. Therefore, the next step in the process of this research was to consider: What is best practice for evaluating complex, multi-stranded government interventions more generally (i.e., not specific to public engagement and/or climate change)? What are useful examples of where this has been done?

First principles of evaluation in complex systems: Key takeaways for the findings of this report

The PES encompasses a diverse set of interventions which operate in a complex system, designed to engage the full breadth of the Scottish public on climate change, across all sectors and geographies.

The complexity and diversity of variables and forces involved poses challenges for evaluation. This is because these confounding factors make it difficult to isolate the impact of the intervention, therefore limiting the conclusions that can be drawn and claims made about strict causality, tying changes observed at society level directly back to PES activities.

Evaluations of interventions operating within complex systems require a clear programme theory or Theory of Change (ToC), setting out the reasoning behind how the intervention is meant to work, including causal pathways, assumptions, and evidence. The PES has a high-level ToC in place; however, the current version will need to be expanded if it is to serve as a useful foundation for robust evaluation. A full discussion of how to approach this need, including a template, has been provided in Appendix C – Using the Theory of Change as an evaluation tool.

Specific methods which could be useful include participatory systems mapping, Most Significant Change, or outcome harvesting (Bicket, et al., 2020). These are methods that the Scottish Government policy teams could use with PES delivery partners and trusted messengers to capture their understanding of how the PES is delivering impact on the ground and articulate this through a full Theory of Change. This will address the identified need for the Scottish Government to be able to more clearly articulate how and why different climate engagement activities, such as those set out in the PES, can work together to deliver intended outcomes.

Best practice for evaluating complex policy interventions builds on the same principles that underpin evaluation across government: evaluation must be proportionate, fit-for-purpose, and embedded from the earliest stages of strategy and programme design. The Green Book (UK Central Government Guidance on Appraisal and Evaluation) provides the overarching structure for aligning objectives, monitoring and evaluation across strategies, programmes and projects (HM Treasury, 2022), while the Magenta Book (UK Central Government Guidance on Evaluation) sets out the core methodological requirements for credible, theory-based evaluation, including the need for a clear Theory of Change, well-defined evaluation questions and appropriate methods for addressing complexity (HM Treasury, 2020).

The Magenta Book defines any policy, programme or activity intended to bring about change as an “intervention” and stresses that evaluation planning begins before implementation. A credible evaluation plan must identify the objectives of the intervention, articulate a clear Theory of Change (ToC), outline any necessary literature reviews, specify the evaluation questions, identify when and by whom evidence will be needed, plan for detecting unintended outcomes, account for wider contextual factors and set out methods, data requirements and the resources required. Evaluation questions define the scope of the work and should be informed by the purpose of the evaluation, gaps or uncertainties identified in the ToC and the needs of stakeholders such as funders, implementers and affected groups. They should also reflect key decision points for the intervention and the expected use of findings, including short-term needs such as benefits realisation and longer-term learning about what works, why and for whom.

The Magenta Book sets out a staged process for evaluation:

• Scoping, which involves developing a detailed understanding of the intervention and choosing evaluation questions and approaches;
  
• Method and data design, which involves selecting methods, collecting data and analysing evidence;
  
• Use and dissemination of findings in order to support ongoing learning and accountability (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 20).

The Green Book complements this by recommending that interventions use a small number of SMART objectives supported by a clear rationale and evidence-based appraisal. These objectives should align across strategies, programmes and projects, with programme objectives framed as outcomes and project objectives framed as outputs that enable those outcomes (HM Treasury, 2022, p. 26).

What do these steps look like in the context of the PES? The PES operates within a complex, adaptive system, where interventions interact with an evolving policy context, diverse stakeholder groups and long-term feedback loops. In such environments, traditional, linear, “did‑it‑work” evaluations struggle to establish clear attribution due to the number of variables and influencers involved. Robust causality is difficult to infer, particularly in the absence of a counterfactual (i.e., “What would have happened in the absence of the PES?”). The Magenta Book discusses the aspects of complex systems which pose challenges for evaluation:

“Because of the multiple interactions and influences in complex systems, the relationship between a policy intervention and its outcomes may be far from straightforward. For example:

• Complex Systems may be in continual change, or might resist change, as different parts respond at different times, or adapt to maintain the ‘status quo’ (linked to the characteristics of adaptation, feedback loops, emergence and self-organisation and domains of stability);
  
• Context (and history) matters: the same intervention will often have different outcomes in different contexts, or if delivered in a slightly different way (linked to the characteristics of being an open system and path dependency);
  
• The nature of the change is unpredictable, going faster or slower, or taking a different path to the one expected (linked to the characteristics of non-linearity, unexpected indirect effects, feedback loops, levers and hubs and tipping points);
  
• Multiple perspectives: different actors within the system will often have different views of what is happening, and this can influence the way they respond to an intervention.” (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 18)

These confounding aspects of complex systems have consequences for the steps to developing and carrying out an evaluation. For a detailed definitions and discussions of the different properties of complex systems, see Magenta Book Supplementary Guide: Handling Complexity in Policy Evaluation (Bicket, et al., 2020). All of these properties apply to the PES and its wider context, to varying degrees. Therefore, how does this affect the steps for the Scottish Government to explore, scope evaluation, and select appropriate methods?

Appraisal: Building understanding of the PES and its context

At the outset of commissioning and managing an evaluation, it is essential to develop an initial understanding of the policy or intervention being evaluated and the context in which it operates. This early understanding underpins both the initial evaluation design and the deeper insights generated as the evaluation progresses. The Magenta Book recommends that evaluators develop a clear map of the intervention and its intended outcomes using tools such as logic models, policy mapping or a Theory of Change (ToC), particularly where this has not already been undertaken during policy planning or appraisal. This mapping stage becomes especially important where policies are complex, as it helps clarify how different elements are expected to interact and where risks and uncertainties may arise (Bicket, et al., 2020).

• A Theory of Change (ToC) is a structured, explicit explanation of how and why an intervention is expected to lead to desired outcomes. It sets out the causal pathways linking activities and outputs to short-, medium- and long-term outcomes, and makes explicit the assumptions, risks and external factors that must hold true for change to occur. A ToC is typically used to guide planning, monitoring and evaluation by clarifying what success looks like, what evidence is needed, and where learning should focus.
  
• A system map is a visual or analytical representation of the wider system in which an intervention operates, showing the multiple drivers, relationships, feedback loops and contextual factors that influence outcomes. Rather than focusing on a single intervention’s intended pathway, system mapping seeks to understand how change actually emerges within a complex system, including non-linear dynamics, interdependencies, leverage points and unintended effects. System maps are descriptive rather than prescriptive and are particularly useful for diagnosing complexity and revealing where interventions may interact or conflict.

Where appropriate, system mapping and modelling approaches can complement logic models or Theories of Change, either before or alongside them, to encourage a broader understanding of the multiple interacting factors that shape delivery and outcomes. Where system mapping has already been undertaken during appraisal (i.e., the “building understanding” step), it can provide a strong foundation for evaluation design. In highly complex interventions, the boundary between appraisal and evaluation may be blurred, with ongoing learning requiring regular review and adaptation of the intervention itself. In such cases, evaluation should actively feed back into decision-making, supporting continuous reflection, adjustment and, where necessary, reappraisal over the life of the policy.

The Defra complexity evaluation framework, as shown in Figure 2, illustrates the iterative nature of evaluation for complex policy frameworks. The framework emphasises that, for policy evaluations in complex contexts, developing understanding of the system and designing the evaluation are simultaneous, related, iterative processes, rather than taking place sequentially, as might be possible for simpler contexts and interventions. These processes continue throughout the evaluation’s life cycle, adapting it as necessary as understanding improves. Understanding and design allow evaluators to clarify the evaluation purpose, which sits at the centre of the framework. Understanding and designing are conducted with the support of stakeholders, therefore learning is fed back and embedded into relevant processes both inside and outside the evaluation. All of these evaluation components are managed by the evaluation team and/or commissioners in response to findings and evolving needs (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 27).

The PES seeks to help enable change on a whole-of-society basis, and a broad array of factors and variables will influence its outcomes. Articulating a robust Theory of Change (and perhaps a broader system map) is important to clarify how the PES is meant to work, its “programme theory,” which evaluation then assesses. As discussed in the previous section, change rarely follows a simple or linear pathway from inputs to outcomes in complex systems. For this reason, early mapping should be treated as provisional rather than definitive. Its value can be significantly enhanced by involving stakeholders who have detailed knowledge of the delivery context or experience of similar interventions elsewhere, as they can help anticipate how complexity may influence outcomes.

The PES has an existing Theory of Change (Figure 7 in Appendix C). However, this version was designed to be a communication tool to summarise PES thinking, rather than to reflect the full scope of the PES or for use as an evaluation tool. Scottish Government teams, PES delivery partners, and the wider informal network of trusted messengers all hold significant knowledge about the PES, the practical realities of how it works, and insight into local contexts to which it is applied. Co-creating a comprehensive Theory of Change and potentially a wider system map would provide an opportunity to capture and visualise this knowledge, creating a resource which clearly communicates the logic and applications of the PES for internal and external audiences. This addresses the identified need to more clearly articulate how and why different climate engagement activities can work together to deliver intended outcomes.

The first step of a strengthened M&E system for the PES is therefore to expand this ToC. Practical approaches and methods for doing this are:

• Participatory Systems Mapping: Qualitative, participatory mapping approaches to draw out multiple perspectives and generate deeper shared understanding of the system, causal mechanisms and the process of change. Maps can be analysed using network analysis tools to help identify aspects of the system such as: key influences, trade-offs, feedbacks, and vulnerabilities (see practical guide from the Centre for Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus here).
  
• Most Significant Change: Significant change stories emanating from the field level, are periodically collected and the most significant selected by panels of designated stakeholders or staff. Once changes have been captured, groups sit down together, read the stories aloud and have regular and often in-depth discussions about why the stories are considered significant and in particular, to learn about the similarities and differences in what different groups and individuals’ value. It provides some information about impact and unintended impact but is primarily about clarifying the values held by different stakeholders (see comprehensive overview from BetterEvaluation here).
  
• Outcome Harvesting: A participatory methodology that collects (‘harvests’) evidence of what has changed (‘outcomes’) and then, working backwards, determines whether and how an intervention has contributed to these changes. Various data collection methods such as interviews and surveys (face-to-face, by telephone, by e-mail), workshops and document review can be employed. It is repeated as often as necessary to understand what the intervention is achieving (see comprehensive overview from BetterEvaluation here) (UK Government 2021 pp.59-60)

These are useful methods for building understanding of the intervention and its context, outputting an updated ToC and potentially a wider system map, which then informs evaluation design. The PES ToC should be expanded based on the knowledge and lived experience of trusted messengers and delivery partners. This directly addresses the need for this research, to more clearly articulate how and why different climate engagement activities can work together to deliver intended outcomes. Additional guidance on how to do this, including applying the above methods, is given in Appendix C – Using the Theory of Change as an evaluation tool. A robust, articulated Theory of Change is absolutely a prerequisite for evaluating a complex intervention operating within a complex system.

Key factors in evaluation design

As discussed in the previous section and visualised in Figure 2, building understanding and evaluation design are parallel, iterative processes. The key factors impinging on evaluation design are the system attributes (explored and clarified in the through the “building understanding” step, constructing a robust ToC and/or system map), the evaluation purpose (depends on the intervention’s stage/maturity and needs of key stakeholders), and what are feasible designs (depends on availability of data, expertise and resources) (Figure 3).

This section explores these key factors in detail and relates them specifically to the PES.

Key factors in evaluation design: Key takeaways for the findings of this report

Evaluation of public engagement is complex. Appropriate approaches are determined based on the context and specific goals of the intervention and evaluation. Complex, multi-stranded interventions operating in systems affected by many variables (such as Scotland’s PES) require agile, flexible approaches to evaluation. Together, these conclusions point to an evaluation style that:

• centres on a refined ToC that articulates the three PES objectives (Understand, Participate, Act) and the causal chains which clarify how PES activities and programmes support them
  
• adopts a mixed‑methods design that embraces different data types, combining high‑level quantitative tracking (national indicators like Scottish Household Survey, campaign reach) with deep qualitative inquiry (case studies, stakeholder interviews, participatory system mapping) for different PES programmes and activities, as appropriate
  
• uses theory‑based evaluation approaches (such as contribution analysis) to uncover mechanisms, which can handle these diverse data types and contextual conditions. These will give insight into the degree of contribution, while acknowledging that a pure experimental counterfactual is unlikely to be feasible.

Theory-based evaluations are based around a robust Theory of Change and are bespoke to the stated objectives of each intervention. Based on the evaluation purpose, system attributes, and feasibility, this report recommends a hybrid design for PES M&E, combining elements of participatory and theory-based to strengthen and address the challenges to M&E. The next section explores the opportunities and practical considerations to applying a contribution analysis approach to the PES.

Evaluation purpose: PES M&E challenges and needs at strategy level

The Magenta Book discusses several key purposes for evaluation: accountability (i.e., evidence of impact; Has the intervention achieved its aims? Has it represented good value for public money?); learning (i.e., How is the intervention working or not working? How can it be improved?); and listening and building (i.e., ensuring diverse voices play a part; builds trust and legitimacy across stakeholders) (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 31).

All of these purposes are relevant and important for the PES:

Accountability: “We will draw together all the data we have collected from our programme evaluations to date, our national indicators and any bespoke commissioned research to provide an assessment of our overall progress towards our strategic objectives.”

Learning/process: “We will also use this as an opportunity to gather feedback from key stakeholders and delivery partners on what aspects of the strategy they think are working well and what could be improved. The findings of this review will be made available and we will use them to shape and inform the remainder of the strategy’s implementation.”

Listening and building: “Responses to our consultation highlighted the importance of involving wider stakeholders in our evaluation activity, including recognising the role of community-led methods and data collection. We are committed to working with our delivery partners in designing programme evaluations that not only track progress towards objectives but also provide opportunities for learning and development” (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 43).

The stakeholder workshop that was conducted as part of this research was also an important opportunity to understand the purposes of PES evaluation from the perspective of the Scottish Government teams who are responsible for shaping and steering the strategy, commissioning evaluations, and integrating resulting findings:

“That there’s so many different levels and lenses that you can look at the PES in terms of what it’s trying to deliver. And so, finding a way to organise that in the monitoring and evaluation that allows us to identify gaps or big successes, or maybe where more effort is needed, I think that’s the key thing. […] Saying, “Do we have the right combination of these kinds of tools and metrics and things to paint the whole picture and be able to then identify those highs and lows?” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

It is clear from the above that PES evaluation will ideally cover all purposes of evaluation, based on the evaluation questions that key PES stakeholders want to see addressed. This therefore informs evaluation design and the selection of methods which can deliver on each of these for the PES at strategy level.

System attributes: Addressing different scales and styles of engagement within the PES

The PES is a complex and multi-stranded set of interventions because it is designed to address a complex and thorny problem. Scottish Government’s approach to climate action is described using the language of “widespread,” “transformational,” and the framing of the PES document emphasises a “holistic, systemic approach” to public engagement (Scottish Government, 2021). The PES includes a diversity of layers, scales, and styles of engagement in order to provide robust and comprehensive approach to the wide-ranging issue of how to meaningfully engage the public on climate change.

As discussed in 5.2 Overview of PES history, programmes & partners, the component programmes of the PES are designed to contribute to its strategic objectives, Understand, Participate and Act. PES programmes provide national coverage, aiming to reach as many members of the Scottish public as possible and providing opportunities to participate and get further involved. PES programmes are also tailored and delivered in local context. For example, Climate Action Hubs and Schools are delivered at regional level, adapting to the needs of their areas. This is intentional, delivering key climate messaging through trusted messengers:

“Community groups already have an existing audience that they work with, and they might communicate with, their social media, their notice board in their village hall etc. And they also know people and they have an understanding of their issues and their priorities” (Quote from interview)

Locally embedded PES delivery partners and wider trusted messengers translate strategic objectives into locally relevant activity. They also tie into the social fabric of each local area in different ways and can act as catalysts for widespread change^[2], as was shared by a PES stakeholder involved with Climate Action Schools:

“Quite often it’s actually local schools that act as, or have acted as a catalyst for climate action in a local area. In some parts of the country, schools are very active and outward-looking in terms of their work, and they do engage with local businesses and local community groups […]Local authority officers who have engaged with us and seen the value of what we offer continue to return, request further support, and try to encourage schools to participate. While their influence over schools is limited, they persist because they recognise that our offer supports their own local authority targets, climate action plans, and wider sustainability objectives.” (Quote from interview)

Climate Engagement Fund projects are delivered at a range of scales (including specific cities and regions) and by a range of organisations from different sectors (e.g., museums, universities, charities, etc.) (Figure 4).

Activity delivered under these programmes varies widely. The differing scales and demographics of target audiences of these programmes, or the aspects of the PES strategy that they are designed to deliver, determines how they shape their delivery and set their own KPIs.

• Programmes aiming to increase understanding across the full breadth of society, such as the Let’s Do Net Zero communications, Net Zero Nation website, and communications around Climate Week or other events represent very broad, but comparatively shallow engagement. They collect KPIs such as number of Scottish adults reached, how many times they saw activity, and data collected from website traffic such as followers, email engagement, and downloads of materials.
  
• Conversely, programmes delivering deeper engagement in narrower, local contexts, face-to-face with participants, such as the Climate Action Hubs, Climate Action Schools, and Climate Engagement Fund projects can collect more detailed and qualitative data such as demographics reached, changes in understanding, confidence, or intended behaviour changes, and a wide range of other metrics and case studies collected from people participating directly in PES programmes and activities (Scottish Government, 2025).

PES programmes each have their own monitoring and evaluation strategies in place, proportionate to their scale and maturity. Scottish Government teams collect data from projects and programmes managed by locally embedded delivery partners, such as quarterly monitoring forms from Climate Engagement Fund projects. The Climate Action Hubs have a fully refreshed M&E system, which includes a spreadsheet linking key data fields / KPIs to the Hubs ToC. Climate Action Hubs also set additional, individual KPIs based on the priorities of the local community:

“Spending a lot more time getting to understand the local landscape and what other funders are offering in the area and things like that has meant that, this year, our KPIs are probably a bit more bespoke, whereas in the first year they were probably more similar to some of the other Hubs.” (Quote from interview)

Climate Engagement Fund projects are encouraged to do the same, with a part of their monitoring forms left for free text entry about what they have achieved beyond the standard KPIs. This makes sense: PES programmes are all different, each designed to address a different part of the PES’s overall objectives, and require different monitoring approaches and metrics to capture and reflect the outcomes of their delivery. It would not make sense to compare them based on the same metrics. The diversity of trusted delivery routes strengthens the Strategy by increasing the likelihood that climate messaging reaches a wider and more diverse public. At the same time, it further underscores the importance of programme-specific monitoring frameworks that can capture how different forms of trust, audience reach and engagement contribute to the Strategy’s shared objectives rather than attempting to assess performance through standardised indicators alone. The following interview quote expands on this idea in the context of the PES’s three strategic objectives:

“For the Participate outcome, it makes a lot of sense to me to do the deep dive deliberative stuff. […] If you engage 100 people, you can have a really useful participatory process that really does change and inform policy in a useful way. You don’t need to talk to all 5 million people, you wouldn’t get that much more from talking to a lot more people, right? Whereas for the other two impact outcomes [Understand and Act], it’s more complicated, because you have to raise awareness across the majority of the population, or you have to get most people to act. […] We’ll never reach everybody, but we have to get enough people that they influence each other, and businesses, and other organisations.” (Quote from interview)

However, the diversity of scales, approaches, and corresponding data types poses challenges for summing up the impact the PES is having as a whole, coherent strategy, as highlighted in the MPR:

“At the time of this review the portfolio of activity in support of the PES represented a variety of approaches at different stages of delivery. Activities operate at a range of scales, with different measures of success which are difficult to aggregate or compare across. These factors add to the complexity and challenge of evaluation.” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 10)

The central challenge for PES M&E at strategy level is to create a framework which can use this diversity of scales, approaches, and data types to assess and communicate the cumulative impact of the PES. This has implications for which evaluation approaches and methods are feasible, discussed in the next section.

Feasible designs: Selecting appropriate evaluation approaches for the PES at strategy level

The central challenge for PES M&E is to build an evaluation framework at strategy level that can:

• account for different scales and styles of engagement,
  
• remain adaptable and agile, and
  
• capture emergent and unintended outcomes.

There are a variety of potentially suitable evaluation approaches and methods that could be applied to the PES, working within a Theory of Change framework. The below list of approaches comes from the Magenta Book supplementary guide on handling complexity in policy evaluation, laying out a typology of evaluation approaches which can be used in complex contexts:

• Participatory, emancipatory and adaptive approaches such as developmental evaluation, action research and peer challenge, highly responsive and exploratory approaches in which stakeholders take an active part in the delivery of the evaluation providing real time feedback on the policy.
  
• Theory-based approaches which articulate a theory of how the policy is working to deliver change, then seek to test this to investigate whether, why or how the policy causes or contributes to observed results, and whether alternative explanations can be ruled out. Approaches include:
  • Systems mapping and modelling, used to generate, progress and test the theory of change through an iterative process of developing and testing a formal model of the system, and
    
  • Generative causation approaches, such as realist evaluation and contribution analysis, that seek to articulate underlying mechanisms or processes of change, and test the theory empirically to investigate whether, why or how the policy causes or contributes to observed results, and how context influences these.
    
• Configurational case-based approaches such as qualitative comparative analysis, which support systematic analysis of a number of cases of the intervention being evaluated to identify the configuration of factors, or combinations of factors, that appear necessary or sufficient, to success.
  
• Counterfactual approaches, including:
  • Experimental approaches such as randomised control trials, and quasi-experimental such as difference in difference, which provide a usually quantitative measure of the extent to which any observed changes in an outcome of interest were caused by the intervention (or treatment) by means of a comparison of results obtained for a treatment group with those in a non-treatment control, and
    
  • Predictive approaches, which attempt to predict what would have happened in the absence of the treatment using statistical or simulation modelling; in its simplest form, predictive approaches use informant opinion as to whether impacts would have happened in the absence of an intervention.
• Statistical association approaches, that look for correlations between cause and effect or between variables, to explore the influence of (usually) isolatable multiple causes on a single effect, while controlling for ‘confounders’.
  
• Synthesis designs, such as realist synthesis, which seek to draw conclusions by combining results from evaluations drawn from several contexts. (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 42)

As discussed in previous sections, choosing feasible and appropriate evaluation approaches from this list depends on evaluation purpose and system attributes. Figure 5 plots these approaches based on two key attributes of complex systems, their degree of certainty and agreement. On the horizontal axis, policy areas that are far from certainty benefit from approaches which embrace systems thinking (i.e., developing a system map and ToC; seeking data about scope, context and interactions), whereas better understood systems may not require this depth. On the vertical axis, policy areas that are further from agreement benefit from more participatory methods (i.e., wide engagement, participatory mapping, agile and adaptive management), whereas areas where there is less of a diversity of positions may not require this breadth. This illustrates why participatory, adaptive, generative approaches are more suitable for multi-stranded interventions operating in complex systems, such as the PES. Adapted from (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 44).

Counterfactual and/or statistical evaluation approaches provide the clearest and most robust evidence for strict attribution of impacts, i.e. “The intervention clearly has had these effects, because they are present in treatment cases and absent in control groups.” However, counterfactual approaches are often challenging in complex settings because they necessitate control groups and the tight controlling of variables (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 46). A central challenge of evaluation in the PES is that it is a very “open” system, with many possible variables and local settings affecting the delivery of its activities. This quote from the Magenta Book demonstrates the difficulties that this poses for experimental approaches:

“An experimental design used to evaluate a programme designed to help disabled people into work foundered when it was discovered that organisations operating in different locations delivered the intervention in different ways, tailoring this to the types and levels of disability they were dealing with, and the kind of work opportunities available locally. […] As well as making it difficult to clearly articulate, or standardise, the intervention, these factors also made it difficult to identify and collect uniform data from an intervention group and a control sample” (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 23).

Counterfactual approaches are

“difficult to apply where causal pathways are complex, little understood and hard to unravel, making them unsuited to analysis through the experimental manipulation of single causal factors. Can, by their generalising nature, hide the initial emergence of new phenomena in a complex system” (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 55).

While an updated ToC for the PES would clarify its assumed causal pathways leading from inputs to impacts, the breadth of the PES’s activities and target audiences make counterfactual and other reductive approaches unsuitable at this stage of its development.

Due to the complexity of the PES’s system attributes, as well as the diversity of its programmes, activities, and outcomes, PES M&E will need to embrace an evaluation design which is flexible, agile, and which embraces systems thinking and participation. These factors point towards participatory, emancipatory, adaptive, and theory-based approaches. These types of approaches have important advantages which make them suitable for strategy-level evaluation of the PES.

For policies that are multi-stranded, evolve over time, and interact with wider social, political and institutional systems (like the PES), evaluation approaches must be theory-based, flexible and capable of accommodating non-linear change, multiple causal pathways and uncertainty. An evaluation framework for the PES must be built from a clear understanding of what the Strategy is trying to achieve, how change is expected to occur, and which assumptions are most critical to test. By focusing on Theory of Change development, contribution rather than attribution, and the careful selection of proportionate methods, the approach aligns with Magenta Book guidance for complex interventions where experimental designs are neither feasible nor appropriate. This also creates space to explicitly consider system effects such as feedback loops, reinforcing mechanisms and contextual variation, features that are central to public engagement but often invisible in simpler evaluation models.

The main limitation of theory-based approaches is their inability to strictly attribute the change (the “effect size”) to the intervention. However, they are good at articulating why an intervention is working and exploring how it is working or not working in certain contexts, and whether this might be transferrable to other contexts. Theory based approaches can also embrace and reconcile different evaluation methods and data types (e.g., output and performance monitoring, surveys, interviews, focus groups, case studies, ethnographies) (HM Treasury, 2020, pp. 42-43). This makes an overarching theory-based approach a good choice for the PES at strategy level, as it could incorporate the outputs of programme-level evaluations in a hybrid design:

“None of these approaches or methods is mutually exclusive. In evaluation it is common to combine different methods so that conclusions are based on several different sources of information gathered in different ways. For complex evaluations, often what is required is a hybrid design in which two or more approaches are combined and tailored to meet the needs of the evaluation” (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 43).

The Magenta Book explicitly recommends an adaptive management style for complex issues, embedding evaluation in implementation, using regular feedback loops and allowing the design to evolve as new insights emerge. Both the Magenta Book and the Guide stress that learning (risk‑management, improvement) and accountability (demonstrating impact) can be pursued simultaneously when the evaluation is proportionate, iterative and focused on contribution rather than strict causality.

Recommended approach: Applying contribution analysis to the PES at strategy level

Applying a contribution analysis approach to the PES at strategy level: Key takeaways for the findings of this report

This section demonstrates that contribution analysis provides a robust, proportionate framework for evaluating the PES at strategy level in the absence of experimental counterfactuals.

Rather than standardising or aggregating diverse programme data, it shows how a refreshed Theory of Change and theory-based evaluation can credibly integrate multiple data types to build a coherent contribution story across Understand, Participate and Act.

The analysis confirms that the PES already generates much of the right evidence; the key gap is not data collection but strategic synthesis, target-setting and sense-making.

Delivery partners and trusted messengers are central to this approach as contributors to appraisal, learning and innovation. Storytelling and case studies play a vital role in communicating impact where quantitative attribution is neither feasible nor appropriate.

To evaluate the impacts of the PES, we recommend the Scottish Government applies contribution analysis. This is a particularly useful method when experimental counterfactuals are impossible. It provides a structured, step-by-step approach to examining whether an intervention plausibly contributed to observed outcomes, whether the causal pathways in the ToC are supported by evidence and whether alternative explanations can be ruled out. It does this by testing and refining the ToC, examining the strength of evidence for each causal link, integrating quantitative and qualitative data, and assessing whether rival explanations offer a better account of the change. Although it cannot offer definitive proof of attribution, it can provide reasoned and credible evidence of contribution. It is most effective when supported by a clear and well-specified ToC and is particularly suitable for complex portfolios such as large public engagement programmes, where outcomes arise from multiple interacting influences and where interventions vary in type, scale and context (HM Treasury, 2020).

Other theory-based tools include realist evaluation, which examines what works, for whom, in what contexts. However, realist evaluation is more about how the intervention is working (process evaluation), while contribution analysis is skewed towards attribution, tying activities to impacts (impact evaluation) (HM Treasury, 2020, pp. 14-15). Process tracing and qualitative comparative analysis tests causal pathways in cases. These could be useful to investigate specific PES programmes which are less well understood or have not yet been evaluated. Innovative complements might include systems mapping (wider context / ecosystem), outcome harvesting (works back from observed changes), potentially useful for constructing the ToC, discussed in Appendix C – Using the Theory of Change as an evaluation tool (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 49).

Applying contribution analysis to the PES could provide a robust framework for Scottish Government teams to understand how their PES activities influence society. Since experimental designs are infeasible for the complexity of evaluating large-scale public engagement, contribution analysis allows teams to infer causality by verifying the ToC behind the PES, confirming that the expected chain of results occurred, and accounting for external factors. By following the six iterative steps below, Scottish Government teams can build a “contribution story” that provides a credible assessment of whether the PES has made a difference in how people in Scotland understand, participate in, and act on climate change.

Step 1: Set out the attribution problem to be addressed

The first step for Scottish Government teams is to acknowledge the attribution problem: determining the extent to which observed changes in public attitudes and behaviours are due to PES activities rather than external factors (e.g., global news, energy price fluctuations, or UK-wide policies). This involves moving from the question of, for example, “To what extent did the PES cause behavioural change across society?” to the manageable question: “Is it reasonable to conclude that the PES activities have made a difference to the public’s willingness to engage with net zero?”. This is a subtle but important change – While contribution analysis cannot strictly quantify the “effect size” of an intervention, it provides a framework to verify the links of the causal chains which lead to desired impacts.

Step 2: Develop the Theory of Change and the risks to it

As discussed in 7.1 Appraisal: Building understanding of the PES and its context, robust evaluation hinges on an updated PES ToC, which maps out how PES activities lead to the strategy’s three pillars: Understand, Participate, and Act. This involves creating chains that link outputs (what the government does) to immediate outcomes (reactions or outtakes), intermediate outcomes (e.g., behavioural or other observable changes), and final impacts. Within these chains, the method requires the identification of assumptions (the conditions that must exist for one step to lead to the next) and the risks that might prevent this progression.

The below list provides some example, high-level causal pathways for PES objectives. These illustrate some pathways through the PES Theory of Change, illustrating how Inputs / Activities lead to Outputs, which lead to Outtakes^[3], which lead to Outcomes, together building to contribute to Impacts. These are presented, as well as the types of evidence which can support each. Assumptions are listed, including some taken from the ToC for the Wales PES, where these are relevant to Scotland’s PES. For a full discussion of how to refresh and update the PES ToC and how this builds into the evaluation framework, see Appendix C – Using the Theory of Change as an evaluation tool.

• Understand: “Let’s Do Net Zero” Campaign (Inputs/Activities; Outputs, evidenced through monitoring data) → Public recall of campaign messaging (Immediate Outcome or Outtake, evidenced through surveys, e.g.) → Improved knowledge of how climate change relates to individual lives (Outcome, evidenced through surveys or poll, e.g.) → Increased awareness of Scotland’s collective net zero goals (Outcome, evidenced through surveys or poll, e.g.) → (Supports) Implement the updated Climate Change Plan (Impact, assumed)
  • Assumption: Increased understanding leads to further engagement and/or behaviour change, i.e., “if you know better, you do better.” Evidence for assumptions can be drawn from a wide variety of sources and constitutes the evidence base for the chosen approach overall. It should be robust and clear, showing how the intervention was developed based on the best available information (applies to all) (HM Treasury, 2020, pp. 36-37).
    
  • Assumption: Trusted messengers make climate change content more resonant and relevant to local contexts.
• Participate: Climate Policy Engagement Network / Participation Programme (Input/Activity; Outputs, evidenced via monitoring data) → Participants feel their voices are heard and valued (Immediate Outcome or Outtake, evidenced through surveys or poll, e.g.) → Public input is integrated into draft Just Transition Plans (Outcome, evidenced through internal monitoring or policy audit, e.g.) → Policies are more fair, inclusive, and supported by the community (Impact, assumed).
  • Assumption: “Involving the public, including disadvantaged groups, in decision-making on the climate will lead to better outcomes for the wider public and disadvantaged groups.” (McNamara & Foss, 2024, p. 30)
    
  • Assumption: There is a robust feedback loop in place, where the government explicitly communicates how participant recommendations were acted upon, maintaining trust in the process.
• Act: Funding for Climate Action Hubs (Input, evidenced via monitoring data) → Local organisations have increased capacity and networks (Output, evidenced through monitoring data) → Communities initiate and sustain local climate projects (Outcome, evidenced through monitoring data) → Taking action is normalised in households and communities (Impact, assumed).
  • Assumption: “Improvements are required to the capability, opportunity and motivation outcomes for there to be improvements in the behaviour outcomes. This is the core logic of the strongly evidenced COM-B model of behaviour change.” (McNamara & Foss, 2024, p. 55)
    
  • Assumption: “Partners have the institutional and technical capacity required to deliver and amplify the Strategy’s activities” (McNamara & Foss, 2024, p. 42). Long-term, intensive support is provided rather than one-off grants, because community-led action requires sustained capacity building to be effective.

Step 3: Gather existing evidence on the Theory of Change

In this step, teams utilise existing data (such as the data collected for and presented in the Mid-Point Review (MPR) to validate the links in the ToC. Evidence must be gathered in three areas: the implementation of activities, the occurrence of results, and the validity of assumptions.

Our review of the M&E in place across PES programmes finds that programmes are collecting many of the right types of data and indicators for quantifying the impact of government public engagement. For example, under the “Understand” objective, the MPR shows the “Let’s Do Net Zero” campaign reached 75% of Scottish adults, providing evidence for the first link in the results chain. For “Act,” independent evaluations of pathfinder Hubs confirm they have successfully empowered local organisations to initiate projects (Scottish Government, 2025). Furthermore, the MPR’s inclusion of the Millar et al. (2024) evidence review helps validate assumptions, such as the finding that the public wants honesty about the climate crisis balanced with practical, positive steps they can take.

As discussed in 8.2 System attributes: Addressing different scales and styles of engagement within the PES, programmes have their own M&E in place – The key job at strategy level is to collate the various scales and data types being collected across the PES and discuss how this evidences the strategy’s ToC, for which contribution analysis is a suitable method. For a full assessment and discussion on what data types are available to evidence different parts of the PES ToC, see Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E.

Step 4: Assemble and assess the contribution story

Evaluators now critically evaluate the contribution story developed so far. This involves identifying which links in the causal chain are strong and which are weak. For instance, while there is strong evidence for the Understand objective’s reach (campaign recall), the MPR acknowledges that it is difficult to attribute national shifts in public attitudes solely to the PES (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 10). A challenge to the story might be: “Even if awareness is high, does the PES actually cause the behavioural change, or is it the rising cost of energy?”. Identifying and addressing these weaknesses head-on allows teams to see where the logic of the PES needs more support or where the influence of external factors need more recognition or exploration.

Step 5: Seek out additional evidence

Based on the gaps identified in Step 4, evaluators then gather new data to strengthen the story. The MPR and our review highlighted several areas where current evidence could be strengthened:

• Demographic data: There is a lack of demographic data on participants in the Participation Programme, making it difficult to prove that the Participate programmes are reaching under-represented groups (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 24). New evidence collection could include standardised demographic monitoring of all engagement activities to identify any gaps in representation.
  
• Long-term behavioural tracking: While the Scottish Household Survey tracks general trends, the PES delivery partners interviewed as part of this research expressed interest in the long-term impact of specific interventions, such as whether people engaging with PES activities maintain their increased motivation to act over several years.
  
• However, collecting additional data is time consuming and costly. See 9.1 Proportionality: How can contribution analysis address the challenges of PES M&E in a feasible way?

Step 6: Revise and strengthen the contribution story

Contribution analysis is iterative; as new evidence is gathered; the story is refined. If the data shows that a certain assumption is false, the ToC and delivery may need to be adjusted to include more direct support or different messaging. By following this approach, Scottish Government teams can create a revised story that clearly demonstrates how the PES’s multi-layered approach has collectively contributed to Scotland’s transition to a net zero economy. This final story will not strictly quantify the effect size the PES, but it will be more credible than solely reporting activity outputs.

For an external guide to contribution analysis, see (Mayne, 2008).

Some of the key challenges which have been identified for PES M&E are:

• “More consistency in data gathering and reporting, aligned to the PES Theory of Change, would help strengthen the conclusions that can be drawn. There is opportunity to take action on this for the remainder of the PES delivery period, and particularly for designing the end of PES review.” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 3)
  
• “Activities operate at a range of scales, with different measures of success which are difficult to aggregate or compare across.” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 10)

A Theory of Change and linked evaluation framework for the PES at strategy level will address this gap in comparing across the diversity of PES programmes and activities. They will do this by articulating how the different PES programmes are designed to support its overall objectives in different ways and specify what evidence is needed to evidence that this is working in practice. The primary way to evidence the cumulative impact of the PES is not to attempt to standardise metrics collected across programmes to try to compare apples to apples, when these programmes take fundamentally different approaches; Rather, it is to articulate and provide evidence for how this mix of approaches is necessary and sufficient to deliver the PES’s overall objectives (Figure 6).

Programmes need not be directly comparable or simply aggregated. The PES takes a range of approaches and scales to address the needs for engagement at different levels. These programmes each have proportional M&E strategies in place, selecting appropriate KPIs. Contribution analysis makes it possible to have a common evaluation framework across this diversity because it is method-agnostic. This means that evaluators can mix and match specific evaluation methods and data types (e.g., output and performance monitoring, surveys, interviews, focus groups, case studies, ethnographies) to capture the outputs of the different PES programmes contributing. A refreshed Theory of Change framework will link these activities together, articulating the thinking behind this mix of approaches and specifying what types of measurable cumulative impacts are reasonably expected to be observed as a result. A theory-based approach, specifically contribution analysis, emerges as a good approach for this need.

For examples of where contribution analysis has been applied or proposed in similar contexts (The EU Adaptation Strategy on Climate Change and the Climate Action Wales Public Engagement Strategy), see Appendix D – Case studies.

Proportionality: How can contribution analysis address the challenges of PES M&E in a feasible way?

Proportionality is a foundational principle of government evaluation, dictating that the level of scrutiny and resource investment must align with the scale, risk, and innovation of the policy. Evaluation must be fit-for-purpose and tailored to the needs of decision-makers. For a low-risk, well-evidenced intervention, light-touch monitoring may suffice. The scale and complexity of the PES and its context necessitate a robust, proportional evaluation (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 16).

Regarding the specific allocation of resources, official guidance clarifies that there is no “standard proportion” or fixed percentage of a policy’s total value that should be dedicated to evaluation (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 69). Instead, the scale of investment is generally proportionate to the policy’s ambition and the degree of uncertainty involved. Key factors affecting resourcing include:

• Pilots and innovations: Interventions that are breaking new ground or involve high levels of uncertainty typically require a higher proportionate spend on evaluation than routine, established policies.
  
• Data collection costs: Collecting new primary data often constitutes the largest portion of an evaluation budget. Integrating data requirements into routine monitoring and administrative systems early on can substantially reduce these costs. The MPR showcases the depth of data already collected and available for PES programmes.
  
• Specialist expertise: Complex evaluations often require specialised skills in theory-based methods, systems mapping, or software for data visualisation, which should be factored into the management case of the business plan.

For the Scotland PES, the high interdependence of its Understand, Participate, and Act objectives suggests that evaluation resourcing should be significant enough to support a wide data “net,” capable of capturing the multiplicity of factors influencing societal change. Because complex systems change over time, the evaluation must also be flexible, embracing adaptive management approaches. This means building contingency into the budget and allowing for the revision of evaluation questions as new properties emerge within the system, such as adaptation, levers and hubs, feedback loops, and/or other unintended effects (Bicket, et al., 2020, pp. 34-36).

This report finds that PES programmes are collecting many of the right types of data and indicators for robust and proportionate M&E already and have effective M&E strategies in place (see Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E). This is consistent with the MPR, which concludes: “these measures and trends should be taken as an indication of progress being made towards the strategic objectives of the PES, as well as a source of evidence to inform how PES aims and activities are designed and delivered” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 37). The key next step is to construct a coherent narrative and draw evidence together for how these programmes act in a coordinated way to support the strategic objectives.

However, given finite time and resources, how can Scottish Government prioritise among the many causal pathways which will compose the updated Theory of Change? How can Scottish Government teams carry out a contribution analysis for the PES at strategy level in a targeted, feasible way? What is the headline KPIs for the PES under this new evaluation framework?

“No individual method can provide answers to all evaluation questions. If time and resources are limited, questions and methods will have to be prioritised and trade-offs between methods will be needed. Iteration will be necessary. It is important to consider both the feasibility and appropriateness of a proposed method” (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 41).

An efficient way to track progress against the PES’s objectives will be to establish reasoned and challenging targets. The Green Book makes clear that government appraisal must be built on objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time‑limited (SMART) (HM Treasury, 2022, p. 25), and the Magenta Book reinforces this by stating that evaluators should help develop “well‑defined objectives (e.g. SMART)” (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 12). The Green Book states that government interventions should typically limit themselves to “up to 5 or 6 SMART objectives” to retain focus and avoid dilution of effort (HM Treasury, 2022, p. 26). The Magenta Book does not prescribe an exact number of objectives, but it advises that the scope of an evaluation (and by extension the set of high‑level objectives that drive it) be kept manageable, recommending around 6 or 7 overarching evaluation questions (UK Government 2020 pp.28-29).

The PES and MPR do not use the language of “SMART,” but they do embed measurable targets and key performance indicators that fulfil the spirit of SMART criteria. The three strategic objectives are linked to concrete metrics such as percentages of people recognising climate urgency (baseline 68% in 2019), believing their behaviour matters (baseline 58% in 2018) and understanding required actions (baseline 74% in 2018) (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 42). Specific campaign targets are also recorded (e.g., 73% recognisers reporting increased awareness and a 50% action‑taken target, exceeded at 78% in 2021; a 60% action target in 2024, exceeded at 80%) (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 13), alongside quantifiable engagement goals for the Climate Week hashtag and website visits (p.16). However, explanation or reasoning for these targets is not provided.

The national-level indicators from the Scottish Household Survey are presented in the MPR as “the most robust Scotland-level data on public attitudes towards climate change over time” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 7). However, the PES also recognises that there are limitations to the explanatory power of using these figures as evidence for PES efficacy, acknowledging that “there are a multitude of factors which affect these indicators” (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 42).

The refreshed PES ToC and wider strategy need to set clear targets, including linked indicators which are directly attributable to PES delivery.^[4] Depending on what is feasible to measure at strategy scale, these targets may need to be set within Outputs, Outtakes, or Outcomes, rather than at Impact level. The corresponding sections above identify which data types are available in the current reporting scheme, where the gaps are, and make recommendations for how to standardise data collection on those aspects of the PES. This is how the cumulative impacts of the PES can be communicated:

1. Set a small number of SMART targets within PES stages, including the reasoning behind the level of change targeted^[5]
   
2. Capture data across the stages of PES programmes, aggregated at strategy level where feasible, to report against these targets
   
3. Clarify the causal mechanisms, assumptions, and evidence behind the ToC, including how PES stages build on each other to contribute to Outcomes and Impacts that are not measurable or attributable solely to PES delivery (including national awareness and attitudes reported in the Scottish Household Survey, as well as national policy goals).

Some ideas for strategy-level KPIs which came out the evidence review and interviews from this project are:

• Inclusion reach (Output)

Metric: Percent of participants from unengaged or hard‑to‑reach demographics (monitoring data).

The PES aims for national coverage, but delivery often screens for sympathetic audiences rather than those most affected by the transition. This could be tracked to ensure partners (Hubs, Schools, Climate Engagement Fund) are using appropriate recruitment strategies, choosing different venues or using trusted messengers to access, for example, Gaelic speakers, rural residents, or low‑income groups.

• Collective efficacy (Outtake)

Metric: Percent reporting increased confidence that “people like me” can influence local climate decisions (survey).

High climate anxiety is best countered by a sense of collective efficacy, the belief that a community can work together to solve problems. This normalizes action at a local level (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 36). This could be boosted by Hubs and Climate Engagement Fund projects focusing on showcasing local success stories and peer‑to‑peer learning.

• Feedback loop completion (Outcome)

Metric: Percent of Participate activities that have delivered a “You Said / We Did” report back to the participants (monitoring data).

This emerged from interviews as the primary driver of long‑term public support and trust. The lack of evidence on how the Climate Assembly or Participation Programme influenced final policy is currently a “significant weakness” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 22). Delivery partners can add a mandatory “Report Back” milestone to their project timelines, ensuring participants see the tangible results of their time. For a full discussion of feedback loops as a way to evidence the impact of participation, see in Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E.

These are illustrative suggestions only – the most important KPIs will need to be discerned from the results of the refreshed ToC development process, ideally in collaboration with PES stakeholders and trusted messengers.

This target-setting approach has several key advantages for PES M&E: One of the most powerful uses of SMART targets is the ability to set the scope of strategy-level evaluations. It is important to share the background evidence with PES stakeholders to define what success looks like, focusing stakeholder attention on the most critical indicators. A strategy as broad as the PES cannot evaluate every outcome in every sector. By setting high-level headline targets, you effectively tell stakeholders: “These are the areas of greatest uncertainty and/or highest priority” (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 27). This focuses data collection efforts on evidence that is impact-orientated, increasing the efficacy and efficiency of the evaluation. For instance, if the literature indicates that “climate self-efficacy” is a key predictor of behavioural change, setting a SMART target around self-efficacy justifies why the evaluation prioritizes qualitative deep dives into this metric over other, more peripheral data.

Target setting provides a proactive tool for the communication or evaluation results. It allows evaluators to say: “We set out to achieve X because it is a proven indicator of success; here is the evidence that we achieved it”. This is particularly useful in complex systems where direct attribution is difficult, as is the case for the PES. By hitting specific, theory-backed targets, evaluators build a contribution claim that is credible and evidenced, even if other external factors were also at play. Headline targets serve as a storytelling device for audiences and key stakeholders. They translate complex technical data into accessible narratives about progress, following through on the commitment from the PES for accessible and inclusive evaluation (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 43). Demonstrating success against a predefined target also builds trust and legitimacy among the diverse stakeholders involved in the climate transition.

Targets themselves should be supported by evidence, as well as by stakeholders, and reviewed at each evaluation cycle. Poorly set policy targets can lead to poor or perverse outcomes and involving relevant stakeholders can help avoid this. When targets are developed through participatory methods, stakeholders are more likely to buy into the findings, even if those findings highlight areas for improvement (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 45).

Anchoring the PES M&E strategy in this combination of contribution analysis and strategic target setting creates a cohesive, evidence-based narrative of societal change. This approach acknowledges complexity without being paralyzed by it, focusing on proving that the strategy’s mix of approaches is the necessary and sufficient driver of Scotland’s society-wide, net-zero transitions.

Communicating and embedding evaluation results with PES trusted messengers and other stakeholders

Trusted messengers outside of core PES programmes

The evaluation of the Public Engagement Strategy (PES) operates across two distinct spheres of influence, each presenting different challenges for measuring impact and establishing causality. The direct scope of evaluation includes the “umbrella” of Scottish Government-funded programmes, which have been the focus of this research, such as the Climate Engagement Fund, Climate Action Hubs, and Climate Action Schools (see Figure 1). For these initiatives, the Scottish Government has high data control through mandatory quarterly reporting, grant conditions, and bespoke monitoring templates. The indirect scope, however, encompasses a much broader landscape of trusted messengers, including public bodies like NatureScot and the NHS, as well as local community groups and industry representatives (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 9). While the PES is designed to act as a guiding framework for these messengers to ensure coordinated and consistent climate communication across all parts of government and society, these partners often operate under their own mandates and do not provide routine reporting to the PES team.

This creates a significant attribution challenge for the Scottish Government in seeking to include this activity in evaluation. While these wider messengers are essential for reaching unengaged groups and providing local relevance, it is difficult to determine to what extent their activities are influenced by the PES itself. The Strategy’s role is primarily that of an enabler and facilitator: it provides the direction of travel, messaging, evidence, and potentially networks that messengers use to engage their own spheres of influence. Once again, contribution analysis could provide a suitable method to tackle this challenge, moving away from seeking direct cause-and-effect proof in favour of building a credible narrative of how the PES has influenced the broader ecosystem. This would involve new, systematic data collection on this trusted messenger activity to enable:

• Testing the “enabler” logic: Gathering evidence to see if trusted messengers are aware of the PES, if they have used its Understand, Participate, Act objectives to design their own engagement, and if the PES principles (e.g., being positive, inclusive, and evidence-based) have influenced their messaging.
  
• Accounting for external drivers: Recognising that an organisation like Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) might deliver engagement that aligns with the PES due to its own statutory duties, rather than direct PES influence. The analysis would look for the added value the PES provided, such as increased message consistency or improved access to under-represented groups through PES-funded networks.
  
• Triangulating evidence: Combining quantitative indicators (e.g., toolkit downloads) with qualitative insights (e.g., stakeholder interviews) to assess whether the PES influenced how these messengers communicate. To include these wider messengers in a future round of evaluation, these additional data types and collection methods could be helpful:
  • Targeted partner surveys: A standardised survey for climate leads in major public bodies and other identified trusted messenger organisations to measure their awareness of the PES, their use of PES messaging, and the perceived value of the support provided by the Scottish Government.
    
  • Administrative uptake metrics: Monitoring the reach and utility of central PES resources, such as the number of Let’s Do Net Zero toolkit downloads by external organisations and the frequency of Climate Week hashtag use by non-government partners (already monitored and presented in MPR).
    
  • Alignment content analysis: A periodic review of communication materials from a sample of trusted messengers to assess the degree of alignment with PES principles and core messaging themes.
    
  • Social Network Analysis (SNA) could be interesting to explore, if resources allow.^[6]

These data points and methods could absolutely be included in an evaluation of the PES in the future. However, Scottish Government will need to decide the relative priority of monitoring and evaluating the impact of external versus internal, funded partners and trusted messengers. Data collection would need to be built in from the outset (HM Treasury, 2020).

Delivery partners facilitating PES programmes in local communities

Delivery partners play a central and distinctive role within the PES. They are not only implementers of funded activity, but also trusted intermediaries, innovators, and sense-makers operating at the interface between national ambition and local context. Any strengthened, unified approach to M&E must therefore be designed with the involvement of delivery partners. This section sets out how delivery partners can be meaningfully included in the appraisal, design and ongoing operation of PES M&E, while remaining proportionate, non-burdensome, and supportive of innovation.

The Magenta Book emphasises that effective evaluation begins with developing a shared understanding of how an intervention is intended to work, the context in which it operates, and the assumptions underpinning causal pathways. Delivery partners hold critical experiential knowledge of how engagement unfolds on the ground, how audiences interpret and respond to climate narratives, and how contextual factors such as place, trust, identity and institutional relationships shape outcomes. Involving delivery partners in the appraisal and evaluation design stage therefore serves two complementary purposes. First, it improves the quality and credibility of the PES Theory of Change by grounding it in lived delivery experience. Second, it builds shared ownership and legitimacy for the resulting evaluation framework, increasing the likelihood that it will be used for learning rather than perceived as a compliance exercise.

Participatory methods are particularly well suited to this stage. Approaches such as participatory systems mapping can be used to surface delivery partners’ perspectives on how different PES programmes interact with each other and with wider social, economic and policy systems. Qualitative, story-based approaches such as Most Significant Change (MSC) and outcome harvesting are well suited to engaging delivery partners in articulating outcomes and early impacts. Used at the appraisal and design stage, these methods can inform the refinement of the PES Theory of Change, test assumptions, and help shape evaluation questions that are meaningful to both Scottish Government and delivery partners.

One of the defining strengths of the PES is the degree of innovation enabled through its delivery model. Funds such as the Climate Engagement Fund, alongside place-based programmes like Climate Action Hubs, intentionally allow partners to experiment with formats, narratives, audiences and modes of participation. This flexibility is essential in a complex and evolving system, where no single engagement model will work everywhere or for everyone (see Learning and Innovation in Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E). A unified M&E approach must therefore avoid constraining innovation through over-standardisation. Delivery partners should continue to have the freedom to adapt and innovate in response to local needs, emerging opportunities and changing contexts. Rather than measuring success solely against predefined outputs or outcomes, strategy-level M&E should seek to document what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why. Case studies are particularly valuable in this regard, illustrating how innovative approaches emerge, how challenges are navigated, and how unintended outcomes arise.

Taken together, these elements point toward a model of evaluation that is relational rather than transactional. Delivery partners are not passive data providers, but active contributors to understanding how the PES functions as a system. Their involvement is concentrated where it adds most value—at the stages of appraisal, sense-making and learning—while routine monitoring remains proportionate and streamlined. Embedding this approach will require clarity of roles. Scottish Government retains responsibility for strategy-level evaluation design, synthesis and accountability. Delivery partners contribute contextual insight, experiential knowledge and reflective learning, primarily through existing channels and periodic participatory processes. Independent evaluators play a facilitative role, translating between levels, ensuring methodological robustness, and managing the balance between standardisation and flexibility. This partnership-based approach is well aligned with the mechanisms of the PES itself. Just as the Strategy recognises that government cannot engage the public on climate change alone, so too must evaluation recognise that understanding impact in complex systems requires multiple perspectives.

Telling the story of the PES to external stakeholders

When presenting the results of a contribution analysis approach to external audiences and decision makers, the narrative should be built around three pillars: credibility, relevance, and accountability. “In a complex policy situation, there may be a gap between what key stakeholders would like to know, and what it is possible to conclude from the evaluation” (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 32). This is due to the properties of these complex systems, which limit the certainty of outcomes and make precise causal attribution difficult. Nonetheless, the contribution analysis approach provides a robust contribution narrative.

Presenting the results of evaluation will mirror the concise discussion in 9 Recommended approach: Applying contribution analysis to the PES at strategy level: Start with the attribution problem, explaining that the PES operates in a complex policy environment where experimental counterfactuals are infeasible. Contribution analysis is therefore the most appropriate tool because it offers a transparent, step‑by-step process for judging whether the strategy plausibly contributed to observed outcomes, rather than claiming definitive causal proof. Emphasise that the method moves the question from “Did the PES cause the change?” to “Is it reasonable to conclude that the PES made a difference?”

Briefly walk the audience through the six-step contribution analysis process, detailing how it builds on itself and is iterative, feeding back and repeating. Translate the analytic outcomes into decision‑relevant claims – Because contribution analysis does not deliver a single effect‑size estimate, the claims that can be made are credible, bounded statements about contribution. Be explicit about the limits of contribution analysis, explaining what the evaluation can and cannot claim:

• Can claim: The PES contributed to higher awareness, greater public input into policy, and the emergence of community projects. Examples:
  • “The PES contributed to a measurable increase in public awareness of Scotland’s net‑zero goals, as evidenced by the 75% campaign reach and corresponding survey‑based recall.”
    
  • “Community Climate Action Hubs have contributed to the emergence of locally led climate projects, supported by independent evaluations.”
    
  • “The Participation Programme has likely improved the inclusiveness of climate policy design, although additional demographic data are required to confirm reach to disadvantaged groups.”
• Cannot claim: Exact percentages of change solely attributable to the PES (“effect size”), because other factors (e.g., rising energy prices, global news) also influence its impacts.

Framing the claims as contributions rather than guarantees builds trust while remaining honest about uncertainty. All claims are anchored in the six‑step contribution analysis framework, backed by the Mid‑Point Review data, programme level evaluations, and the refreshed Theory of Change. By communicating both the strengths of the evidence and the uncertainties, the Scottish Government can demonstrate methodological rigour, build stakeholder confidence, and demonstrate the need for ongoing public engagement investment.

Layered into this can be more qualitative, contextual anecdotes from across PES delivery, to demonstrate the qualities of work happening across different programmes, including different scales and approaches to engagement. This storytelling aspect of the PES was highlighted as important at our workshop with PES stakeholders:

“I think one of the challenges we have is being able to tell the stories of the impact that we’re having effectively. […] I think it’s particularly the storytelling aspect that I think is something that we could explore more, and how we can encourage that to happen at a project level, as well as thinking about it at the programme level, so it’s a bit more consistent.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

Storytelling can be used as an exploratory appraisal and evaluation method:

“Storytelling encourages people to make sense of their own experiences, reflect on the array of contextual factors that influence outcomes, and articulate possible futures. Personal stories provide a human face to evaluation data and so can strengthen communication of key messages about a policy, including the impact on people and communities, their emotions and perspectives in ways that descriptions cannot” (Bicket, et al., 2020, p. 61).

This is a key function and reason to collect case study data and examples of innovative methods, even where these do not fit squarely into evaluation questions or cannot be meaningfully aggregated, because they provide the context, colour, and depth that allows external stakeholders to meaningfully engage with the results of evaluation:

“Maybe it’s useful to think about the different purposes of M&E. […] If you think about it as more of a kind of comms and engagement tool, that then comes out of the M&E, then having some case studies at project level is useful at the programme level, if that makes sense. It doesn’t have to be aggregated; it can stay project level.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

“A lot of these smaller pieces get lost […] when we come to try and do the big measurement picture. […] I think innovative metrics is necessary to be able to capture the different ways in which we achieve impact, because you can reach a high number of people without really reaching them, whereas you can reach a very small number of people and have a really lifetime impact. And trying to work out how we reflect that and measure that is quite a challenge.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

“The people who get involved in these processes, for them, they could have started off this type of engagement with zero interest, zero knowledge of anything that we’re talking about and that they leave it feeling that they’ve actually contributed something. I think that’s incredibly important and the reason why we do our job and it’s not necessarily that easy to evaluate.” (Quote from interview)

This is being embraced in England’s approach to public engagement on climate change, in which DESNZ flagged some specific organisations who are supporting them with storytelling:

“We are also learning from organisations like the Local Storytelling Exchange and Round Our Way that are making sure that stories about the impacts of climate change on our day to day lives, as well as the action that people are taking in their communities to address it, are part of the national discussion and news reporting. These stories can also highlight the benefits that can be realised, including for health and wellbeing and protecting the places that we care about.” (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, 2025)

For more detail on storytelling as an evaluation method, see the methods, tools and techniques from Community Research (Community Research, 2025).

Conclusions

This report was commissioned to support the Scottish Government in strengthening how it assesses, evidences and communicates the impact of its Public Engagement Strategy on Climate Change (PES). The core challenge facing PES monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is demonstrating how a diverse, multi-stranded portfolio of engagement interventions collectively contributes to its strategic objectives of understanding, participation, and action. The PES operates across different scales, geographies, audiences, and modes of engagement, within a complex and dynamic policy environment. These features make robust evaluation both essential and inherently challenging. In this report we set out to address three related aims:

• to identify best-practice approaches for monitoring and evaluating complex public engagement strategies
  
• to understand how PES monitoring and evaluation currently operates in practice
  
• to provide practical, proportionate recommendations that can strengthen strategy-level M&E while remaining feasible and proportionate.

Each of these aims has been addressed through a combination of literature review, international comparison, document analysis, stakeholder interviews and a validation workshop with Scottish Government teams.

A central finding of the research is that Scotland’s PES is world-leading its ambition and unique in its structure. Few other governments have attempted to coordinate national communications, funded local delivery, deliberative participation, and trusted messenger networks under a single strategic framework on climate change. However, this same strength creates challenges for evaluation, because there is a lack of similar interventions to provide precedent or best practice.

In response, we returned to first principles of evaluation in complex systems, drawing on the established literature, including the Green and Magenta Books. We find that counterfactual and experimental approaches to evaluation (which focus on attribution, uniform indicators or aggregation of standardised metrics) are ill-suited to capturing the PES’s nuanced approach. Attempts to force comparability across programmes risk obscuring, rather than illuminating, how engagement works in different contexts. Theory-based approaches provide the most credible and feasible route to strategy-level evaluation for the PES. Specifically, contribution analysis (supported by a strengthened Theory of Change) is identified as an appropriate overarching framework. This approach allows diverse forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence to be brought together in a structured way, testing the plausibility of causal pathways while remaining sensitive to context, emergence and indirect effects.

A key implication of this shift is that diversity within the PES is not a weakness to be corrected through harmonisation, but a defining feature to be understood and analysed. Contribution analysis can accommodate different data types, scales and evaluation practices by focusing on how evidence supports or challenges the programme theory, rather than on whether indicators are directly comparable. This resolves a tension identified earlier in the strategy’s evaluation journey: the need for coherence without imposing uniformity.

The report also highlights the critical role of PES delivery partners and trusted messengers in making this approach work. Delivery partners are not simply sources of monitoring data, but key holders of knowledge about how engagement unfolds in practice, how innovation emerges, and how outcomes are shaped by local context. By involving them meaningfully in appraisal, Theory of Change development, and evaluation (using participatory methods such as systems mapping, Most Significant Change and outcome harvesting) the Scottish Government can both improve the quality of its evaluation and strengthen trust, legitimacy and shared ownership.

Across the report, we framed practical recommendations around proportionality and feasibility. The proposed unified M&E approach builds on what already exists: a strategy-level Theory of Change, programme-level monitoring systems, national datasets and a growing body of qualitative insight. Rather than introducing a new layer of reporting, it focuses on aligning these elements within a coherent evaluation framework that can support accountability, learning, and adaptation over time. In doing so, it responds directly to the central challenges of consistency, coherence and communicating cumulative impact.

The PES is particularly well-placed to make these improvements now. A helpful (though high-level) Theory of Change is already in place (Figure 7 in Appendix C); all component programmes have operated for more than two years; and the first full-term evaluation has yet to be conducted. This creates an optimal window for articulating clearer causal logic and designing an evaluation framework that will support both the remainder of this strategy cycle and the refreshed PES due in 2026. By strengthening the Theory of Change, adopting contribution analysis as a unifying framework, and working in partnership with delivery organisations, the Scottish Government can build a compelling evidence base for how public engagement contributes to Scotland’s transition to net zero. Crucially, this approach embraces evaluation not only as accountability, but evaluation as learning, ensuring that the PES continues to evolve, innovate and respond to the complex societal challenge it was designed to address.

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Appendices

Appendix A – Full project methodology

Literature review

The literature review was designed to identify best-practice approaches for monitoring and evaluating complex, multi-stranded public engagement strategies. Its purpose was to connect these insights back to the PES ecosystem and to determine what is both feasible and proportionate within the Scottish context. To achieve this, the review adopted a targeted and pragmatic approach, identifying 17 authoritative sources of M&E guidance from the UK and internationally which were selected from a broader review as being the most relevant and applicable to Scotland’s PES. These included core government evaluation frameworks such as the UK Magenta Book, the Green Book and OECD evaluation standards; the evaluation of the EU Climate Adaptation Strategy; the Theory of Change underpinning the Wales Public Engagement Strategy; and research on building a social mandate for climate action produced by Climate Outreach.

Findings from each source were systematically extracted into a structured data matrix and organised according to relevant thematic fields. The evidence was then synthesised across nine sub-research questions, grouped under three overarching themes: understanding the purpose of strategy-level evaluation (“the why”), defining outcomes and impacts (“the what”), and designing appropriate monitoring and evaluation methods (“the how”).

The findings from this stage of work were central to identifying best practice for monitoring and evaluating public engagement strategies, and they directly inform our recommendations on how to operationalise the Theory of Change as a practical evaluation tool.

Document analysis

This document analysis methodology was designed to systematically review the existing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) landscape of the Public Engagement Strategy (PES) to identify current data collection practices, assess their alignment with established best practices, and directly inform evidence-based recommendations for strengthening the PES evaluation framework.

The analysis began by defining the scope of the PES M&E data landscape. The primary sources reviewed included a comprehensive set of documents detailing programme-level M&E practices:

• M&E templates, return forms, and project reports provided by PES programmes and projects. These sources detail how project-level data is collected and communicated up to the strategy level.
  
• The Net Zero Nation Public Engagement Strategy for Climate Change Mid-Point Review (MPR), which serves as the most recent formal evaluation and provides high-level aggregation of KPIs and findings across the PES portfolio.

This review established a record of the current M&E practices and capability. The core of the methodology involved a structured classification of the data points and reporting mechanisms found in the source materials against two established evaluation frameworks. Notes were systematically recorded for each project to document the types of data and indicators collected, aligning them with the stages of the Government Communication Service (GCS) Evaluation Cycle, which establishes a clear taxonomy for assessing communications efforts. Indicators and data being collected were mapped to the different stages of the GCS Cycle: Inputs, Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes, and Impacts. This process aimed to map current data collection against the inherent ‘programme theory’ of the PES, which captures inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impact.

By comparing observed M&E practices against established evaluation criteria, the analysis identified current data flows, highlighted existing data gaps (such as missing impact measurements or difficulties in aggregation across varying scales), and determined the feasibility and sensibility of collecting specific data types at different levels. This structured review directly informs the subsequent phase of the project: refreshing the evaluation framework and providing concrete guidance on applying the right metrics to future PES programmes. The results of this step of the research are detailed in Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E.

Interviews with key stakeholders

To provide depth and lived experience of delivering climate change engagement activities to the evaluation of the PES, a qualitative data collection approach was utilised through semi-structured interviews. This methodology was designed to gather practical insights into M&E application, system strengthening opportunities, and lessons learned regarding tensions between strategic design and practical delivery.

A total of fifteen participants were interviewed, strategically selected to represent different functional levels of the PES. The interview design and specific questions, which were drawn from three tailored guides (for project, programme, and strategy levels), were discussed and agreed with the project steering group (see Appendix B – Interview guide example). Interviews were conducted virtually via MS Teams and lasted between 30-60 minutes. Ethical integrity was maintained by ensuring all participants signed information and consent forms prior to the interview, confirming their understanding of how the data would be managed. All sessions were recorded and subsequently transcribed for detailed analysis.

The analysis of the transcripts focused on pulling out key findings and capturing anecdotes and lessons learned to support the overall research aims. The resulting qualitative evidence is layered into the final report to enhance interpretation and provide narrative depth.

Workshop with Scottish Government teams

The final activity of this research was a stakeholder workshop with Scottish Government teams, which delivered crucial validation and operationalisation for the research findings. This methodology aligns with evaluation best practice by involving key audiences to ensure the utility and adoptability of the final recommendations. The session maintained the same rigorous ethics protocol (including informed consent and confidentiality) established for the preceding qualitative interviews.

The central objective was to refine six ideas for M&E improvement that emerged directly from initial delivery partner interviews. The session focused intently on the practical challenges of implementation, addressing the need for more consistency in data gathering and reporting identified by the Mid-Point Review. The core methodology involved two key activities:

• Metric definition: Discussion focused on the specific metrics needed to effectively capture the impacts achieved by delivery partners, extending beyond simple outputs to address measurable behavioural change and complex outcomes.
  
• Practicality mapping: Participants prioritised the proposed M&E improvements (and their corresponding M&E metrics) by mapping them onto an effort vs. impact matrix. This exercise gave the research team insights into the feasibility and perceived effectiveness of recommendations, ensuring they were pragmatic for Scottish Government implementation.

The rich context and concrete ideas generated during the workshop directly inform the final report sections, contributing to both practical recommendations and strategic context.

Appendix B – Interview guide example

This was the interview guide for project-level delivery partners (i.e. individual Climate Engagement Fund projects, Climate Action Hubs, etc.)

Interviewer to introduce themselves and the aims and outcomes of the evaluation.

Interviewer to confirm that participant has read, understood, and signed project information and consent form.

Ask for permission and start recording.

1. Role & Link to PES

• Can you describe your project and your role in delivering it?
• The [insert relevant programme, depending on Understand/Participate/Act pillars] is linked to the Public Engagement Strategy (PES). How aware are you of the PES, and do you feel your project connects to its pillars (Understand, Participate, Act)?
• The PES has seven engagement principles — were these clear when you applied, and how do you check your project follows them?
• Did you refer to PES documents (like the Theory of Change) when shaping your application?

2. Monitoring & Evaluation Practices

• What kind of monitoring and evaluation do you currently carry out for your project?
• What data do you collect (e.g. attendance, training numbers, surveys, stories, behaviour change, audience reach)?
• How do you know you’re reaching people who were previously unengaged?
• Did you establish any kind of baseline for your staff, students, or community participants? If not, what made this difficult?
• How did you set your milestones, outputs, and outcomes when applying for [insert name of programme / fund]? Did SG provide guidance?

3. Use of Findings

• How do you use your monitoring and evaluation findings within your project team? Do they help adapt your activities?
• Do you report these findings to SG, or to your community or partners? If so, how?
• Do you feel the reporting templates capture the real value of your work, or are some impacts invisible in the data?

4. Challenges & Gaps

• What barriers or challenges have you faced in monitoring and evaluation (e.g. time, resources, relevance of indicators)?
• Are there aspects of your work (like shifts in confidence, trust, or community attitudes) that are especially hard to measure?
• Climate engagement can lead to different kinds of change (understanding, motivation, reduced distress). Which of these outcomes do you see, and how do you try to measure them?
• Did the short funding period or reporting requirements make it harder to evaluate properly?

5. Suggestions for Improvement

• What would make monitoring and evaluation easier or more useful for your team? Is there any need for additional guidance, shared templates, or peer learning help?
• If you could change one thing about the reporting process, what would it be?
• Do you think your project has built capacity that will last beyond the funding period (e.g. staff, students, community capability)?

Appendix C – Using the Theory of Change as an evaluation tool

The research team understands that the existing PES Theory of Change (ToC) was developed primarily as a communication tool, giving an accessible overview of the strategy and its overall vision (see Figure 7). Rather than spelling out the precise causal mechanisms underlying the programme theory, the current ToC gives a streamlined, one-page picture of the PES’s key objectives. Some delivery partners have found this to be useful:

“We’ve been paying attention to the Public Engagement Strategy and […] trying to reorganise the way we report to government. We always keep in mind the overarching objectives the government wants to achieve through the PES and the 2030 target, and we ask ourselves how the work we are doing contributes to those aims.” (Quote from interview with delivery partner)

It is sensible to retain an updated version of the current one-page ToC overview for this purpose, making clear that it is an overview and signposting to a full ToC.

However, based on best practice, a key first step to developing a more robust M&E system for the PES is to develop that more complete ToC. A key objective of this work is to explore ways to better evidence how PES programmes and projects act cumulatively to contribute towards the Strategy’s objectives and vision. By articulating the underlying assumptions, mechanisms, and contextual factors that govern change, a ToC allows policy teams and evaluators to identify KPIs and what the data needs are to evidence progress. This need has been echoed by Scottish Government:

“This kind of goes back to the whole Theory of Change and trying to make the Theory of Change a bit more granular, so that you can say, “Why do we want partnership working?” And then it will break it down into, “Ok, we want some partnership working to facilitate this cross-programme learning,” right? […] So it’s that’s kind of where that more detailed Theory of Change I think will help draw out some of these issues. It’s just too broad of a thing, at the moment.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

The Climate Action Hubs have recently had a new M&E approach developed for them, which began with an overhaul of the Hubs ToC:

“Our first phase of redesigning the M&E approach for the Hubs was to look at the Theory of Change. So, with that, we were looking at the longer-term outcomes and agreeing those and working through them in workshops with the Hubs. What we’re doing now is, we’ve commissioned an evaluation of the Hub programme, so that’s underway, it will report in March next year, and that is directly looking at impacts and is speaking to people who have been involved in Hub activities.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

This supports the idea that evaluation starts with a robust ToC, developed in partnership with stakeholders, such that everyone agrees on the baseline against which they are being measured. Evaluation then follows, to put evidence behind the key points of the programme theory. The synthesis below addresses the key elements of a useful ToC, details what this looks like for a communications strategy, provides a critique of the current PES ToC, and lays out a guide for policy colleagues to refresh and update the framework.

A useful ToC differentiates itself by its ability to align large-scale, multi-part programmes for cumulative success. This usefulness is defined by:

• Utility for all stakeholders: The ToC can offer a practical tool for both the commissioning body (e.g., Scottish Government) and the delivery partners, enabling everyone to see clearly how their specific work supports the overall collective goals.
  
• Supporting cumulative assessment: A useful ToC maps the thinking behind how multiple, diverse activities collectively contribute to outcomes, providing a foundation for cumulative assessment necessary for complex portfolios where different component programmes may use varying measures to define success.
  
• Focusing activities and identifying gaps: By clarifying assumptions and cataloguing evidence, a fleshed-out ToC helps policy colleagues focus activities (“What does this programme do, specifically?”) and identify where the current strategy leaves gaps (“Which parts of our Theory of Change are not covered?”).
  
• Testing realism: Exploring why an intervention might fail (i.e. the “negative programme theory”) strengthens the ToC by testing assumptions and improving realism and risk identification (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 26).

For an engagement strategy like the PES, the Theory of Change can show how inputs lead directly to changes in audience knowledge, attitudes, and (where relevant) behaviour:

• Inputs/Activities: The resources and specific communication and engagement actions (e.g., campaigns, training, partnerships).
  
• Outputs: The direct results of the activities (e.g., number of people reached, materials produced, toolkit downloads).
  
• Outtakes: What the audience thinks, feels, or intends to do after exposure (e.g., awareness, attitude shift, sentiment, motivation).^[7]
  
• Outcomes: The desired changes or behavioural response (e.g., changes to social norms, understanding, or attitudes; starting, stopping, or maintaining a specific climate action; actively participating in policy design).
  
• Impact: The achievement of the long-term policy goal (e.g., delivering on Just Transition commitments).
  
• Learning and Innovation: Capturing how lessons learned through both delivery and evaluation are fed back into the Inputs stage and integrated into the intervention.
  

The PES has an underlying ToC structured around three high-level objectives—Understand, Participate, and Act—which aligns all initiatives toward an overarching vision. However, the Mid-Point Review and best practice guidelines suggest areas where the ToC requires strengthening to be a more rigorous alignment and evaluation tool:

• Causal specificity and assumptions: A robust ToC must detail precise causal mechanisms (the precise chain of events and steps that link the inputs and activities of the programme to the desired outcomes) and assumptions (the explicit conditions, beliefs, or circumstances that must hold true for each causal link to succeed). While mechanisms and assumptions are implicit in the current version and likely guide implementation, these are not sufficiently clarified or explicitly catalogued with supporting evidence.
  
• Alignment and cumulative assessment: A useful ToC enables cumulative assessment across all programmes. The complexity of the PES means activities have “different measures of success which are difficult to aggregate or compare across” (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 10). This difficulty suggests the high-level ToC needs refinement to standardise the flow of data up to the overarching indicators.
  
• Activity gaps: A ToC should help identify gaps in coverage. These could be made clear, for example, Millar et al. (2024) suggested that certain effective engagement approaches like creative activities and the use of humour are noted as underrepresented in the current PES and require greater focus going forward (p.19). A refreshed ToC would provide an opportunity to highlight this gap indicate plans to fill it.
  
• Contextual factors and alternative pathways: A robust ToC should also include an explanation of how contextual, behavioural, and organisational factors influence whether the outcomes occur, as well as any alternative mechanisms that could potentially lead to the same outcomes (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 24).
  

UK Government Communication Service (GCS) Evaluation Cycle

The GCS Evaluation Cycle is the Government Communication Service’s (GCS) practical adaptation of evaluation principles to the specific context of public communication. Whereas the Magenta Book provides the theoretical and methodological foundation, the GCS framework is designed for the operational realities of communication campaigns, where diverse audiences, fragmented delivery models and behaviour-change goals require more iterative, adaptive and real-time approaches to evidence. Although the PES is broader than a single communications campaign, its delivery strands aim to inform, motivate and empower the public to understand, participate in and act on climate change, objectives closely aligned with the GCS model’s focus on audience insight, behavioural barriers and the sequencing from awareness to action. The GCS Cycle embeds evaluation from the outset of a campaign, enabling communicators to integrate behavioural science tools into planning and make ongoing, evidence-informed adjustments throughout delivery.

Together, the Green Book, Magenta Book and GCS Cycle provide a coherent framework that supports learning, strengthens accountability and enables continuous improvement in the design and delivery of public engagement. These frameworks are complementary and mutually reinforcing. The GCS explicitly recommends that colleagues utilise the Magenta Book alongside the Evaluation Cycle to gain understanding of evaluation methods for different scenarios, data collection and analysis approaches (both quantitative and qualitative), and guidance on sharing evaluation results to inform better communications. Collectively, they provide the authoritative UK Government guidance on evaluation design and practice.

Given that the PES is a government-led communications initiative aimed at driving public understanding, participation, and normalising action on climate change, these frameworks are important sources for assessing best practice in evaluating the PES. The PES itself is grounded in evidence-based principles and explicitly incorporates a Theory of Change aligned with these frameworks. Using the Magenta Book and GCS Evaluation Cycle as reference standards allows for a systematic assessment of whether the PES evaluation approach adheres to current government best practice and identifies where alignment could be strengthened.

In the main body report, we have supplemented guidance from the Green & Magenta books with more specific material from the GCS. Specifically, this report adds “Outtakes” from the GCS, which is an intermediate category which is relevant to interventions which include public engagement. It also draws upon the metrics used to evidence different stages of the GCS cycle as examples. The GCS adds communications- and engagement-specific guidance to the more general best practice for evaluations found in the Green and Magenta Books.

A guide for reviewing and refreshing the PES Theory of Change

Developing a comprehensive, strategy-level ToC is an opportunity to clarify how PES inputs and outputs (including those deployed at strategy level as well as at programme level) cohere to deliver the strategy’s aims and objectives. It should show the thinking behind how the PES’s programmes are targeted towards addressing different parts of its objectives and how these are necessary to deliver in different contexts (i.e. across different scales, geographies, demographics, etc.). It should bring this together in one place without duplicating existing programme-level strategies. Clarifying the causal mechanisms and assumptions behind the individual programmes will directly identify the appropriate data and metrics required to evidence these (see next section, How does the Theory of Change become the evaluation framework?).

To align more closely with the Magenta Book guidance, the PES going forward could adopt a structured, iterative process to review and refresh the PES Theory of Change for the next strategy refresh (due 2026). Key steps to ensure the requirements of a robust ToC are met are:

1. Recategorise existing ToC actions / outcomes / impacts to align with Magenta Book categories: The “Indicative Actions” as well as the Outcomes and Impacts of the current ToC could be recategorised to align with the categories used in Theory of Change guidance. Clarifying how the ongoing PES activities align with the definition those key steps is an important first stage to building a more robust programme theory. Clarifying the difference between inputs / outputs etc. is crucial to selecting relevant metrics to measure each. For example, “Promote and maintain Net Zero Nation website” becomes an Input, aligning most closely with the GCS Input, “Content creation.” The research team has created a first draft of this recategorisation in Figure 8. This figure serves as a practical tool and template on which Scottish Government policy teams can build.
   
2. Add the full scope of Inputs, Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes, and Impacts: Building on the template provided in Figure 8, add entries to the ToC to make it a complete picture of what the strategy aims to deliver and how. Prioritise strategy-level inputs / outputs etc. (see lists below).
   
3. Break down / subdivide some existing entries (e.g. “Deliver Just Transition Commitments,”) to make clear which of these relate to the PES and how it addresses them. Consider rephrasing these to make them fit more squarely into GCS stages.
   
4. Map causal mechanisms: For the PES at strategy level, explicitly map the predicted causal pathway from Input to Impact through the GCS Evaluation Cycle stages (Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes). This structure ensures all programme elements cohere under the high-level PES objectives. Some suggestions or examples of this are also provided in the main body report in Recommended approach: Applying contribution analysis to the PES at strategy level.
   
5. Clarify and catalogue assumptions: Systematically list assumptions underlying each causal link. It is best practice to be clear regarding how the programme assumes that each (input / activity / output) will lead / contribute to each outcome / impact.^[8] Going further, it is best to link these assumptions to supporting theory or evidence where possible, i.e. how assumptions are supported by research or that approaches have been successful in the past or in similar contexts.^[9]
   

Specific methods which Scottish Government policy teams could use with PES delivery partners and trusted messengers to capture their understanding of how the PES is delivering impact on the ground and then articulate through a Theory of Change include participatory systems mapping, Most Significant Change, or outcome harvesting (Bicket, et al., 2020). This will address the identified need for the Scottish Government to be able to more clearly articulate how and why different climate engagement activities, such as those set out in the PES, can work together to deliver intended outcomes.

In addition, Scottish Government policy teams should consider how to integrate or “nest” the work of the PES’s component programmes within the strategy-level ToC. Many of the PES’s inputs and outputs are delivered by its component programmes – For example, the Climate Action Hubs have a very robust ToC of their own (Scottish Government, n.d.) .^[10] Scottish Government policy teams should discuss how best to include PES programmes within a strategy-level ToC in a way that is useful and appropriate to strategy-level evaluation. Ideally, programme-level logic models or ToCs should be “nested” within the PES ToC, showing what inputs are received from strategy level and how each programme delivers outputs and outcomes relevant to the strategy overall. The Climate Action Hubs ToC gives an example of how to do this, clearly delineating “Individual Hub Outcomes” and “Hub Network Outcomes.” Including nested programmes in this way would ensure that the strategy-level ToC is a complete picture of the PES, clarifying how programmes support the strategy’s outcomes and impacts, and identifying any gaps in delivery.

An improved ToC would also provide a place to capture those inputs, outputs, etc. which are delivered at strategy level, which provide the infrastructure, framework, and coordinating mechanisms within which individual programmes operate. For example:

Strategy-level Inputs

• Framework and governance development: Development and publication of the PES itself, including the Theory of Change; Creation of governance structures and stakeholder networks, such as the Climate Change Communications Stakeholder Group and Climate Policy Engagement Network (CPEN).
  
• Evidence-based strategy planning: Commissioning and analysing the independent evidence review on effective public engagement (Millar, et al., 2024), which informs how the strategy should evolve; Consultation exercises on the strategy itself (e.g., the 2020 consultation that received 178 responses and shaped the current PES) (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 10)
  
• Monitoring and evaluation architecture: Design of the multi-stranded monitoring and evaluation approach (national indicators, programme evaluations, MPR, full-term evaluation); Commissioning of independent evaluations and research (e.g., MPR, Millar et al. report, and this project)

Strategy-level Outputs

• Strategic documents and reports: Publication of the PES strategy document itself, MPR, full-term report, and publicising updates to the three national indicators from the Scottish Household Survey
  
• Data integration and synthesis: Analysis and synthesis of monitoring data across all programmes to assess cumulative progress toward the strategic objectives

Strategy-level Outtakes

• Organisational learning: Documented lessons on what works well and what needs improvement (e.g., the effectiveness of community-led action), e.g., stakeholder survey (67 responses from 280 organisations) to understand delivery partners’ experiences and perceptions of the PES (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 9); Identification of gaps in the current approach (e.g., underrepresentation of creative activities, need for stronger feedback loops on policy influence); Decisions to strengthen particular elements (e.g., increasing emphasis on trusted messengers, building in stronger communication of how public participation influences policy outcomes)

Strategy-level Outcomes

• Organisational adaptation: Incorporation of learning from the MPR and other reports into the refreshed PES (due 2026); Improved monitoring and evaluation framework for the next strategy period
  
• Instances of demonstrable policy action resulting from participation: Integration of participation insights into specific policy decisions and plans (e.g., Transport Just Transition Plan informed by Participation Programme outputs); Clear communication back to participants about how their input was used

Capturing strategy-level Inputs, Outputs, Outtakes, and Outcomes in the ToC is essential because it makes visible the coordination and learning infrastructure that transforms disparate programme activities into cumulative impact. Without these, Scottish Government policy teams cannot demonstrate how the full portfolio of PES activities coherently delivers against the overarching net zero vision—they can only report on individual programme success. Including and clarifying these strategy-level activities is useful for all PES stakeholders: It shows Scottish Government policy teams, delivery partners, and members of the public how their individual contributions connect.

The above recommendations represent a clear guide to refreshing the PES ToC and bringing it in line with best practice for the purposes of M&E for government interventions. Thinking longer-term, Scottish Government policy teams could consider going further to integrate the following:

• Ensure partner utility and stakeholder involvement: Ensure the ToC serves as a functional tool across the organisation and its partners. The ToC should be developed and reviewed in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders, including policy designers, implementers (e.g., Climate Action Hubs, Climate Engagement Fund recipients), and beneficiaries. This ensures delivery partners have ownership over their contribution to the overall goals.
  
• Identify and incorporate gaps: Use the revised model to identify activities not currently covered (e.g., greater focus on creative activities and humour). Catalogue evidence learned from previous communications activities—including what did not work—to build upon prior performance.
  
• Explore the negative programme theory: Conduct a formal exercise to explore why and how the intervention might fail, thereby strengthening the ToC by testing realism.

The refined ToC should guide the development and implementation of the refreshed PES due in 2026, ensuring continuous improvement and institutionalising best practice.

Practical tools and templates: Theory of Change

The following resources provide a comprehensive toolkit for refreshing the PES ToC:

The Green Book and Magenta Book provide general guidance and technical background. The relevance of these websites to the PES is highlighted in the sections above. The Magenta Book also includes a comprehensive list of further resources, reading, and additional templates (HM Treasury, 2020, p. 26).

The template presented in Figure 8 synthesises the guidance of the Green Book, Magenta Book, and GCS to align the existing PES ToC with best practices from these sources. This adaptation provides a framework / “bones” to which Scottish Government policy teams can add detail, including the full suite of strategy-level inputs, outputs, etc., casual mechanisms, underlying assumptions, linked evidence, and how PES programmes “nest” and fit in.

The Climate Action Hubs example provides a robust, worked template for an effective ToC. The PES ToC could be modelled on this and should ensure that strategy- and programme-level programme theories are aligned and resolved, underpinned by the same frameworks and consistent language (Scottish Government, n.d.)

How does the Theory of Change become the evaluation framework?

The Theory of Change (ToC) is the intervention’s causal model; it articulates how the communication is theoretically expected to work. It maps out the assumed causal chain: inputs (resources and activities) are expected to generate outputs (audience reach and exposure), which are predicted to shift audience beliefs and feelings (outtakes), ultimately resulting in behaviour change (outcomes) and policy/organisational impact. Evaluation activities should then align with the GCS six-stage cycle (Figure 9).

1. Inputs/Activities: Evidence of planning and using learnings (from past delivery, based on audience insight, or findings from other previous interventions) to shape content and delivery, and setting SMART objectives linked to policy goals.
   
2. Outputs: Measuring successful delivery and audience exposure, such as reach, impressions, and distribution.
   
3. Outtakes: Capturing immediate audience reception, perceptions, attitudes, and intentions.
   
4. Outcomes: Measuring the actual changes or behavioural responses (e.g., changes to social norms, understanding, or attitudes; starting, stopping, or maintaining a specific behaviour; actively participating in policy design).
   
5. Impacts: Linking outcomes to the achievement of high-level policy and organisational goals, often including value-for-money assessments.
   
6. Learning and Innovation: Capturing strategic lessons that feed back into future planning cycles (back into Inputs stage).
   

The GCS six stages are the evaluation framework—they define how and what to measure at each point in the causal chain to test whether the ToC held true in practice. The two interact as follows:

• Inputs stage: The ToC is developed during the planning phase (the Inputs stage). The GCS explicitly states that “it may be beneficial to set out your assumptions and predictions for how your different audience segments will experience your communication activity (‘Outputs’) and how this is predicted to change their respective beliefs or feelings (‘Outtakes’), and ultimately lead to the desired audience behaviour (‘Outcomes’) in a Theory of Change.” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 33)
  
• Testing the theory: Collecting data (using a template / evaluation framework) on stages 2–5 (Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes, and Impacts) directly measures the causal chain predicted in the ToC. If the ToC predicted that outputs would lead to outtakes, the GCS recommends collecting data on both and assess whether that relationship materialised in practice.
  
• Learning loop: The Learning & Innovation stage (stage 6) feeds insights back to refine the ToC for future iterations.
  

The ToC forms the conceptual foundation for evaluation by articulating the intervention’s logic (“the what”), while the GCS six-stage cycle serves as the methodology or framework (“the how”) to systematically test whether that logic holds true in practice.

The next step is to formalise the steps of the GCS into a fit-for-purpose evaluation framework that standardises data collection across PES programmes (e.g., Climate Action Hubs, Climate Engagement Fund, Climate Action Schools, and campaigns like ‘Let’s Do Net Zero’) to allow for cumulative assessment of the entire programme’s impact. The following steps outline how Scottish Government policy teams can build a fit-for-purpose evaluation framework for the PES, flowing directly from the updated PES ToC:

• Construct the evaluation framework: This should flow directly from the ToC, providing a space to capture relevant data to summarise progress against delivering the inputs and outputs and evidence of outtakes, outcomes, and impacts achieved. The PES requires a core data collection tool that uses mandatory indicators collected from programmes and mapped across the GCS stages. Indicator data could include quantitative and qualitative metrics for each GCS stage. Discussion and recommendations on relevant indicators and data are given in Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E.
  
• Coherence, nesting, and streamlining: Replicating the “nesting” of programmes within the strategy-level ToC, the PES evaluation framework should show clearly where and how data collected from programmes feeds into reporting at strategy level. The evaluation framework should operationalise and evidence the theory behind how programmes relate to and deliver the overall strategy.
  
• Standardisation: To enable this nesting and streamlining, monitoring forms should be standardised across PES programmes, to the degree possible, to allow for easier cumulative assessment. The eventual framework should be designed to be simple, cross-compatible, and allow for easy linking of data to facilitate aggregation and potential autofill functions (e.g., in Excel) between different programme reports.

Refreshing and building out the PES ToC is the more complex task – A fit-for-purpose evaluation framework should be a shorter leap from there, simply collating the correct types of metrics to evidence each stage of the ToC.

Practical tools and templates: Evaluation framework

The following sources provide a comprehensive toolkit to implement an evaluation framework aligned with best practice:

The Government Communication Service (GCS) Evaluation Cycle provides clear guidance and definitions of each of its six stages, along with relevant metrics commonly used to measure each. It shows why measuring each stage matters and what can be claimed based on collecting that information. It also clarifies the theory behind a recurring, iterative evaluation cycle, showing how the stages feed into each other and back into Inputs, enabling learning and adaptation.

The Climate Action Hubs Revised Theory of Change and Revised Monitoring Template are robust tools which should be used as key sources and templates for building both the PES ToC and corresponding evaluation framework. The Hubs’ version shows the thinking behind how their activities are meant to address strategy level goals, delineates the difference between programme- and Hub-level outcomes, and their evaluation framework shows how each data collection step links back to the ToC. The Hubs template offers a ready-made structure for tracking Outputs, Outtakes (e.g., improved knowledge, concern, skills), and Outcomes (e.g., funding secured by community groups). The PES ToC and evaluation framework should be aligned with that of the Hubs such that data is cross-compatible they and can nest/integrate into each other effectively to allow for cumulative assessment by the Scottish Government.

Appendix D – Case studies

Case study 1: Lessons from EU Adaptation Strategy on Climate Change

The EU Adaptation Strategy for Climate Change provides a valuable reference point for the PES as an example of how monitoring and evaluation can be structured for a complex, multi-stranded climate change strategy operating across multiple governance levels. The formal evaluation of the EU Strategy, conducted between December 2016 and March 2018, assessed its implementation and performance since its launch in 2013. Covering all Member States, the evaluation applied five core criteria (Relevance, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Coherence, and EU Added Value) and drew on the original Impact Assessment to establish a 2013 baseline, planned inputs and activities, outputs, expected results, and operational objectives (European Commission, 2016). Key learnings for this research included:

• The absence of a clear counterfactual scenario was identified as a major methodological challenge. This led evaluators to adopt a theory-based evaluation approach rather than impact attribution in a strict causal sense.
  
• The evaluation was structured around a clear intervention logic, linking the need for policy action to objectives, actions, and anticipated impacts, and using this logic to guide assessment across the EU Strategy.
  
• The assessment was organised around a set of evaluation questions aligned with the five Better Regulation criteria. These questions were further translated into operational sub-questions tailored to different action areas and stakeholder groups.
  
• Evidence was drawn from multiple complementary sources, including literature review, targeted stakeholder surveys, interviews, workshops, open public consultation, and case studies. Evidence was triangulated to strengthen the robustness of findings.

Relevant and transferrable lessons from this example have been carried through to the recommendations for the PES in this research. As the Impact Assessment did not project a counterfactual scenario (which would have outlined how conditions would have evolved in the absence of the Strategy) and given the complexity of evaluating a multi-level intervention, the EU evaluation necessarily adopted a theory-based approach. Evaluation for the PES has similar starting conditions. The EU approach examined the Theory of Change embedded in the Strategy’s intervention logic, assessing progress for each objective and associated action. The current state of play was compared against the expected impacts and operational objectives defined in the Impact Assessment, which served as the principal points of comparison. Where suitable data were available, impacts were assessed quantitatively; in other cases, qualitative judgement was applied. To support robust conclusions, evidence from multiple sources was triangulated, with any inconsistencies identified and explicitly addressed (European Union, 2021). The recommendations of this report mirror this approach, identifying contribution analysis as a method which can combine multiple data sources to evidence a coherent contribution story.

Case study 2: Lessons from Wales PES

Wales is at an early stage of delivery but has taken a clear step towards establishing a structured evaluation architecture for its Public Engagement Strategy. The Strategy is underpinned by a detailed Theory of Change (ToC), developed through participatory workshops, which articulates how activities are expected to contribute to intermediate outcomes and longer-term impacts, and clarifies key assumptions and dependencies across four “green choice” themes (Welsh Government, 2023, p. 14). The ToC is structured around the COM-B behaviour change model, which assumes that behaviour change occurs only where Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation are present, and explicitly links public engagement activities to these components to set out the Strategy’s causal pathways. While a full evaluation framework has not yet been finalised, Wales has identified a range of measurable outputs and outlined how outcome measurement will draw on existing national datasets, including climate perceptions, behavioural tracking, and national survey data (McNamara & Foss, 2024). Key learnings from the Wales PES include:

• The ToC should be treated as a living framework and updated as the Strategy evolves, particularly as engagement activities become more clearly defined and as the scope of behaviours, including adaptation behaviours, expands over time.
• There is a risk that, without partners being fully aware of the Strategy and their role within it, activities may continue as disconnected strands of work rather than as a coherent public engagement strategy. This creates challenges both for attribution of outcomes and for the Strategy achieving its intended impact.
• Measuring outputs and outcomes is challenging due to the breadth and diversity of partners involved. Future evaluation should therefore consider how to assess the effectiveness of partner contributions by identifying what has changed as a result of the Strategy.
• The Wales ToC explicitly identifies assumptions, risks, and dependencies at each stage of the model. These provide a valuable foundation for shaping evaluation questions and identifying areas of focus when assessing the extent to which the Strategy has achieved its aims.

The Welsh ToC report reinforces the value of contribution analysis as a theory-based method for Scotland’s PES, that asks whether it is reasonable to conclude the strategy contributed to the desired outcomes, a fit for a policy where many parallel drivers exist:

“Recommendation 1: Use contribution analysis when evaluating. The Strategy will not directly lead to the COM-B outcomes or impacts described in the Theory of Change but aims to increase them. Future evaluation should therefore take a theory-based approach, using contribution methods (HM Treasury 2020). Rather than asking the questions such as, ‘did the Strategy lead to a Just Transition to net zero?’, contribution evaluation will assess questions such as, ‘is it reasonable to conclude the Strategy contributed to a Just Transition to net zero.’” (McNamara & Foss, 2024, p. 59)

Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E

Evaluating a multi-faceted national program like the PES requires a data collection approach that is both robust and pragmatic. The selection of data types should be guided by the principle of proportionality, which ensures that evaluation efforts are fit-for-purpose, credible, and tailored to the questions being asked, the resources available, and the context of the intervention (HM Treasury, 2020, pp. 16-17). Within contribution analysis, the function of data collection is to gather sufficient evidence to test the causal pathways outlined in the Theory of Change (ToC) and build a credible narrative of the strategy’s influence.

The core data needed to achieve this must provide a triangulated view of performance, combining quantitative and qualitative sources to track progress from inputs to outcomes. These essential data types are generally cost-effective and can often be integrated into existing program management and reporting cycles.

• Core quantitative data: This includes administrative and monitoring data that tracks Inputs & Activities (e.g., total spend, number of events organised), and Outputs (e.g., estimated total reach, website traffic, volume of press coverage). It also includes survey data, which is crucial for measuring outtakes and outcomes not captured elsewhere, such as changes in public awareness, attitudes, and stated intentions to act. Existing sources like the Scottish Household Survey provide a baseline for national indicators.
  
• Core qualitative data: This includes stakeholder interviews, progress report narratives, and feedback forms. This data is essential for the process evaluation component, providing the contextual “why” behind the quantitative figures, exploring what worked well or less well, for whom, and how delivery could be improved.

The following sections of the report present more specific metrics and data types which are relevant for evidencing the different stages of the updated PES ToC. It also signposts to where these are being collected across PES programmes and highlights any gaps. Putting data behind the reorganised ToC, addressing these gaps, and streamlining data collection and sharing will strengthen PES M&E.

To gain deeper insights into complex or long-term impacts, this core dataset can be supplemented with more resource-intensive methods, layered on strategically. These data types, while more costly and time-consuming to collect, are vital for understanding contribution and capturing the nuanced, meaningful changes that quantitative metrics may miss. This includes in-depth case studies to explore participant journeys, deliberative methods like focus groups to understand community attitudes, or quasi-experimental designs where feasible to strengthen causal claims (HM Treasury, 2020, pp. 42-43). The decision to employ these methods should be proportionate to the evaluation’s needs; they may be reserved for pilot projects, specific high-priority research questions, or the final full-term evaluation where a deeper understanding of “what works” is required to inform future strategy. Options to integrate these and other methods are discussed under Evidence for Impacts, below.

The following sections are ordered based on a generic Theory of Change: Inputs/Activities, Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes, Impacts, and Learning and Innovation. For each section/stage, its definition from the GCS is given. This is followed by the recategorised parts of the PES ToC to align with this definition (this replicates what is presented in Figure 8, so it may be helpful have that updated ToC to hand to follow along/read across). Then, a list of the relevant metrics which are recommended for measuring each stage is presented. This is followed by an overview of where these metrics and data types can be found across the range of PES programmes, any noteworthy gaps, and other discussion points as relevant.

Evidence for Inputs and Activities

“Inputs are what you put in at the start – the planning and research that informs your communications or campaign. This includes everything that must be done to prepare for the communication activity, which may include conducting research, reviewing previous learnings, planning evaluation design, determining budget and costs, etc. Wherever possible, planning should be based on research evidence, insights and learnings to maximise your chance of delivering a successful campaign or communication activity. Successful communication activities and campaigns rely upon sufficient preparation” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 12).

Collecting data on inputs and activities establishes the foundation of every engagement effort, showing what resources, research, and planning work were invested before any outcomes appear. Without that baseline, it is impossible to link observed changes in awareness, attitudes or actions to specific programmes, to calculate cost‑effectiveness, or to demonstrate that the strategy is using evidence‑based approaches. Transparent input data also lets policymakers identify gaps, replicate successful practices and hold the programme accountable for delivering value for public money across the whole PES.

Recategorised Inputs and Activities from draft updated ToC:

• The Scottish Government and Scotland’s key communicators deliver a consistent and impactful message about our climate change national endeavour
  
• Promote and maintain Net Zero website
  
• Ensure accessibility
  
• Promote positive messaging
  
• Apply lessons from Scotland’s Climate Assembly

Metrics for Inputs and Activities:

• Total spend to date (online and/or offline)
  
• Theory of Change (including evidence base) – Implementation of behavioural science in planning effective communication (Is it in place? Is it evidence-based?)
  
• Content creation (volume by type)
  
• Volume of press and/or social media releases (# of releases sent out)
  
• Evidence of implementing insights from research or learnings from previous evaluations (Is it in place? What did it inform?)

The MPR aggregates several metrics for Inputs/Activities, but the level of detail varies across the PES programmes. Budget information for the large‑scale programmes is provided, for example, the £9.5m allocated to Community Climate Action Hubs and the £800k cumulative spend on the Climate Engagement Fund (p.2), with further annual figures for Climate Week in Annex A (p.38). Narrative sections describe the creation of communication assets for the “Let’s Do Net Zero” campaign, website updates and tool‑kits, which together constitute the content‑creation evidence, although no consolidated count is provided (p.12). Social media reach is reported for specific initiatives, giving a partial view of the volume of press/social media releases. The MPR is clearly evidence-based and lists the research that has informed the strategy (e.g., external research, People’s Panel, stakeholder surveys, p.8). It also notes that the overall Theory of Change was tested, but it does not present a programme-by-programme Theory of Change, or a systematic log of how earlier evaluations were fed into design. References to behavioural‑science‑informed messaging appear in the discussion of motivational framing, yet there is no dedicated metric confirming its systematic application.

Gaps – Metrics absent or only partially recorded:

• Total spend to date (online and/or offline): Detailed spend is only available for a few large programmes (Hubs, Climate Engagement Fund, Climate Week). Most other initiatives – Climate Action Schools, Climate Action Towns, the Participation Programme and the Climate Assembly – have no aggregated financial input data in the MPR.
  
• Theory of Change (including evidence base): The MPR mentions the overarching ToC but does not provide a separate, documented Theory of Change for each programme, nor does it link activities to a specific evidence base.
  
• Content creation (volume): Asset creation is described qualitatively (campaign materials, tool‑kits) but no quantitative tally of pieces produced (e.g., number of videos, PDFs, lesson plans) is recorded for any programme.
  
• Volume of press and/or social‑media releases: only ad‑hoc social‑media metrics (hashtag use – see Evidence for Outtakes, below) are cited; no systematic count of press releases or social‑media posts per programme.
  
• Evidence of implementing insights from research or previous evaluations: the Review acknowledges use of external research but does not capture, per programme, which specific insights were incorporated or how they altered design.

Evidence for Outputs

“Outputs are objective measurements of what is delivered and how your audience encounters and interacts with your communications through reach, distribution and exposure. This captures how successfully your communication activity has reached your target audience, which may include press coverage, public relations and impressions, as well as low/no-cost activities such as stakeholder engagement” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 17).

Recategorised Outputs from draft updated ToC:

• There are many opportunities for people to have their views heard on Scotland’s response to climate change and to hear the perspectives of other people in Scotland
  
• Deliver public awareness campaigns
  
• Communicate climate impacts
  
• Facilitate climate conversations
  
• Build strong stakeholder partnerships

Metrics for Outputs:

• Estimated total reach (absolute number and proportion of target audience; offline / online)
  
• Direct contacts (# of direct online / offline contacts)^[11]
  
• Events organised (# of events, # of attendees, feedback from attendees)
  
• Volume of coverage (# of exposures)
  
• Partnerships secured (# partners providing amplifying support, promoting material or any form of in-kind or financial contribution)

The MPR contains data that maps directly onto the GCS output fields, but the information is spread across a series of narrative sections and annex tables rather than being presented as a single consolidated dashboard. For example, the Let’s Do Net Zero evaluation cited in the MPR provides the absolute reach for the COP‑26‑related communications: 75% of adults in Scotland, 3.5 million people saw the campaign, with an average exposure of 9.7 times. The same section also notes that the Net Zero Nation website receives 80‑100k visits per year, providing a baseline for ongoing online reach (pp.13-14). The Climate Engagement Fund section records that the Fund engaged 8,000 people in 2023‑24 and 7,000 people by Q3 2024‑25 (p.17). Annex A on Climate Week (p. 38) supplies the GCS metrics of “estimated total reach” (website visits, attendees), “direct contacts” (partner activity), “events organised” (12 events across 8 Ministerial portfolios), “volume of coverage” (3,588 hashtag mentions, although these could double as an Outtakes metric) and “partnerships” (number of partners, partner asset downloads). 

The Climate Engagement Fund Quarterly Grant Progress Report contains a dedicated “Audience Reach” grid that records total, in‑person and online reach for each grant and maps them against the three strategic objectives (Understand, Participate, Act). The Climate Action Schools Impact Report supplies its own reach and event figures: 27,500 pupils taught directly, 5,500 young people attending in‑person events and 1,160 schools participating – which are cross‑referenced in the MPR narrative as illustrative evidence of school‑level outputs (p.19). The Climate Assembly research report contributes the media‑coverage count (151 articles across four phases) and the number of direct engagement moments (106 assembly members, Ministerial Q&A) (Andrews, et al., 2022, p. 124). Finally, the Climate Action Hubs Revised Monitoring Template links the Output indicators (events organised, participants, partnership counts, coverage) to the hub‑level data collection worksheets. By pulling the figures from these sections and the annexed programme monitoring tables, Scottish Government can compile a strategy‑level dataset for the five GCS output metrics.

Gaps – Metrics absent or only partially recorded:

• Estimated total reach (proportion of target audience): Most programmes report absolute numbers (e.g., Schools, Hubs, Let’s Do Net Zero) but do not calculate the proportion of the defined Scottish audience that was reached (see 9 Recommended approach: Applying contribution analysis to the PES at strategy level.
  
• Direct contacts: a distinct “direct contact” count is missing; Contact is embedded in reach totals but not isolated as a separate metric (e.g., Climate Engagement Fund only captures audience reach, not a tally of unique contacts).
  
• Volume of coverage (media exposures): Only the Climate Assembly report provides a media‑exposure count; other programmes (Schools, Hubs, Climate Engagement Fund, Climate Week) lack a dedicated field for press cuts, broadcasts or digital impressions.
  
• Partnerships secured (amplifying support): Partnership activity is described qualitatively (e.g., “collaboration with community groups” in the Hubs template) but no programme reports a quantified count of partners that provide amplification or in‑kind support.
  
• Consistent offline vs. online split: While some reports separate online and in‑person reach (Climate Engagement Fund, Climate Week), others (Schools, Assembly) give only aggregated totals, preventing a clean offline/online comparison across the portfolio.

Measuring Outputs such as total reach, direct contacts, events, media coverage and partnership counts give the Scottish Government a factual baseline of what the PES actually delivered, turning narrative claims into verifiable numbers. Because the Theory of Change will link these delivery metrics to downstream Outtakes, Outcomes and Impact, a robust Outputs dataset lets PES teams demonstrate the scale of exposure and engagement that underpins any observed changes in attitudes, actions, or policy influence.

Evidence for Outtakes

“The audience perception – what they think, feel or intend to do as a result of your communication activities. Outtakes capture the reception, perception, intentions and reaction of your target audience to your communication activity. Outtakes are distinct from outcomes: while outtakes focus on audience beliefs, attitudes and feelings, outcomes focus on actual changes in behaviours.

Outtake metrics measure how your communication activity impacts your target audience’s awareness, understanding, attitudes, emotions, or intentions. Comparing Outtakes with the targets set in objectives enables you to understand which messaging has been effective for engaging your audience or different audience segments” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 19).

Recategorised Outtakes from draft updated ToC:

• People understand the causes and consequences of climate change and the need for ambitious mitigation and adaptation action
  
• People understand the actions that they are encouraged to take and how to take them
  
• People are aware of the action that all of Scotland is taking to tackle climate change and understand how it relates to their lives

Metrics for Outtakes:

• Sentiment (attitudes & emotions) (percent and/or case studies; assessment of press coverage)
  
• Online engagement: Click-through/view-through rates, Dwell time, Bounce rate, Passive engagements (shares/likes/retweets), Active engagements (comments/responses/hashtag use)
  
• Prompted/Unprompted campaign recognisers/awareness (# and % target audience)
  
• The extent to which different groups agree/disagree with messages related to the Theory of Change (5-point scale)
  
• Understanding and Agreement: Assessment of audience’s level of understanding of, and agreement with, campaign content (5-point scale)
  
• Stated or intended behaviour change: Proportion of target audience that claims they will act in accordance with the campaign aim (absolute number and proportion of target audience)
  
• Response rate (percent of contacts who respond)
  
• Attitudinal change: The degree to which people’s attitudes have changed in favour of the campaign (5-point scale)

The MPR pulls the evidence for Outtake metrics from several sources that are already collected across the Public Engagement Strategy (PES): National attitude and awareness trends are reported from the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) and the Scottish Climate Survey – these provide the “understanding & agreement” and “awareness” baselines used to track whether people know the causes of climate change and the actions they should take (p.2). The commercial “Let’s Do Net Zero” (LDNZ) campaign research provides comprehensive data on online engagement and supplies the core Outtake figures for campaign recognisers, including understanding of actions and having taken action (p.13).

Outcome tables for the Climate Engagement Fund projects list the number of people informed about Scotland’s climate programme (6,000 in 2023‑24) and give qualitative statements of increased understanding (p.17). The Climate Assembly research report provides the member‑level survey data that capture sentiment, attitudinal change, understanding and stated behavioural intention for the Assembly‑wide audience (Andrews, et al., 2022, p. 92). Program‑specific qualitative evidence (e.g., Climate Action Schools testimonials, Climate Action Hubs monitoring template, Climate Action Hubs evaluation) is referenced in the MPR as illustrative examples of audience perception and confidence (e.g., p.19).

Gaps – Metrics absent or only partially recorded:

• No standard 5‑point “understanding & agreement” or attitudinal‑change scale in many programme reports (Climate Action Schools, Climate Engagement Fund template, Climate Action Hubs monitoring).
  
• Stated or intended behaviour‑change figures are not routinely collected outside a few isolated surveys (LDNZ, Assembly).
  
• Sentiment/emotional‑response measurement is only anecdotal (e.g., educator quotes) and lacks quantitative scoring across programmes.

Evidence for Outcomes

“Outcomes are the response from your target audience in terms of changes in behaviour or active engagement, i.e., registrations to a website/service, adoption of positive habits, cessation of unwanted practices to comply with new laws/regulations, etc. It captures whether your audience’s feelings and motivations (“Outtakes”) really translate to actual behavioural change (“Outcomes”).

Outcomes determine how your communication activity influenced behaviour change and contributed to the policy objectives, i.e., whether your campaign encouraged your target audience to start doing something, stop doing something or maintain behaviour. Outcomes enable links to be made between any Outtakes (changes in beliefs and attitudes) and the resulting desired change in behaviour. Remember, even if your communication is primarily aimed at changing beliefs/ feelings (“Outtakes”), rather than behaviours (“Outcomes”), you should still consider whether (and if so, how) audience behaviour might change in response to your communications” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 22).

Recategorised Outcomes from draft updated ToC:

• Social norms are changed through increased local and community engagement and action on climate change
  
• People actively participate in shaping just, fair and inclusive policies that promote mitigation of and adaptation to climate change
  
• Taking action on climate change is normalised and encouraged in households, communities and places across Scotland
  
• Consultation process enhanced^[12]

Metrics for Outcomes:

• Behaviour change: Maintain, stop, or start a specific action; Quantifiable actions taken
  
• Completion/registration date (e.g., sign-up to a service)
  
• Decreased barriers to change behaviour as targeted by the campaign
  
• Decreased barriers to behaviour change that were not targeted by your campaign or cannot be changed through communications
  
• Capacity building, evidence of increased skills and confidence
  
• (All measured by recording absolute number and proportion of target audience, via survey/case study/other feedback)

The PES’s approach to behaviour change and implications for M&E

The PES it clear that it primarily targets understanding and attitudes, rather than acting as a direct driver of individual behaviour change. The strategy’s narrative stresses a “holistic, systemic approach […] to build a strong social mandate for the society‑wide, long‑term changes needed to transition Scotland to a net‑zero nation” and acknowledges that “behaviour change at the individual and household level is a key element […] but we cannot rely on nudging people towards one or two low‑carbon behaviours” (Scottish Government, 2021, p. 13). Within the programme theory for the PES, behaviour change is understood to be a subset of broader public engagement on climate change, rather than a directly measurable objective for the PES.

A critical principle drawn from GCS guidance is that not all outcomes are relevant or measurable for every campaign:

Detail from GCS on “Evaluating different types of communications”

“Awareness and attitudes: In the minority of cases, communications might primarily seek to raise awareness of an issue or to change people’s attitudes, with no behaviour changes anticipated, meaning measurement of Outcomes may not always be possible. However, even where the communication activity does not have a primary behavioural element, considerations should be made regarding how the communication objectives of increasing awareness or changing attitudes feed into overarching behavioural and policy objectives.

Behaviour Change: Most government communication seeks to change behaviours to implement government policy or improve society. This means that, in addition to tracking awareness metrics, evaluations should capture whether your target audience adopt the desired behaviour change, according to the purpose of “start”, “stop” or “maintain”. This is so that we can learn which methods, messages and channels are effective for encouraging successful behaviour change” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 10).

For the purposes of using the GCS metrics and definitions, the research team understands the PES as an awareness‑and attitude‑focused strategy. Drawing on best practice, PES evaluation should therefore concentrate on the Outtakes (knowledge, beliefs, motivation) that underpin the longer‑term cultural shift the strategy seeks, while still recognising that any downstream Outcomes will be mediated through those Outtakes. This is consistent with a contribution analysis approach, focusing on evidencing the causal links and making improvements within the programme’s sphere of influence, supporting the contribution story regarding downstream Impacts.

Practical tools and resources: Linking the PES to behaviour change (where relevant/desired)

Scottish Government policy teams should continue to make clear the programme theory behind the PES, including whether and how it is designed to enable and/or influence behaviour change. This could be included in the updated PES ToC, although it could be made clear that the PES does not directly target behaviour change, instead signposting to other programmes addressing that need. If there is a desire to connect the PES to behaviour change, the following resources provide a fit-for-purpose toolkit:

Awareness and attitude shifts (Outtakes) do not exist in isolation; they feed into the behavioural chain described by the COM‑B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation) (UK Government 2024 p.35). In the GCS framework, the Motivation component is directly linked to the outtakes that the PES is designed to influence. When motivation is raised, the COM‑B model predicts that the likelihood of Capability (skills, knowledge) and Opportunity (access to low‑carbon services, supportive policy environments) will determine whether a behaviour change occurs. The PES strategy document complements this with the ISM (Individual Social Material) model, a similar typology which considers the factors which influence behaviour and behaviour change (Scottish Government 2013). By mapping the PES ToC onto COM‑B + ISM, evaluators can make explicit where additional data (e.g., measures of opportunity such as infrastructure availability) are needed to explain gaps between attitudes and outcomes.

Integrating these insights into future PES evaluations can be done through a tiered design. Scottish Government policy teams could consider investing in further process evaluation components such as targeted case studies that trace the COM‑B pathway from motivation to capability and opportunity. The added value of this is a richer explanatory narrative that can inform policy refinements and demonstrate the systemic cultural shift the strategy promises. The main challenges are the resource demands of primary data collection, the need for inter‑programme data alignment, and the risk of over‑extending attribution claims when behavioural outcomes are measured without a robust counterfactual. By applying the proportionality principle—matching data intensity to evaluation questions and programme risk—the PES can maintain methodological rigour while remaining cost‑effective and focused on its core mandate of building awareness, shifting attitudes and, ultimately, fostering the societal conditions for lasting climate action.

Current reporting and potential lessons for Outcomes within the PES

In terms of reporting on Outcomes, the MPR describes the results from the Climate Action Hubs programme (improved community‑level mitigation and adaptation, confidence‑building and capacity‑building outcomes, p.32), and from the Climate Action Towns case‑studies that show climate actions embedded in local place plans (e.g., the Blackburn Future Plan, p.30). The Let’s Do Net Zero communications evaluation provides the recogniser‑to‑action link (e.g., 80% in 2024 reported having taken an action after seeing the campaign, p.13). The Climate Engagement Fund quarterly reports note that 8,000 people across eight projects reported taking climate‑action steps and give examples of practical workshops (e.g., historic‑building sustainability, p.17).

The MPR cites the Scottish Household Survey and the Scottish Climate Survey as the source of the “understanding & agreement” and “awareness” baselines that underpin the GCS metrics for sentiment, attitudinal change and stated/intended behaviour. The Climate Assembly research report lists the most popular climate actions for members, e.g., reductions in meat/dairy consumption, energy use (Andrews, et al., 2022, p. 16).

Gaps – Metrics absent or only partially recorded:

• Behaviour‑change counts (maintain/stop/start) are not captured in a standardised way for several major programmes (Climate Action Schools, Climate Assembly, Participation Programme) – the MPR notes only anecdotal evidence.
  
• Decreased‑barrier metrics are missing – the Climate Action Hubs monitoring template has no dedicated indicator for “reduction of targeted or non‑targeted barriers”, and the Climate Engagement Fund quarterly template does not request barrier‑reduction data.
  
• Quantifiable practical‑action tallies are fragmented – case‑studies (e.g., 89 bags of foodbank donations, 22,000 litter picks, Keep Scotland Beautiful 2025) exist, but there is no aggregated count across all projects; the MPR only cites project‑level totals (8,000 people taking, or encouraged to take actions via the Climate Engagement Fund, p.17) without a common metric.
  
• Capacity‑building evidence is largely qualitative – several programmes record knowledge gains or testimonials but lack a uniform 5‑point confidence or skill‑score that can be summed across the portfolio.

Evidence for Impacts

“Impact draws links between inputs, outputs, outtakes, and outcomes to determine how your communication activity has contributed to or impacted policy and organisational objectives. Impact is the comparison of actual outcome data with KPIs and objectives set to measure whether these were met. Organisational objectives are distinct from the policy objectives and include longer-term or wider considerations such as return on investment, revenue, cost reduction, compliance, retention, recruitment, positive contributions to physical/ mental health, environmental impact, etc.

Impact allows you to demonstrate whether your objectives were delivered. For paid-for campaigns you should also demonstrate whether your KPIs were met and if they were sufficient to deliver the targets set in your objectives. You should also consider how your communications activity contributed to broader organisational impacts” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 24).

Recategorised Impacts from draft updated ToC:

• Implement the updated Climate Change Plan
  
• Deliver Just Transition Commitments (including empowerment, community building, public support, equity and inclusion)
  
• Deliver COP26 engagement and legacy
  
• The Scottish Government listens to, acknowledges, and responds to people participating in policy design
  

Metrics for Impacts:

• Contribution to policy and/or organisational objectives (absolute number and proportion of targets met)
  
• Long-term compliance or retention (absolute number and proportion of targets met over time)
  
• Cost-per-person metrics (e.g., cost-per-person achieving awareness, behaviour change, etc.).
  
• Current return on investment (unit benefit multiplied by number of behaviour changes achieved)
  
• Evidence of outcomes being embedded in formal plans and/or policies

Impacts of participation: Feedback loops

The PES ToC includes participation in climate policy as one of its goals: “There are many opportunities for people to have their views heard on Scotland’s response to climate change and to hear the perspectives of other people in Scotland” (Outputs); “People actively participate in shaping just, fair and inclusive policies that promote mitigation of and adaptation to climate change” and “Consultation process enhanced” (Outcomes); “The Scottish Government listens to, acknowledges, and responds to people participating in policy design” (Impacts).

Demonstrating that public inputs are heard, acted upon and reported back is essential to prevent participation from being perceived as tokenistic and to preserve trust in government: the Scottish Climate Survey shows that 39% of respondents listed Scottish Government as a trusted source, (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 14), but that this trust could erode if people cannot see the impact of their involvement. The MPR identifies a key weakness in this regard: the current lack of ability to track how public engagement outcomes influence Scottish Government climate change policy, signalling a break in the causal chain that undermines the Participate pillar (Scottish Government, 2025, p. 22).^[13] Evidence from the Climate Assembly research report reinforces this point, showing that participant confidence declined when they could not see how their recommendations were taken forward, underlining the trust-building role of effective feedback (Andrews, et al., 2022, p. 15). The workshop with Scottish Government teams highlighted the challenges of establishing feedback loops:

“The challenge we have with feedback loops, specifically around things like participation and influence on policy, is being able to track that internally, and then being able to provide those feedback loops. I don’t know that measurement is our issue there, because I think that’s about policy measurement. It’s much harder to do that, from a PES perspective. […] I think we’ve gone almost as far as we can in terms of feedback loops now, and we do have a couple of systems. I mean, it’s more reflection loops than feedback loops in that we try and, on the back of a participative exercise, through the partner we’ve been working with, [provide] reflections based on the report and say, ‘Thank you for this input. This is how that’s going to feed into the process. These are some of the highlights that we really liked, really took from the report.’ And we’ve found partner feedback from that has been that that is incredibly useful. And it doesn’t go as far as […] really reflecting the impact on decisions. But it’s probably as far as we can go in terms of feedback loops on policy impact for participation, because it is a really funny, complex, sushi process that no one can really track.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

Both the Magenta Book and the Green Book warn that isolating how engagement activity cause policy changes is rarely possible; evaluations must therefore focus on contribution, using a ToC to trace plausible pathways, as discussed in the previous section. Despite these challenges, there are good examples in the Mid-Point Review (MPR) of closing the loop: the Participation Programme’s delivery tables show how evidence feeds into Just Transition Planning and the Transport Just Transition Plan (p.15), while Climate Policy Engagement Network documents contributions to SNAP3 and other Just Transition Plans (p.25). Evaluation frameworks such as the Independent Evaluation of the Climate Action Hubs further institutionalise this feedback function through explicit measures—such as “Output 8: Supporting policy input and decision making”—designed to capture evidence of influence on policy (Scottish Government, 2024, p. 42).

In summary, a robust feedback loop, systematically documenting how public input is taken up and communicating the response back to participants, where possible, is essential to maintain trust and demonstrate the value of public engagement. Future PES evaluations should continue to capture this data where possible. The recommendations in this report related to strengthening the ToC will help in joining up these efforts across PES stages to demonstrate a coherent approach within the PES to support impact on climate change policies. The OECD Citizen Participation Barometer could be a useful tool in the future, when available.

Value-for-money and return on investment

Value-for-money is one of the three main purposes of evaluation, alongside process and impact evaluations. Value-for- is of key interest for PES stakeholders, as evidenced by this interview quote:

“For me, the most important is, ‘Are we doing the right thing? Are we making any difference? Is this a good use of public money? Are we investing in the right programmes? Is it making any kind of a difference? Should we actually use this this money for retrofitting houses?’” (Quote from interview)

The main difficulty in calculating a clear value‑for‑money or return on investment for the PES is that the strategy is deliberately designed to generate understanding and attitudinal change rather than immediate, quantifiable behavioural outcomes. Government Communication Service guidance stipulates that return-on-investment objectives should be focused on measurable behavioural results (e.g., numbers of investments generated, or teachers recruited) and that impact analysis must move through a five‑step process of objectives, baseline, trend, isolation and externalities (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 37). Because the PES treats behaviour change as a subset of broader public engagement and not a direct, measurable target, the Outcomes required for a traditional return on investment calculation are often absent. Instead, the programme is expected to deliver “Outtakes” such as knowledge, beliefs and motivation. Similar to the limitations on available national scale data discussed in 9.1 Proportionality: How can contribution analysis address the challenges of PES M&E in a feasible way?, it is difficult to establish a baseline and a trend for the desired Outcomes and to separate the PES’s contribution from other policy instruments, so attribution of any observed impact to the communication activity alone is uncertain.

In addition, the PES’s long‑term, systemic ambition to build a strong social mandate for net‑zero creates wide‑ranging externalities (positive cultural shifts, equity gains, indirect health benefits) that are difficult to monetise or link directly to the initial investment. Assumptions required to translate attitudinal shifts into monetary returns are therefore more speculative, and the need to track unintended consequences further adds uncertainty to the return-on-investment calculation. Consequently, standard GCS return on investment methodology—relying on concrete, behaviour‑based KPIs—does not align cleanly with the PES’s intended impact pathway, limiting the ability to demonstrate conventional value-for- money- or return on investment.

Learning and Innovation

“Formal learning forms the final stage of an evaluation cycle. At this stage, you would evaluate the effectiveness of inputs at each stage of the evaluation cycle to understand the impact on policy/organisation objectives and see what did or did not work. Formal learning can be used to drive innovation in the future. It would be useful to consider what approaches could be employed in future activities to overcome difficulties and leverage strengths in your approach. Where applicable, it is also useful to capture what innovations were applied in your communication activities and why they did or did not work.

For paid-for campaigns, this stage is where learnings from your 10% innovation investment should be reported in your evaluation. It is an opportunity to showcase innovations that could be “scaled up” across other communication activities but also to report other learnings (i.e., what didn’t work). The aim of this stage is not to justify new approaches but rather to inform future considerations.

If objectives or KPIs were not met, what reasons can be identified to explain the variation? If the objectives were surpassed, what has driven that? This identifies strategic insights and learnings that can be taken forward and shared.

What are they used for? This is so that, now or in the future, communications activities can capitalise on successful communication techniques and avoid embedding unsuccessful methods. Learnings that can be applied or scaled more generally should also be shared GCS-wide, across teams, and across government organisations” (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 26).

Recategorised “Supporting activities to help bring about the changes (assumptions) required” from draft updated ToC:

• Support climate change education
  
• Involve children and young people
  
• Encourage community climate action
  
• Engage through culture and heritage
  
• Promote a place-based approach
  
• Support trusted messengers
  
• Encourage connections with nature

For the PES, learning and innovation should be understood not as a separate, occasional activity but as a continuous, project-driven feedback loop. This aligns closely with the GCS Evaluation Cycle, which positions “Learning & Innovation” as the final stage that closes the loop by analysing what worked, what did not, and feeding those insights directly into the next cycle of planning and Inputs (Government Communication Service, 2024, p. 8). While the PES sets the overarching strategic aims for understanding, participation and collective action, it is the programmes and projects that translate these ambitions into practical engagement with people on the ground. These are the spaces where experimentation happens: where different formats, audiences, and supporting activities (e.g., trusted messengers, place-based approaches, culture and heritage, community climate action, etc.) are tested in real contexts. Evaluating and learning from this project-level innovation is therefore the primary route through which the PES can evolve, refine its Theory of Change, and adapt to Scotland’s diverse social and geographic settings.

Public engagement initiatives are highly context-dependent: trust dynamics, local networks and culturally relevant messengers can determine whether an engagement mechanism succeeds or fails (Climate Outreach, 2020). Engagement is also non-linear and complex. Its effects tend to accumulate gradually through shifts in understanding, trust and perceived legitimacy, rather than through a single, traceable cause–effect pathway. Much of its impact only emerges when the right combination of conditions is present (Bicket, et al., 2020).

The MPR already demonstrates that the system is capable of project‑level innovation: the Climate Engagement Fund encourages grant‑making organisations to experiment with new formats and audiences (p.16); Climate Action Hubs are deliberately tailored to local contexts, learn from one another, trial new approaches, and feed insights back to Government (p.33). By mandating structured reflection (e.g., the Hubs Section 7 template) and a central “catalogue of evidence”, projects can capture best practice, challenges and suggestions for improvement, then push those insights up the hierarchy so the ToC and the input assumptions are regularly refreshed (Scottish Government, n.d.). Workshop participants reflected on these aspects of PES delivery:

“It kind of links to the co-design. For me, these kinds of things are about people having agency over how they report or how they measure success. And it gives a sense of control over the project […] Potentially, we’re already doing a lot of this, like naturally it just happens, and so it’s more a case of just being a bit more conscious of it and thinking about how it’s used, and how we can maximise the value of it to have the most impact.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

“In the Hubs evaluation, we did include in the contract quite a big emphasis on learning and knowledge sharing. And not necessarily like in an innovative way, but I think just in a way that works for the people involved in the Hub activities. So going beyond just publishing the evaluation report and leaving it out there. […] We’re setting up some learning sessions with the Hubs, which will be centred around different themes. The researchers will present findings to the Hubs, but then have more of an open discussion back and forth with them about how they might integrate the findings in their own work.” (Quote from workshop with Scottish Government)

These projects are already generating insights on what works, for whom and in what contexts—precisely the type of evidence highlighted in the Magenta Book’s guidance for complex social interventions. The challenge is not generating innovation, but capturing it systematically, synthesising it, and feeding it back into the Inputs stage of the PES so that assumptions, mechanisms and ‘supporting activities’ are regularly refreshed.

Robustly testing the efficacy of delivery methods and supporting activities, especially if adapting to the context of Scotland specifically, will require investment in more in-depth research. Proportionality is essential. Richer qualitative data (e.g., case study narratives, interviews, participant journeys, etc.) should be used selectively, where it adds explanatory power or illuminates causal mechanisms. Over time, repeating this cycle of project-level experimentation, structured reflection, and strategic refinement will allow the PES to build a credible evidence base for continuous improvement, strengthen its ToC, and ensure that Scotland’s public engagement system remains adaptive, place-sensitive and capable of evolving alongside societal needs.

All of these activities around learning and innovation should be captured as Inputs, specifically as “Insights and formal learnings” implemented into delivery at strategy level (see Strategy-level Inputs under A guide for reviewing and refreshing the PES Theory of Change and Evidence for Inputs and Activities).

How to cite this publication:

Stevens, B and Vester, S (2026) ‘Measuring the impact of climate change engagement in Scotland,’ ClimateXChange.

© The University of Edinburgh, 2026
Prepared by SAC Consulting on behalf of ClimateXChange, The University of Edinburgh. All rights reserved.

While every effort is made to ensure the information in this report is accurate, no legal responsibility is accepted for any errors, omissions or misleading statements. The views expressed represent those of the author(s), and do not necessarily represent those of the host institutions or funders.

This work was supported by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division of the Scottish Government (CoE – CXC).

ClimateXChange

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If you require the report in an alternative format such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.

1. “Scotland is already leading the way, not just in have the PES in place but also having a built-in process of monitoring and evaluation. The PES should continue to provide a clear and positive vision for the future and include multiple approaches, including co-ordinating large-scale engagement and supporting smaller local engagement. It could explore more creative innovative activities than those currently used.” (Millar, et al., 2024) ↑

2. This point is echoed in the Magenta Book guide on evaluation in complex systems, which identifies “levers and hubs” as a key aspect of complex systems: “Some components of a system may have a disproportionate influence over the whole because of the structure of their connections. Their activity may help to mobilise or slow down change [i.e. depending on whether they are for or against the issue], and their presence or absence make a system vulnerable to disruption” (Bicket, et al., 2020). Using trusted messengers takes full advantage of this aspect to the benefit of PES objectives. ↑

3. “Outtakes” is an intermediate Theory of Change category included in the UK Government Communication Service Evaluation Cycle. They are a useful concept in any intervention which has an awareness-raising or engagement element. They are defined as “the audience perception – what they think, feel or intend to do as a result of your communication activities. Outtakes capture the reception, perception, intentions and reaction of your target audience to your communication activity. Outtakes are distinct from outcomes: while outtakes focus on audience beliefs, attitudes and feelings, outcomes focus on actual changes in behaviours.” (Government Communication Service, 2024) ↑

4. “SMART objectives should be objectively observable and measurable” (HM Treasury, 2022). ↑

5. To assist with this, the GCS Smart Targets Tool is expected in 2026. ↑

6. See for example the following blog from Better Evaluation: Using Social Network Analysis for M&E (Sette, 2013). ↑

7. See next section, GCS Evaluation Cycle. ↑

8. For example, explicitly state the assumption that providing funding through the Climate Engagement Fund (Input) will successfully mobilise local action (Outcome) because the funded organisations have trusted community relationships (Assumption). ↑

9. The Millar et al. (2024) provides a robust evidence base on best practice for engagement, commissioned for this purpose. ↑

10. The Climate Action Hubs ToC (not yet published but shared with the research team for the purposes of this report) is quite robust, with assumptions and key causal links identified. It includes an evaluation framework which builds directly from this, with fields for entering key evidence and how this links to specific parts of the ToC. Data and indicators collected by the Hubs, and how these support strategy-level evaluation, are included in Appendix E – Data and indicators for PES M&E.Programme- and strategy-level ToCs should be aligned and resolved, underpinned by the same frameworks and consistent language. ↑

11. The GCS metrics differentiate between “reach” (the size of the audience that could have been exposed to a communication piece; a one‑way, exposure‑only metric that estimates how many individuals the output could have touched) and “contacts” (the people with whom the strategy has had a direct, two‑way interaction, e.g., attending an event, signing up to a mailing list, responding to a survey, or any other activity that creates a record of the person’s participation and allows follow‑up). The GCS therefore recommends tracking “# contacts” as a separate indicator from reach, reflecting the depth of engagement rather than just potential audience size (UK Government 2024). ↑

12. Rephrased slightly from existing PES ToC, where this Indicative Action was “Enhance consultation process.” Rephrasing this as “Consultation process enhanced” enables it to fit as an Outcome, a better fit for this goal of the PES. No other PES Indicative Actions, Outcomes or Impacts were rephrased. ↑

13. This quote was specifically referring to the outcomes of Scotland’s Climate Assembly. However, interview and workshop findings confirm that linking the results of engagement to policy changes is a challenge faced by Scottish Government policy teams. ↑