Creative Scotland as a public body, has a statutory duty under the Climate Change Act (Scotland) 2009, to address climate change through mitigation, adaptation, act sustainably and to report on its progress annually.
In 2022 we published our Climate Emergency and Sustainability Plan and the recruited our Climate Emergency and Sustainability lead. 2023/24 will see us expand the data that is collected on our organisational emissions and focus on the impact of our transport choices.
It is essential that we act boldly to address the climate emergency and reduce our emissions at speed to achieve net-zero at a minimum, by 2045. While we are working to better understand and reduce our organisational emissions, we are also thinking about the long-term plan of how to address our residual emissions, a challenge we know is also being considered by organisations and individuals across Scotland.
Everyone is at a different point on their journey to net-zero, the tackling of Scope 3 and articulation of Scope 4 emissions. Some recipients of Creative Scotland funding may have already reduced their emissions considerably and are able to tackle those residual emissions now. It is therefore critical that as a distributor of public funding that Creative Scotland establish its position on offsetting and our expectations of you, as funding applicants, should offsetting/insetting costs be included within future funding application budgets.