From November 2023 to April 2025, Phase 1 of the Climate Ready South East Scotland partnership carried out a collaborative climate risk and opportunity (CROA) assessment to understand how climate change will impact the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region. The climate risk and opportunity assessment (CROA) wove multiple strands of evidence together including economic modelling, climate projections, formal evidence from academia and industry, and anecdotal evidence from communities, about the changes they are seeing to their local climate and coastline.
By working together with hundreds of organisations and communities, we now have a better understanding of how climate change will affect our region, and where we need to prioritise action, together to minimise risks and maximise opportunities. The CRSES partnership would like to extend our thanks to everyone who has helped us produce the CROA. Priority regional adaptation actions have been selected on the basis of the need for urgent action (where communities are already experiencing loss or harm today), the potential for regional collaboration to maximise resilience and the risk of cascading consequences if no action is taken.
Results were published in May 2025. Since then, we’ve been working in the background with project partners to secure funding and develop a workplan that takes us from risk assessment results to delivering resilience action on the ground.
In 2025-26, the 6 Local Authorities involved in Climate Ready South East Scotland aim to move from understanding the challenge, towards strategic adaptation planning and action. Phase 2 of CRSES will run from August 2025 to the end of June 2026, and will focus on:
1. Developing business cases and detailed proposals for adaptation actions for each of the Thematic Focus Areas: Land use and environmental connectivity; Coastal change; Catchment level adaptation of rivers; and Infrastructure, including housing, transport, and energy.
2. Widening and formalising CRSES to a sustainable partnership model aligned with wider regional governance structures, including a wider City Deal “Regional assessment tool” to assess all future City Deal projects for robust resilience in design and operation.
3. Resolving priority knowledge gaps identified through the risk assessment, including further work on water scarcity and the interactions between climate risk and health inequalities
On 6th October we’ll be hosting a share-back event online to disseminate the findings from Phase 1 of CRSES and provide more detail on our plans for the next phase of Climate Ready South East Scotland. Sign up for your place at this session here.
