Civil emergency whole system preparedness: 2025 report

2. Risk Assessments in Scotland

The National Security Risk Assessment

The National Security Risk Assessment is the UK Government’s principal tool for identifying and assessing the most serious risks facing the UK. It is a tool to drive risk management and is an essential part of the way national security and resilience is approached. It assesses the key malicious and non-malicious risks that could potentially damage the safety or security of the UK, or its interests, both domestically and overseas.

The Scottish Government is involved in the ongoing review and development of the National Security Risk Assessment methodology and is reviewing how it can optimise use of it, as well as improve its process for taking into account Scotland’s circumstances and characteristics.

The Scottish Risk Assessment

Since 2018, the Scottish Government has produced a Scottish Risk Assessment every two to three years, designed to supplement the National Security Risk Assessment with Scotland-specific information and analysis where this adds value.

Scottish Risk Assessments have been produced in collaboration with a wide range of partners from within Scottish Government and across the wider resilience community. The Scottish Government or national agencies lead on the development and assessment of individual scenarios which fall within their remit, because they have the expertise and links to subject-matter experts. They develop appropriate scenarios and assess the risk using Scottish Risk Assessment methodology.

Consideration is given by Scottish Risk Assessment risk authors to the potential impacts of risks on vulnerable people and communities should they occur. Scottish Risk Assessment risk authors include organisations such as the Met Office, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, British Geological Survey, and Food Standards Scotland.). These individual risk assessments then go through a process of expert challenge to ensure they are robust and evidence led.

There is always room for improvement and having produced three iterations of the Scottish Risk Assessment, a risk assessment working group has now been convened to examine alternatives to the approach the Scottish Government has previously taken to assessing civil contingencies risks. The work of this group considers how the Scottish Government can optimally use UK-wide risk assessment to inform its own work to assess risk, taking into account Scotland’s circumstances and characteristics. This includes the potential impacts that these risks may have upon the most vulnerable in our society, as well as how to integrate the understanding of longer-term trends (10-20 years) into the medium term (2-5 years) civil contingencies risk assessments.

The risk assessment working group’s review is due for completion by the end of 2025, with identified improvements intended to be delivered incrementally from the end of 2025 onwards.

Horizon Scanning

On 17 June 2025, the Scottish Government published the findings from a significant horizon scanning project. The “Future Trends for Scotland” report and the accompanying Trend pack describe the 60 trends likely to be important to Scotland over the next 10 to 20 years. This work involved over 100 stakeholder interviews and several sense-making workshops with a mix of stakeholders, together with a specific project focused on engaging young people. By publishing these findings, the Scottish Government has fulfilled a commitment made to the Finance and Public Administration Committee “to create a new resource for public bodies and partners in the third and private sectors to support their own planning and preparedness” and hopes the insights will enable leaders across Scotland to make future-focused decisions.

This improvement work undertaken by the Scottish Government will also explore how these longer-term trends might interact with civil contingencies risks to allow the interconnections to be understood in order to strengthen preparedness.