Scotland's Land Use Strategy: annual progress report – 2025-2026

Introduction

Section 37A of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, as amended, places a legal duty on Scottish Ministers to produce annual progress reports on the Land Use Strategy. This document is the seventh annual report and the sixth since the publication of Scotland’s Third Land Use Strategy 2021 -2026.

This report looks back to set out the actions we have taken towards the objectives of the third land use strategy to support its landscape-based approach between April 2025 and March 2026.

In March 2026, toward the end of the period covered by this report, we published Scotland's Fourth Land Use Strategy: 2026-2031. This sets out our strategic direction towards our new vision for national scale integrated land use and describes how this can build greater resilience to the impacts of climate change, and support delivery of Scotland’s climate and nature ambitions.