Fraser Sutherland Takes Charge at Stop Climate Chaos Scotland

Fraser Sutherland is Coalition Manager at Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, the £40,000 post filled after Becky Kenton-Lake’s six-year tenure. He took the job in spring 2026 as Holyrood replaced annual climate tests with five-year carbon budgets, rushed out a delayed plan, and went into a May election that left the SNP short of a majority.

The February listing read like a routine charity hire. What it actually did was restaff the centre of a 70-group coalition just as the legal frame that coalition spent two decades defending was rewritten, and just as Reform UK took 17 seats in the new parliament.

Fraser Sutherland Now Runs Scotland’s Climate Coalition

SCCS’s own staff page now lists Fraser Sutherland as Coalition Manager. He came from Humanist Society Scotland, where he was chief executive, after policy work at Citizens Advice Scotland and a research post at the Scottish Parliament. He grew up in Ayrshire and lives in Falkirk. He plays and coaches curling.

That mix is the point of the hire. The coalition is not a single campaign shop. It is environment groups, development charities, unions, churches, health bodies and community organisations that only bite if someone makes them speak together. The job advert asked for a manager who likes partners, can raise money, can line-manage staff, and can walk into rooms with ministers and journalists.

Kenton-Lake left that room. Circular Communities Scotland announced her on 16 March 2026 as its new Circular Economy Policy Officer, and she said she had spent six years at the helm of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland after more than a decade in circular-economy posts at Oxfordshire councils.

I am passionate about bringing people together and making connections to increase our impact and help create a greener, fairer society.

Becky Kenton-Lake, Circular Economy Policy Officer, Circular Communities Scotland

Dr Mike Robinson OBE, the coalition’s chair, wrote to Gillian Martin on 28 May 2026 to congratulate her on keeping the climate brief and said he would ask Fraser Sutherland to fix a meeting. By then the vacancy was no longer a vacancy. The original listing page now returns a 404.

A £40,000 Remote Post With Holyrood in the Diary

SCCS advertised the Coalition Manager vacancy on 4 February 2026. Applications had to reach Kenton-Lake at info@stopclimatechaos.scot by midday on Friday 27 February. Interviews were set for Wednesday 4 March in Edinburgh. The post was to start in spring.

THE TERMS ON THE FEBRUARY LISTING

Covering letters were capped at three sides of A4. CVs were capped at two. The brief also covered fundraising, membership work with the board, and liaison with sister climate coalitions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, plus international networks.

Twenty-three days of advertising, then five days to interview, then twelve days until Kenton-Lake was public in her next job. The handover was tight because the calendar behind it was tighter.

Why the Handover Landed in an Election Year

On 25 February 2026, still inside that application window, the Climate Change Committee published its 2025 progress report on Scotland. The same week, MSPs were finishing 120 days of scrutiny of a draft Climate Change Plan laid on 6 November 2025. Parliament’s last sitting day of the session was 26 March. The final plan had to land before dissolution.

On 23 March, SCCS set out four key tests the delayed plan still had to meet.

THE FOUR TESTS SCCS SET IN MARCH

• Farming: The draft, the coalition said, had no proper strategy to future-proof Scottish agriculture.
• Transport: Scotland’s patchy and expensive public transport network would be left essentially unchanged.
• Homes: Action on home heating was neither fast enough nor at scale.
• Carbon capture: The pathway leaned on unproven kit promoted by the oil and gas sector, including carbon capture and storage.

Robinson was blunt. The draft was “not fit for purpose when it came out, detailing a pathway for three quarters of the journey to net zero at best, but it still left a gaping hole for the rest.” Gillian Martin published the final Climate Change Plan for 2026 to 2040 the next day, 24 March. Campaigners said the final text moved little from the draft.

Counting on the Holyrood election finished on 7 May 2026. The SNP took 58 of 129 seats, seven short of the 65 needed for a majority. Labour took 17. Reform UK took 17. The Greens took 15, the Conservatives 12, the Liberal Democrats 10. John Swinney stayed First Minister. Martin stayed on climate, now as Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Rural Affairs.

A Coalition Manager hired off a February advert was, by May, the person who had to get 70 organisations into that chamber.

The Secretariat Was Rebuilt Around Him

Sutherland did not walk into a settled office. SCCS spent the first half of 2026 hiring almost an entire staff team around the manager’s chair.

THE FOUR-PERSON STAFF TEAM

The admin post went out on 26 January 2026 at £27,000 pro rata for three days a week. The Advocacy Lead went out on 1 April at £35,000 on a one-year contract that could extend with funding. A press vacancy in the same stretch was pitched as work to shape climate coverage before the Holyrood vote.

That is a lot of churn for a charity whose public work is coordination, not service delivery. SCCS is funded mainly through membership fees and donations, with occasional extra grants for specific campaigns. The board is elected by members. Robinson, founding chair in 2006 and chief executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society since 2008, is back in the chair. The board also includes climate lawyer Tessa Khan, WWF Scotland’s Claire Daly, Christian Aid’s Sally Foster-Fulton, and Liz Murray of Community Energy Scotland, who has been in the coalition since 2005.

Without a manager, those people still exist. They just stop arriving in the same room with the same ask.

Gail Wilson, Becky Kenton-Lake and the Law They Served

SCCS came together around 2007 so civil society could feed into Scotland’s first climate statute, the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009. Each Coalition Manager has sat on a different version of that law.

HOW THE MANAGER’S JOB HAS MOVED WITH THE STATUTE

1. 2006: Mike Robinson helps found the coalition and chairs it until 2010.
2. 2009: The first Climate Change (Scotland) Act passes. Gail Wilson is coordinator, then Coalition Manager, through to 2019.
3. 2015: Wilson’s tenure covers the Paris Agreement.
4. 2019: A second Climate Act tightens the domestic frame. Wilson’s decade ends. Tom Ballantine, chair from 2010 to 2022, is later made an ambassador.
5. 2020 to 2026: Kenton-Lake’s six years run through COP26 in Glasgow and then through the collapse of the 2030 target.
6. 2024: Parliament repeals annual and interim targets, including the 75% cut by 2030, and switches to five-year carbon budgets.
7. Spring 2026: Sutherland takes the chair as the first budgets and a new parliament arrive together.

Wilson, now an outreach advocacy worker in Edinburgh and a board member of the Edinburgh Community Solar Co-operative, is listed among the coalition’s ambassadors. The pattern is simple. When Holyrood rewrites the climate statute, SCCS eventually rewrites its staff chart.

Kenton-Lake’s years were the ones in which the old annual tests failed in public. Sutherland’s years start after those tests have been taken off the statute book. He does not get to hold ministers to a 75% point target in 2030. He gets carbon budgets, a plan campaigners already called thin, and a chamber that includes a Reform bloc the same size as Labour’s.

Carbon Budgets Take the Place of Annual Targets

Scotland still has a Net Zero date of 2045, five years earlier than the UK as a whole. What changed in 2024 is the path. Annual statutory targets and the 2030 interim goal are gone. In their place sit four legally binding five-year budgets, set in 2025 in line with Climate Change Committee advice, and they include Scotland’s share of international aviation and shipping.

Those budgets are not the old 75% target under a new name. The 75% figure was a single-year checkpoint for 2030, repealed because the watchdog said it was no longer credible. The new numbers are five-year averages against 1990.

SCOTLAND’S CARBON BUDGETS VERSUS 1990

The CCC’s February assessment found credible plans for 91% of the cuts needed in the first budget, or plans with only some risks. Later budgets, it said, still carry serious gaps on buildings and negative emissions technologies.

THE WATCHDOG’S 2023 BASELINE

• Territorial emissions: 39.6 MtCO2e in 2023, less than half the 1990 level.
• Recent pace: a 2.6% fall between 2021 and 2023.
• Electric vehicles: up 38% in the year to September 2025.
• Peatland: 14,900 hectares restored in 2024/25, almost double the previous two-year rate.

Nigel Topping, the CCC chair, said the Scottish Government has the policy powers to make most of the required cut happen, “but only if they take action now.” He also said current plans for buildings are too slow and lean on a late-2030s catch-up, and that heat pumps need to move faster. Heat pump installations rose 18% between 2023 and 2024. Tenements are about a quarter of Scottish homes, and the committee wanted a strategy for them.

The Scottish Government’s response, laid on 24 March 2026, said it had accepted or partially accepted all 18 CCC recommendations. Its Programme for Government for 2026 to 2031, published on 1 September, says the Climate Change Plan contains 150 actions over 15 years and cites potential financial benefits and savings of £42.3 billion. SCCS’s own June briefing still warned that the plan leans on removing around 3 million tonnes of CO2 a year through negative emissions technologies, with only a route-map promised during 2026.

Before the annual targets were repealed, Scotland had missed eight of 12 of them. That record is why the 2030 75% goal was pulled. It is also why a new Coalition Manager cannot treat the first carbon budget as a quiet period.

Seventeen Reform MSPs Sit Across the Chamber

The second-order problem is not the job description. It is the audience. For most of SCCS’s life, the argument at Holyrood was how fast to go. Reform UK’s 17 MSPs make “whether to go” a live question in the same building. The Greens, on 15, still pull the other way. The SNP, on 58, has to govern without a majority after years of missed tests and a target it abandoned.

Sutherland has already picked a lane that tries to hold both climate and work in the same sentence. In a 14 September commentary he argued that North Sea jobs have more than halved in a decade, that renewables have not replaced them in anything like the numbers required, and that governments could change that with direct investment in the factories that support offshore wind.

The transition to renewable energy is happening, at pace, but the manner in which it’s taking place is leaving everyone in Scotland short-changed.

Fraser Sutherland, Coalition Manager, Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, 14 September 2026

That is a different register from a pure emissions ledger. It is also the register a 70-group coalition needs if it wants unions, churches and community groups in the same lobby as the environment NGOs. The political counter is already in circulation: that professional climate outfits are distant from bills, jobs and energy security. Sutherland’s first public argument is an attempt to take that counter on the facts rather than on tone.

The staff team’s autumn work shows the same shift from the vacancy to delivery fights. SCCS spent August and September pushing a private-jet tax, a ScotWind wealth fund that seeds community ownership, and a pause on hyperscale data centres. On 17 September the coalition cheered a parliamentary vote to pause hyperscale applications until guidance is in place and to require environmental impact assessments.

'Parliament votes to pause hyperscale data centre applications until guidance is in place AND all are to be required to do Environmental Impact Assessments.'

A huge step in the right direction 🙌

Read more on @APRScotland's full press release:https://t.co/qfACtB5g6c

— Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (@sccscot) September 17, 2026

Robinson’s May letter to Martin had already asked for a pause on such developments until their effect on climate targets and electricity supply was assessed. The new manager’s job is to keep that pressure in one voice after the law, the plan and the parliament have all changed under the coalition’s feet.

Kenton-Lake spent six years holding 70 organisations together while the old targets failed. Sutherland starts with a rebuilt staff, a first carbon budget the watchdog says is mostly mapped, and a Holyrood in which 17 Reform MSPs can vote as if the emergency is the lobby, not the emissions. The £40,000 chair is filled. The argument it exists to run is only beginning.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Is Stop Climate Chaos Scotland Funded?

SCCS pays for a small secretariat through membership fees and donations, and it sometimes seeks extra grants for named pieces of work rather than for core staff. It is a registered Scottish charity, number SC039643, and a company limited by guarantee, SC339217. It is not party political and says it does not use illegal action.

Does the Coalition Have Sister Groups in the Rest of the UK?

Yes. Its sister bodies are The Climate Coalition in England and Stop Climate Chaos Cymru in Wales, and the Coalition Manager brief also covers contact with the Northern Ireland climate coalition and with international networks. The Scottish body is separately constituted even though it grew from the same mid-2000s NGO push that created the London coalition.

Where Does Stop Climate Chaos Scotland Work From?

The registered address is 2nd Floor, Thorn House, 5 Rose Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2PR. Most staff work from home in Scotland, with meetings concentrated in the Central Belt and only occasional days in that Edinburgh office, which is why the Coalition Manager post was sold as remote with travel.

Do Scotland’s Carbon Budgets Include Flights and Shipping?

They do. The Climate Change Committee’s budget advice, and the 2025 regulations Parliament approved, set the four five-year caps including Scotland’s share of international aviation and shipping, which also sit inside the 2045 Net Zero target. That is one reason the new 57% first-budget figure cannot be read as a simple swap for the old 75% by 2030 checkpoint, which was a different kind of target on a different legal basis.