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Building a Sustainable Scotland: Sustainable Development and the Spending Review 2002

FOREWORD
by the Minister for Environment and Rural Development and the Minister for Finance and Public Services

Growing our economy and increasing opportunities in our communities. Inspiring our young people and realising our aspirations for Scotland. Improving our public services and safeguarding our environment. These are the ambitions that have shaped our spending proposals for the next three years.

Sustainable development is not an optional extra. Our social, economic and environmental ambitions are interlinked and we must work to deliver all three if we are going to deliver the quality of life we want for ourselves and for future generations.

Sustainable development has been a central element of our Programmes for Government and was reaffirmed when the Executive set out its priorities in the Parliament on 9 January. In April, we published Meeting the Needs... Priorities, Actions and Targets for Sustainable Development in Scotland, which sets out our vision for sustainable development in Scotland, identifies our three main priority areas of resource use, energy and travel, and sets out a range of actions being taken to address these. It also set out a range of indicators and targets to help us to monitor our progress.

But Parliamentary debates and Scottish Executive publications alone cannot make Scotland more sustainable. We need to examine all of our activities to ensure that they contribute to sustainable development. We want action across the whole of the Executive and throughout those public services and budgets which are devolved. A key part of this has been to design our Spending Review so that it contributes to sustainable development, ensuring that the very considerable financial resources being deployed really help us to meet the needs of Scotland, combining economic progress with social and environmental justice.

This document explains how we incorporated our commitment to sustainable development as an integral part of the Spending Review process, and what it has achieved. We set out our spending proposals, and an overview of what that spending would achieve, in Building a Better Scotland. The Review has enabled us to make major commitments to sustainable development in Scotland across the Executive, set out in Building a Better Scotland and shown on the next page. In this document we show how each portfolio has risen to the challenge of sustainable development. Fully integrating sustainable development into the daily work and thinking of a large organisation is not easy. This is the first time that such a comprehensive process has been attempted in Scotland, and we recognise that there is still a long way to go. But we now have a much better understanding of where we are doing well, and where more needs to be done. We will build on this work by ensuring that we do examine all of our activities to ensure that they contribute to sustainable development.

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