Scottish Environment Protection Agency

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA; ) is Scotland's environmental regulator and national flood forecasting, flood warning and strategic flood risk management authority. Its main role is to protect and improve Scotland's environment. SEPA does this by helping business and industry to understand their environmental responsibilities, enabling customers to comply with legislation and good practice and to realise the economic benefits of good environmental practice. One of the ways SEPA does this is through the NetRegs environmental guidance service. It protects communities by regulating activities that can cause harmful pollution and by monitoring the quality of Scotland's air, land and water. The regulations it implements also cover the storage, transport and disposal of radioactive materials.

SEPA is an executive non-departmental public body (Executive NDPB, often known as a Quango) of the Scottish Government. SEPA was established in 1996 by the Environment Act 1995 and is responsible for the protection of the natural environment in Scotland. SEPA is a member of SEARS (Scotland's Environmental and Rural Services).

On 24 December 2020 SEPA was subject to a serious and complex cyber-attack that significantly impacted their contact center, internal systems, processes and communications. Hackers stole over 4,000 digital files. SEPA refused to pay the ransom, and on 21 January 2021 learned that the information stolen had been published online illegally; some of the information was already publicly available, while some was not. Provided by Wikipedia