Envisioning carbon-free land use futures for Sweden: a scenario study on conflicts and synergies between environmental policy goals

Abstract

In climate change mitigation, backcasting scenarios are often used for exploring options for achieving a single environmental goal, albeit at the expense of other goals. This paper assesses potential conflicts and synergies between multiple environmental policy goals based on four future scenarios on Swedish rural land use, assuming zero GHG emissions in 2060. The assessment shows that goal conflicts are apparent, and policy makers need to make trade-offs between goals. The choice of strategy for dealing with these trade-offs yields conflicts or synergies. The assessment shows that a transition to zero GHG emissions provides opportunities for Sweden to shift to carbon free land-use planning. Overall, there are alternative ways with different underlying assumptions to achieve zero GHG emissions, which will feed discussions on new opportunities to overcome multi-scale and multi-sectoral goal conflicts. Multi-target backcasting scenarios are considered more suited to account for the multi-dimensional aspects of goal conflicts. This requires a comprehensive multi-target backcasting approach, which combines the strengths of multicriteria analysis, nexus approaches and backcasting, for supporting a transition to zero GHG emissions.

Water Resource Systems Analysis for Water Scarcity Management: The Thames Water Case Study

“…There is also a lesser component for the maintainance of navigation. In the absence of a numerical model or criteria to allow the comparison of potential solutions for this objective, it is not possible to undertake Pareto or qualitative multi-criteria analysis to compare solutions [22] which would allow further investigation of conflicts and synergies in policy choices. In lieu of such a possibility, the target flow matrix is applied as a hard constraint in the optimisation model, such that the status quo must be met or exceeded, with no way of quantifying what benefit any excess water might accrue for the environmental objective.…”

Bioenergy versus forest conservation: a partial equilibrium analysis of the Swedish forest raw materials market

“…Bhutto et al 2016;and Mustapha et al 2017 for a market impact analysis). In addition to HP and transport fuels, forest biomass may also be in demand for the production of products such as green chemicals and plastics, in so-called advanced biorefinery concepts (Ulonska et al 2018)technologies which would also add to the competition for forest biomass. Due to several possible future outcomes for forest bioenergy use in Sweden, the present study investigates feedstock price formation and resource allocation under two scenarios of increased forest biomass use in the Swedish HP sector: 15 and 30 TWh in addition to the production of 92 TWh produced from forest biomass in the year 2016.…”

“…For an overview of conflicting areas regarding the "more and less harvest" issue, see e.g. Felton et al (2020), Simonsson et al (2015), and van der Voorn et al (2020). For studies focusing on specific aspects relating to this, e.g.…”

A Methodology for Industrial Water Footprint Assessment Using Energy-Water-Carbon Nexus

“…Backcasting scenarios describing normative aspects are used to examine paths to alternative futures taking into consideration desirability goal conflicts [17]. Thus, a comprehensive multi-target backcasting approach, which combines the MCA, nexus approaches and backcasting has the potential to ensure resilience and sustainability in a consistent long-term vision framework [18]. Overall, previous studies have demonstrated that the multi-target backcasting approach is a useful way to set system boundaries and to identify synergies and conflicts for management within these boundaries supporting a transition to zero GHG emissions [19].…”