Sustainability governance of the Danish bioeconomy — the case of bioenergy and biomaterials from agriculture

Abstract

Background: The EU bioeconomy strategy aims to accelerate the European bioeconomy and its contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. National policies and strategies in many countries promote their bioeconomies. The importance of agricultural crops and residues as raw materials for the bioeconomy is increasingly recognised, but agricultural production also contributes to large impacts on nature and environment. With the aim of assessing the governance measures and their effectiveness in addressing the sustainability of bioenergy and biofuel production, the purpose of this study was to map the governance complex relevant to agricultural crop production in Denmark, and to identify the achievements, challenges and lessons learned. Methods: The analysis is based on a review and assessment of publicly available databases, inventory reports and scientific literature on governance measures and their effectiveness. Governance here includes a variety of legislation, agreements, conventions and standardisation. Environmental sustainability is represented by greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector, soil carbon, water quality and biodiversity. Results: The agricultural sector has a significant impact on Danish climate performance and on landscapes in the form of soil carbon losses, leaching of nutrients to water bodies and pressures on biodiversity. The governance complex addressing these issues is made up of a variety of state regulation and co-regulation between state and firms, state and NGOs, or NGOs and firms. Much regulation is adopted from EU directives and implemented nationally. Conclusions: The analysis found that greenhouse gas emission is a virtually unregulated field and additional regulation is required to live up to Denmark's 2030 emission reduction targets. The regulatory framework for soil carbon is criticised for its complexity, its competing instruments and its recognition procedures of voluntary coregulation. For water quality governance measures in place have improved water quality, but it is still difficult to achieve the goals of the Water Framework Directive. It remains a challenge to protect biodiversity in agriculture. Biodiversity is mainly governed by national and supranational regulation, but co-regulating between state and firms and NGOs and firms have been initiated in the framework of the Agricultural Agreement.

The Soil Organic Matter in Connection with Soil Properties and Soil Inputs

“…However, ensuring soil fertility must not be associated with a negative impact on the environment. One of the basic approaches to ensure this compliance is to increase the organic matter in the soil, which helps to ensure soil multifunctionality [1][2][3] and support soil living conditions [1,2].…”

The sustainability prism of structural changes in the European Union agricultural system: The nexus between production, employment and energy emissions

“…According to Parajuli et al (2019), the economic development is led by a switch from income and employment concerns to environmental issues and its regulation. The environmental situation has exacerbated due to replacement of horses by tractors, use of herbicides, switch from manure to mineral fertilizers (Bentsen et al, 2019), growth of energy demand for livestock facilities (ventilation, lighting, heating, etc. ), greenhouses and irrigation (Harchaoui & Chatzimpiros, 2018).…”

“…Thus, Cluster 2 covers member states that have managed to decouple GVA growth from GHG emissions from fuel combustion. Bentsen et al (2019) show the importance of national regulation and strategic goals in this context, while Parajuli et al (2019) argue that the nexus between economic growth and pollution becomes the issue of concern only when countries accumulate the certain level of capital stocks. It is also worth noting that, starting from 2008, the progress towards the higher consumption of renewable energy in agriculture and forestry was observed in Czech Republic, Spain, France and the Netherlands.…”

Implementation at Multiple Levels

“…The multi-level, multi-actor, multi-sector character of the Sustainable Development Goals has the potential to promote innovative public policy approaches giving a prominent role to civil society (Carneiro and Battistella 2019;Salim and Drenth 2020). The literature reveals many experiments with new forms of governance for delivering specific Sustainable Development Goals, sometimes building on frameworks also applied elsewhere, such as the Policy Coherence for Development Approach (Koff, Challenger and Portillo 2020), Transformative Partners Approach (Al Sabbagh and Copeland 2019), co-regulation experiences (Bentsen, Larsen and Stupak 2019), smart cities (Salim and Drenth 2020), regulatory experimentation (Bauknecht et al 2020), ecosystem approach (Bridgewater, Régnier and Cruz García 2015) or 'co-labs' (Francis, Henriksson and Stewart 2020).…”