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.
Highlights
In the face of global climate change, there is growing international momentum to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change, with the Paris Agreement cherishing the aspiration to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels (Hooper et al 2018)
As a consequence of these interdependencies, decision makers in all sectors face the significant challenge of accounting for synergies, goal conflicts and potential trade-offs between these sectors at multiple spatial and temporal scales (Leck et al 2015)
The assessment in this paper concerns how the scenario assumptions and adopted strategies for mitigating climate change could impose on or influence other environmental policy goals. This assessment of potential synergies and goal conflicts was made through a systematic comparison of the content of the four scenarios in relation to the Swedish environmental goals, i.e. the 16 Swedish National Environmental Quality Objectives
Summary
In the face of global climate change, there is growing international momentum to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change, with the Paris Agreement cherishing the aspiration to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels (Hooper et al 2018). Progressing from aspiration to action, decisions on climate. Exploratory scenario approaches have become mainstream in climate change mitigation research, for the purpose of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the effects of climate change (Giddens 2009), they have limitations too (Van der Voorn et al 2017). Exploratory scenario approaches are well equipped for mapping uncertainties but do not account for normative preferences or desirability (Quist 2007; Van der Voorn et al 2012).
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