Abstract
This paper studies the relative importance of societal drivers and changing climate on anthropogenic nutrient inputs to the Baltic Sea. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Representative Concentration Pathways are extended at temporal and spatial scales relevant for the most contributing sectors. Extended socioeconomic and climate scenarios are then used as inputs for spatially and temporally detailed models for population and land use change, and their subsequent impact on nutrient loading is computed. According to the model simulations, several factors of varying influence may either increase or decrease total nutrient loads. In general, societal drivers outweigh the impacts of changing climate. Food demand is the most impactful driver, strongly affecting land use and nutrient loads from agricultural lands in the long run. In order to reach the good environmental status of the Baltic Sea, additional nutrient abatement efforts should focus on phosphorus rather than nitrogen. Agriculture is the most important sector to be addressed under the conditions of gradually increasing precipitation in the region and increasing global demand for food.
Highlights
We developed multiple plausible baseline projections of nitrogen and phosphorus loads for point sources, land use and atmospheric deposition to the Baltic Sea for the period 2010–2100
We extended global (O'Neill et al, 2014) and regional (Zandersen et al, 2019) narratives of societal development for the main polluting sectors and factors relevant for the nutrient emissions from agriculture, wastewater treatment and combustion processes in traffic and production of power and heat
Increasing precipitation due to climate change increases nutrient leaching from agricultural soils, forests and other land uses
Summary
S. Pihlainen et al / Science of the Total Environment 731 (2020) 138935 investment or policy intervention. Uncertainties tend to increase exponentially over time, and pathways become more difficult to justify the longer the time horizon of the analysis (Heal and Milner, 2014). In cost-benefit analysis, the impact of an investment or policy decision is typically weighted against some previous reference point or baseline. The usual, but unsatisfactory, assumption of such baseline or businessas-usual scenarios is that society, the natural system, the level of pollution, or whatever is the studied system, remains unchanged over time. Extending the baseline scenarios to several plausible, but internally consistent and well documented global futures would give better understanding and provide a richer picture of the breadth of possible future challenges and uncertainties associated with the viability of decisions
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