Climate-neutralizing managed landscapes in Sweden.

Abstract

To limit dangerous climate change, Sweden has signed a law to contribute zero net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to the atmosphere. Land use is an important source of Sweden's emissions, but it can also be managed to take up more CO2 in growing vegetation and increase carbon storage in soils, thus reducing climate warming. We will present results from our project, modeling the factors controlling the GHG balance of farms and forests to support Sweden achieving its climate goals in an environmentally, socially, and economically optimal way.We will use the ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS (Olin et al., 2015) to identify different combinations of land use (e.g., forest vs. agriculture) and land management (e.g., agricultural intensity) that could achieve this multi-dimensional aim. The identified land-use and land-management combinations will be evaluated relative to the current landscape for their ability to sequester carbon and nitrogen, produce food and timber, and preserve cultural landscape values. We will also evaluate the consequences for land managers' incomes and societal welfare.Different ecosystem services are measured in different units and thus trade-offs between them cannot be evaluated directly, all services will be valued for their marginal contributions to societal welfare using market and non-market valuation techniques. We expect to show significant trade-offs among the climate goal and other ecosystem services; hence societal welfare can only be maximized by identifying optimal trade-offs among ecosystem services given the climate goal.We will present this novel framework that combines quantification and valuation of multiple ecosystem services to identify optimal climate pathways for Sweden and discuss the potential to extend this approach for Europe.