EU Climate Policy Implications for Land Use in Norway: Managing Trade-offs and Achieving Policy Coherence

EU climate policy will have great significance for Norwegian climate, energy, forestry, and land-use policy in the years leading up to 2030 and beyond. Conflicts and trade-offs between climate, energy, and nature considerations are challenges that we will increasingly have to deal with. The ClimaLand project will investigate trade-offs between policy goals, governance levels, and sector interests, and seek to identify how to design more coherent climate and land-use policies. An important objective is to investigate how conflicting policy goals can be handled and various considerations and land-use interests balanced. The point of departure for ClimaLand is an examination of the EU Fit for 55 package and its policy implications for Norway. This is followed by a cross-sectoral examination of the biggest sources of Norwegian Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) emissions sources and the most important drivers of these, providing the basis for in-depth studies of potential synergies and trade-offs between policy goals, -levels and sector interests. The policy areas examined are i) the potential for increasing the forest sink capacity in the short-, medium- and long-term and how forest owners as key actors can affect this capacity, ii) the Norwegian ban on developing peatlands and its implications for land use, and iii) renewable energy developments and implications for land use. Based on these studies, ClimaLand will produce new, interdisciplinary knowledge about how EU climate policy affects land-use in Norway, and how Norway can achieve its 2030 climate targets whilst managing trade-offs between policy goals, -levels, and sector interests. One study, conducted as part of the first WP in the project, shows that Norway faces significant challenges in implementing the EU LULUCF regulation. Norway adopted this regulation in 2019, through a climate agreement with the EU. Forests play a significant role in Norway’s LULUCF sector, where the forest sink is equal to about 40 percent of the national emissions from all other sectors combined. However, while the LULUCF regulation has established a binding target of increased net removals by 2030, projections show decreased net removals from Norway’s LULUCF sector in the same period. Hence, an implementation gap will arise, which must be filled with measures to increase net removals or by using flexible mechanisms available in the LULUCF regulation. The study shows that there are trade-offs involved in increasing the forest sink capacity. In the short term, reaching the 2030 LULUCF target might imply rapidly reducing forest harvest. However, this would decrease activity in the forestry sector and supply of forest products that could involve substituting less climate-friendly materials and energy sources. From a long-term perspective, forest management efforts like denser planting, fertilization, extended rotation age/cutting cycle, and a change in tree species from low-productive to high-productive forests might be needed to increase the forest sink capacity. Such policies are supported by forest owners and forestry organizations, but they are opposed by environmental NGOs and other stakeholders advocating for the protection of forests and biological diversity. The study finds that assessments of policy coherence depend on the time perspective adopted and how problems are framed. Time inconsistency problems – when optimal policy choices at one point in time may conflict with optimal choices in the future – are likely to arise in Norway’s forest sector because trees grow slowly in a cold climate. Forest management efforts to increase the sink capacity have marginal impact by 2030 and even by 2050. Regarding problem framing, the study shows that what is framed as conflicting or mutually supporting policies depends on political objectives and economic interests. Forestry sector interests have regularly asked for policy measures to support increased forest growth and yield—long before carbon sinks appeared on the political agenda – but such policies are now framed as key climate policy measures. The study concludes that policy coherence studies should always pay attention to who has the political power to define problems, policy objectives, and policy synergies – and how such framing is linked to political and economic interests.

The EU Fit for 55 climate policy package challenges existing sectoral policies, not only in Norway but in all EU member states and affiliated countries. Responding to the need for implementing coherent policies to address the intertwined problems of climate change, land-use change, and biodiversity, ClimaLand will produce new, interdisciplinary knowledge about how EU climate policy affects land-use in Norway, and how Norway can achieve its 2030 climate targets whilst managing trade-offs between policy goals, -levels, and sector interests. The point of departure for ClimaLand is an examination of the EU Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation and other parts of the Fit for 55 package and the policy implications for Norway. This is followed by a cross-sectoral examination of the biggest sources of Norwegian LULUCF emissions sources and the most important drivers of these, providing the basis for in-depth studies of potential synergies and trade-offs between policy goals, -levels and sector interests. The policy areas examined are i) the potential for increasing the forest sink capacity in the short-, medium- and long-term and how forest owners as key actors can affect this capacity, ii) the Norwegian ban on developing peatlands and its implications for land use, and iii) renewable energy developments and implications for land use. Based on these studies, ClimaLand will develop policy recommendations on how a high level of land-use policy coherence can be achieved whilst managing trade-offs between policy goals, -levels and sector interests – within and across sectors. The project rests on a mixed-methods, interdisciplinary approach, with close collaboration between researchers with background in political science, natural sciences, economics, and law, and where collaborating partners are integrated in knowledge production.