Envisioning carbon-free land use futures for Sweden: a scenario study on conflicts and synergies between environmental policy goals

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.