Scenarios and pathways towards land-use and food production for Western and the Nordic European countries as part of the FABLE Consortium

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2019

End date

12/31/2022

Budget

443,538 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Current trends of unsustainable management of food and land-use systems undermine our capacity to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement. Achieving these long-term commitments in Europe and globally requires closing three critical knowledge gaps: gaps between disciplines (environment, agriculture and health); gaps between geographies (countries, region, globe), and gaps in time (short term progress to 2030 and long-term goals (2050). This project is developing a Nordic land-use modelling consortium to provide the research network and infrastructure to close these gaps with the objective of providing the first iteration of national, regional, and, in collaboration with the UN's existing Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land Use and Energy (FABLE) network, global pathways to Paris and food and land use systems that are compliant with the SDGs. We use simultaneous and iterative modelling efforts grounded in national expertise and priorities and tested against global ambitions. Autonomous national modelling efforts are combined though cross-country comparisons of contributed efforts to shared global targets, and target domains (healthy diet, biodiversity, climate, environmental flows of water, nitrogen and phosphorus, and land). The EAT Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Production Systems provides an initial set of science targets for food and land use systems to be used by the group. This project is part of an international consortium funded under the JPI Climate ERA-NET AXIS (Assessment of Cross(X) - sectoral climate Impacts and pathways for Sustainable transformation) call. Much of the work so far has focused on modifying the FABLE consortium's generic land-use model to Norway's circumstances. Generic models always require much detailed work to allow them to run for a specific country, and Norway was no exception, with its very high fish production per capita, for example, leading to a number of problems with underlying data quality not faced by other countries using the model. We have identified and corrected the more significant such problems, enabling us to perform the scenario analyses prescribed by the consortium. This analysis, under 'Scenathon 2020', resulted in a Norway chapter that was published as part of a FABLE report presenting combined analysis from all participant countries in the consortium. In parallel we have been contributing to the project's Nordic dialogue process, which aims to apply a consistent framework across Nordic countries to the issue nexus of food, nutrition, land-use, biodiversity, water use, and climate change. Towards this we have conducted surveys of key Norwegian stakeholders in the climate-food nexus, from both industry and government, and will use the lessons from these as input into the next round of modelling work, in collaboration with our Nordic partners.