Catchment effects of a future Nordic bioeconomy: From land use to water resources
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ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS OF A GREEN BIO-ECONOMY
Catchment effects of a future Nordic bioeconomy: From land use to water resources Eva Skarbøvik , Philip Jordan, Ahti Lepisto¨, Brian Kronvang, Marc I. Stutter, Jan E. Vermaat
Received: 18 August 2020 / Revised: 21 August 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 / Published online: 14 September 2020
Abstract In the future, the world is expected to rely increasingly on renewable biomass resources for food, fodder, fibre and fuel. The sustainability of this transition to bioeconomy for our water systems depends to a large extent on how we manage our land resources. Changes in land use together with climate change will affect water quantity and quality, which again will have implications for the ecosystem services provided by water resources. These are the main topics of this Ambio special issue on ‘‘Environmental effects of a green bio-economy’’. This paper offers a summary of the eleven papers included in this issue and, at the same time, outlines an approach to quantify and mitigate the impacts of bioeconomy on water resources and their ecosystem services, with indications of useful tools and knowledge needs. Keywords Bioeconomy Ecosystem services Long-time monitoring data Mitigation measures Sustainability Water quality
INTRODUCTION As the world is moving towards the end of the era of fossil fuel, a sustainable bioeconomy is envisioned to be our common future solution where food, fodder, fibre and fuel will increasingly be provided by renewable resources (European Commission 2012, 2018). As expressed by the Nordic Council of Ministers (2017): ‘‘the bioeconomy is all-encompassing and comprises those parts of the economy that make responsible use of renewable biological resources from the land and water for the mutual benefit of business, society and nature’’. However, since the concept is under development, consensus about what ‘‘bioeconomy’’ in fact entails is limited (Golembiewski et al. 2015;
Bugge et al. 2016; O’Brien et al. 2017). This makes the consequences of the bioeconomy on the environment and society even more difficult to predict. Policy makers have so far paid little attention to the sustainability of the possible implementation of the concept (Bugge et al. 2016), but several scientists have elucidated the likely environmental impacts of this so-called ‘green shift’ (Ollikainen 2014; Pfau et al. 2014; Eyvindson et al. 2018, Stegmann et al. 2020). In a review of 87 papers on bioeconomy and sustainability, Pfau et al. (2014) found that the problem most often mentioned was competition for land caused by an increased demand for biomass resources. The amount of land needed for a future bioeconomy remains undetermined since bioeconomy monitoring systems are not yet developed (O’Brien et al. 2017), and the society as well as its technology are under continuous development (Ollikainen 2014; Nystro¨m et al. 2019). However, based on 15 science studies made for the European Commission, Harrison (2010) estimated that an area of 4.5 million ha, approximately the size
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