There are still many challenges and barriers to reaching climate neutrality in the Nordic countries. Challenges of which many are similar across the Nordic region and globally.
Across the Nordic countries, in the energy sector, a combination of skepticism towards energy production facilities due to negative impacts on local populations and nature as well as a slow review and permit processes risk halting the planned expansion of green power. At the same time, increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix creates intermittency issues regarding a sufficient expansion of supplementary power production that can be regulated.
For domestic transport, the main challenges are in the road transport sub-sector. Firstly, the future role of biofuels as a mitigation instrument is unclear. The production of biofuels is limited by land resources, competing with food production and ecosystems services, and limited availability of a waste feedstock for production of advanced biofuels. Secondly, and despite positive developments in electric vehicle uptake, internal combustion engine cars (ICE) still have a dominant presence on the roads. Phasing out ICE cars and trucks is a major challenge.
Regarding industrial processes, the main cross-Nordic challenges are incentivizing emission reductions in an internationally competitive sector – while avoiding carbon leakage - and scaling up and providing incentives for carbon removal technologies. The attainment of Nordic countries’ individual and joint ambitions to reach net-zero GHG emissions may require very significant CCS deployment within a couple of decades, but that will require significant efforts and cross-Nordic collaboration on capture, transport, and geological storage of CO2.
In waste management, reducing emissions is not the major challenge. Instead, issues such as reducing the amount of waste generated, increasing recycling rates of sorted waste and in general, the broader transition to a circular economy is lacking across the Nordic region.
In agriculture, forestry, and land-use, strategies and initiatives are hard to implement due to political concerns such as carbon leakage, regressive effects on income distribution, food security and rural development. This is a major challenge in decarbonizing and transforming the agricultural sector in all the Nordic countries. Across the Nordic countries, strengthening carbon storage in sinks and reducing emissions from Forestry, and Land-Use also proves difficult. This is especially true regarding emissions from degraded wetlands, such as cultivated peatlands. The Nordic forest sink is strained by climate change and increased demand for biomass.