The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) recently launched (14/10) the report "How Swedish agriculture meets climate goals". The report will show the way forward for Swedish agriculture, but lacks several points.

The report ”This is how Swedish agriculture meets its climate goals”Is written by the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy of Agricultural Sciences (KSLA) and aims to highlight opportunities and give recommendations for how Swedish agriculture can be adapted to contribute to climate goals. The main message is that Swedish agriculture must increase productivity - the production of food and bioenergy - and implement several measures aimed at increasing the competitiveness of agriculture.
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 Lack of starting point leads to errors

We think it is positive that IVA and KSLA raise the issue of the role of agriculture in climate change. The report points to several interesting aspects such as agriculture's opportunities to contribute to increased carbon storage and the importance of Swedish agriculture becoming fossil-free. But the report is flawed in terms of the very starting point for the analysis, which according to the authors themselves focuses on Swedish territorial emissions, ie emissions and uptake within the country's borders. Imported inputs such as mineral fertilizers, chemical pesticides, soy and lime are not taken into account at all.
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Excluding imported inputs from the analysis means giving a misleading picture of the emissions that Swedish food production actually generates. In a comment to the report, Håkan Emilsson, consultant at the sustainability agency U&WE, writes: “What they are trying to achieve on a global level after the Paris Agreement is to reduce global emissions in order to avoid a common tragedy. Then it does not help that we have low emissions in Sweden that are based on high emissions for input substances in other countries. It violates one of the basic ideas behind the Generation Goal; that we should not export environmental problems abroad or to future generations. "
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Misleading about the climate footprint of agriculture
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We also believe that the report lacks in its attempts to compare the climate footprint from organic and conventional cultivation. The authors of the report use a new method - carbon opportunity cost - to calculate the climate impact from land use. In short, the method means that the less land we use for food production, the more land is left that can be used for forests that bind carbon dioxide. This reasoning is then linked to harvest figures for two crops - peas and wheat - in organic and conventional production.
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The method is not used by either the IPCC or the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In addition, this way of calculating has been criticized by Johan rockström, which means that far too far-reaching and generalizing conclusions have been drawn from the article where the method is presented. Read more about our critique of the method here.
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 Organic farming is part of the solution

How Swedish agriculture should be adapted to meet the climate goals is a complex issue. The climate impact of our food needs to be reduced in several ways. Eating less but better meat, preferably organic and natural grazing meat from grazing animals that keep meadows and pastures open, is important. In addition, it is of great importance to reduce food waste. In Sweden today, a third of the food produced is wasted.
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At the same time, agriculture needs to contribute to several other important sustainability goals, such as the UN's global goals of biodiversity, clean water and healthy seas. Organic farming delivers on all these points and has a great opportunity to contribute to increased carbon storage, which is confirmed by the report Organic Agriculture and the Sustainable Development Goals. Many organic farmers in Sweden today also go further than the EU regulations for organic production, among other things by following KRAVrules for reducing climate impact or using methods such as agroforestry, cultivation of perennial crops and reduced tillage.