Translating planetary boundaries to targets and policies in the Netherlands; a process of downscaling and benchmarking

Ongoing population growth, economic development and lifestyle changes have been prime drivers of severe environmental degradation. Many concepts have been proposed to monitor and communicate on environmental degradation. An... [ view full abstract ]

Ongoing population growth, economic development and lifestyle changes have been prime drivers of severe environmental degradation. Many concepts have been proposed to monitor and communicate on environmental degradation. An influential concept is the Planetary Boundary (PB) framework. The framework proposes quantitative global limits to the anthropogenic perturbation of nine crucial Earth system processes, thereby defining a global safe operating space for human activities and the use of natural resources. Where planetary boundaries are defined and monitored at the global level, decisions regarding environmental policies and resource use are generally made at less aggregated scales, by national and sub-national governments, businesses, and other local actors. Therefore, the boundaries need to be translated into and aligned with policies at these decisions-making scales.

In this presentation, we discuss translating the planetary boundaries to the national level, by determining national fair shares of the global safe operating space for the Netherlands (downscaling). Furthermore, we compare these fair shares to current Dutch environmental performance and existing policy targets (benchmarking). The discussion focuses on four of the nine planetary boundaries, i.e. climate, land use, biodiversity and the phosphorous cycle.

The downscaling starts from the biophysical dimension of the planetary boundaries, i.e. their temporal and spatial scales (e.g. global for climate change and biomes for biodiversity) and their interactions. Developments in global planetary boundaries were obtained from scenario studies, by tracking developments in the control variables for the different boundaries processes. However, downscaling and subsequent benchmarking also needs to take into account the socio-economic and ethical dimensions of the respective boundary processes.

The socio-economic dimension addresses the sub-global relationships between production and consumption through international trade, pointing at environmental impacts outside national borders. Production-based indicators were obtained from Statistics Netherlands. Consumption-based (footprint) indicators were calculated with an environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model that links Dutch consumption to production activities and related environmental degradation in regions all over the world.

The ethical dimension takes into account the differences between countries’ rights, abilities, and responsibilities with respect to resource use and environmental impacts. Criteria for allocating the global safe operating space to countries include population, land area and economic output. Together with uncertainties on the boundary values and on future developments with respect to their global performance, these criteria result in a bandwidth of national fair shares.

Benchmarking the downscaled boundaries with Dutch environmental performance and existing policy targets can help identifying implementation gaps (difference between current environmental performance and the existing policy targets) and policy gaps (difference between existing policy targets and the downscaled boundary values). Initial results show that current Dutch performance is well above the national fair shares (based on different allocation principles), especially when assessed from a consumption-based perspective.