Climate adaptation in Sweden

In Sweden like most parts of the world mitigation issues have dominated climate policy to date. The work mainly concerns limiting the impact through reducing GHG emissions. Sweden is relatively developed in mitigation policies and techniques such as using renewable energy sources and building passive houses while climate adaptation is in its infancy here. The issue of climate adaptation has lately risen in Sweden as a response to several extreme weather events during the past decade and it’s under development.

According to a report from Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) the general policy for dealing with climate change risks, vulnerabilities and crises is to allocate the various responsibilities to the same actors during crises as under normal conditions. Therefore, much of the responsibility and tools for dealing with climate adaptation lie at the local level. This means that practical work on climate adaptation will be done by local authorities, businesses, and individuals. 

Central government agencies, on the other hand, have few operational roles with regard to climate adaptation but act rather as a source of information and funding, and as a provider of the regulatory framework. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) and The Swedish Geotechnical Institute (SGI) are examples of governmental agencies responsible for producing information on climate change for local authorities.

Since networks and collaboration between different actors appear to be important for society’s work on climate change in general and climate adaptation in particular, the commission on climate and vulnerability suggests that county administrative boards should take an overall approach for coordinating the work on a regional level. They should establish a climate delegation in which local authorities, industry, government agencies, organizations and others are invited to participate. Collaborative approach seems to be the best way to deal with complex problems with a lot of uncertainties such as climate change.

The effort in Sweden has been to integrate the organization of adaptation work into existing physical planning and crisis management. Major advantage of using existing processes is that the structure is already available and, depending on the experiences, the processes can be altered.  

Implementation of climate adaption trough physical planning has two main goals. The first one is to consider environmental and crisis aspects in all decisions regarding land and water planning. For example, to change prescribed minimum levels for foundation-lying. Second is to reduce vulnerability to extraordinary events such as sea level rise and flooding by investing on dykes and pumping systems and adapting location and technical design of buildings and other infrastructure.

Adaptation measures have been divided into two categories: institutional and specific or local. The experiences concerning institutional measures involve a change in planning and building act while the local measures mostly have dealt with higher water flows. Three major operational actions are to increase minimum level for building foundation, to build dykes around areas vulnerable to flooding or higher sea level and to invest in new pumping systems.

Furthermore, adaptation measures to date mainly oriented towards dealing with extreme weather events such as extreme high water levels, flooding, and hurricanes. The FOI report emphasizes that there is a need to expand the work to other impacts of climate change like new forms of disease, longer periods of warm weathers, and changing conditions in the Baltic Sea. According to this report it is also important to change the approach from being solely reactive response to proactive encounter and include more municipalities than those which already face the problem.

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Source: 

"Climate Adaptation in Sweden, Organization and Experiences", Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI)

Available at: http://www2.foi.se/rapp/foir2725.pdf