[Swedish government policies to climate change]

Eco-generation's theme of this month was various efforts to mitigate climate change. As the ambassador of Sweden, I would like to report on some of the Sweden's hard effort to ease the climate change. Please note that I was mostly informed from Swedish Ministry of the Environment, its Midnight Sun Dialogue Meeting (depth discussions on key issues related to the future of international cooperation on climate change) and its fourth national report to the UNFCCC.

The climate change has been significantly noted by the political and public attention in Sweden. Thus the latest two Governments of Sweden have worked hard to moderate the climate change, as the Government considers climate change to be one of the major environmental and political challenges of this century.

[Reducing Greenhouse gas emission while helping the economy.]

The Swedish Ministry of Environment stated that the Swedish climate strategy is that Sweden is to set an example by showing that it is possible to combine proactive climate policies and economic growth. Surprisingly, during this period of time Sweden?s economy has grown up to 36%. The Greenhouse gas emission was 7% by the 2005, lower than 1990. In addition, from 2008 to 2012, Sweden has set the additional goal of lowering emission rate up to 4%. With these achievements, Sweden became one of the lowest emissions levels per capita among industrialized countries.

How were they able to achieve this successful outcome? Well, the success of Swedish climate policy is based on the use of the economic instruments. For instance, Swedish introduced the carobodioxide tax or the first time in the world in 1991. This tax played significant role mitigating the climate impacts, because the carbon dioxide tax was based on the carbon context and the net contribution to greenhouse gases of various fuels. Meaning, the tax is low on natural gas, while it?s heavy on the bad materials such as coal. This tax assisted the use of biofuel, and thus emissions were reduced.

The transportation plays huge part on Greenhouse gas emission. The Swedish government thus created the eco-friendly cars. Furthermore, in order to persuade the citizens to use the eco-friendly car, the government granted the individuals to buy a new green car.  Also, the government claimed that at least 25% of the emergency vehicles and 85% of the lease car to be green cars.

Furthermore, the Swedish government has demonstrated their effort on mitigating climate change by promoting the involvement of the citizens by cooperating with communities and businesses to establish institutes such as Commission on Sustainable Development, Scientific Council on Climate Issues and Climate Committee.  to come up with helpful researches and data, better policies, practices and further work on mitigating climate change.

Enjoy your reading!