Environmental assessments of projects and local plans in the energy and waste sectors in Sweden : Practice and potential for improvement

Early perspectives on environmental issues have in general focussed on local pollution from specific sources. However, in past decades there has been a shift in society’s perspective on environmental management towards a focus on diffuse sources of pollution and long-term and global environmental issues. A systems approach to environmental issues has also been suggested in order to avoid overlooking important environmental issues. In this thesis, the potential of two Swedish legally regulated decision-making processes, the development permission process and the local planning process in the energy and waste sectors, to meet these emerging perspectives on environmental issues is explored. The results in this thesis show that in practice the potential of the development permission process to include the emerging perspectives on environmental issues for this process has been rather low in the past, since the environmental assessments reports submitted with the applications for development permission focus to a large extent on local and technical issues. This means that environmentally relevant issues such as global and long-term impacts and resource management issues tend to have been disregarded. However, studies of more recently made assessment reports reveal that such ssues are beginning to emerge to some extent. Furthermore, the public adds to the potential for this decision-making process, as it tends to discuss the project from a systems perspective as well. The thesis further suggests that the institutional context of the decision-making process impedes the potential to include the emerging perspectives in some respects. For example, present legislative rules and guidelines do not include the new perspectives on environmental issues and do not allow decision-making authorities to take such issues into account. The thesis also shows that the local planning processes do not have the potential - in practice - to include environmental issues from wide perspectives. The local plans tend to focus on environmental issues from a local and technical perspective and do only to some extent include wider perspectives. It is further indicated that the interests and power of the actors within the planning processes are important factors influencing which perspectives are applied when the plan is made. To increase the potential for the local planning process to meet the demands for wider perspectives on environmental issues, the thesis therefore suggests that it is important to raise the status of local energy and waste management plans so they can have an actual impact on the development of the local technical systems. Finally, in order to increase the potential for both of the two formal decision-making processes studied in this thesis, linking the two decision-making processes would enable local planners, project developers and decision-making authorities to address impacts from a wider perspective. Linking the two processes would leave only local and project-oriented environmental issues to be discussed within the project development permission process, and the local planning process could focus on the environmental impacts of a local energy system and proposed energy projects from wider perspectives. The two processes would therefore be able to take all environmental issues relevant from a systems perspective into account

The scope of municipal energy plans in a Swedish region : A review of energy and environmental issues in the plans

Swedish legislation requires municipalities to produce an energy plan. Each municipal government is required to prepare and maintain a plan for the supply, distribution, and use of energy. Legislation also requires an assessment of the environmental impacts of any activities before implementation. Whether municipal energy plans have contributed to or preferably controlled the development of local energy systems has been a subject for debate. In the research project "Strategic Environmental Assessment of Local Energy Systems", financed by the Swedish Energy Agency, the municipal energy plan as a tool for developing local energy systems is studied. In this study, twelve municipal energy plans from Östergötland County in southern Sweden have been analysed. Different kinds of municipalities are represented in this county. The analysis has been based on a number of questions in different categories assessing energy system characteristics, environmental impact assessment and aims, the planning process, and goals for the plans. This report reviews the contents of all the energy plans in this first study.  Strategisk miljöbedömning av lokala energisyste

The scope of municipal energy plans in a Swedish region : A review of energy and environmental issues in the plans

Swedish legislation requires municipalities to produce an energy plan. Each municipal government is required to prepare and maintain a plan for the supply, distribution, and use of energy. Legislation also requires an assessment of the environmental impacts of any activities before implementation. Whether municipal energy plans have contributed to or preferably controlled the development of local energy systems has been a subject for debate. In the research project "Strategic Environmental Assessment of Local Energy Systems", financed by the Swedish Energy Agency, the municipal energy plan as a tool for developing local energy systems is studied. In this study, twelve municipal energy plans from Östergötland County in southern Sweden have been analysed. Different kinds of municipalities are represented in this county. The analysis has been based on a number of questions in different categories assessing energy system characteristics, environmental impact assessment and aims, the planning process, and goals for the plans. This report reviews the contents of all the energy plans in this first study.  Strategisk miljöbedömning av lokala energisyste

Effects of a total change from paper invoicing to electronic invoicing in Sweden

Electronic invoicing is a current alternative to traditional invoices distributed on paper.There are reasons to believe that electronic invoicing is environmentally preferable totraditional invoicing, as the production of paper and envelopes, the printing process andthe physical distribution can be avoided. However, there are additional needs for servers,etc. when electronic invoices are used. To assess the environmental performance of aproduct or a service or to compare two alternative ways of providing a service, a life cycleperspective should preferably be used. The study presented here is a screening life cycle assessment (LCA) aimed at assessingthe consequences of a complete transition from all paper invoicing to all electronicinvoicing in Sweden. Readily accessible data were used and the focus was on cumulativeenergy demand and emissions of greenhouse gases. The main purpose of the study wasto increase our knowledge about the advantages and disadvantages of such a transition.An additional aim was to identify areas with a lack of data and major uncertainties. In an LCA, environmental impacts are related to the function provided by the product orservice studied. The function provided by invoices is to distribute information aboutpayment obligations from supplier to customer. This may be business-to business (B-to-B) or business-to-consumer (B-to-C). (läs vidare i rapporten)Appendices available at http://cesc.kth.se/effects-of-a-total-change-from-paper-invoicing-to-electronic-invoicing-in-sweden/QC 2010101

Environmental integration and policy implementation: competing governance modes in waste management decision making

Research into environmental policy integration (EPI) has focused very much on coordination issues associated with the preparation of policies at national and international levels. We instead examine some challenges in implementing EPI at the local level. We look at legal and policy frameworks relating to environmental governance and actual waste management decision making in five Swedish cities. We observe an implementation gap between the high-level policy ambitions relating to environmental governance of the waste sector, as expressed in national policy frameworks, and the local-level decision-making procedures and outcomes. Several discrepancies are identified: between national waste policy and the local decision premises, between local waste planning and project decision making, between knowledge gathering and project decision making, and between the legal mechanism in the development consent process and the national environmental quality objectives framework. Our study indicates that the governance frameworks at different levels are quite different, and at least partly incompatible, which causes important coordination problems across levels. Sectoral developments towards an industrial marketisation of waste have rendered frameworks such as local waste plans obsolete. We also find that the more traditional and coercive forms of governing the sector, such as consent, bans, and taxes, are the ones that have steering power, whereas new procedures, such as management by objectives, lack sufficient institutional and cognitive support structures to be effective.