In 1999, the Swedish parliament adopted 15 environmental

goals. Taken together, they are intended to function as

an action plan for the national environmental policy. An

evaluation every fourth year is part of the environmental

goal policy, as a necessary step for this policy to be reliable.

A sixteenth goal was decided in 2005. There does not seem

to exist anything similar to the Swedish environmental

goals anywhere in the world.

However, the global perspectives are almost totally

missing in the Swedish environmental goal structure,

the only exceptions being the global warming and ozon

layer goals. This is remarkable, considering the ever

increasing globalisation. One practical manifestation of

the globalisation are the growing imports of food, feed,

pulp and paper from the developing world to the wealthy,

industrialized countries. Very recently, the industrialized

countries have started to import large quantities of biofuels

from the South. Together with increasing wealth in the

South and a rapidly growing population, this results in

forests and savannas being cleared to make room for new

pastures, plantations and arable land. This leads to habitat

destruction, which is by far the most important cause of

the ongoing impoverishment of biodiversity.

There is an obvious need for a new environmental goal

focusing on impacts in the South from growing imports

of agricultural and forest products to the North. Such

a complementary environmental goal, including eight

subgoals, is proposed and formulated in this report.

This report contains 14 case studies, 11 of which concern

renewable natural resources and three non-renewables.

The renewables are wood & paper, cotton, ethanol,

palm oil, soybeans, Brazilian beef, coffee, cocoa, bananas,

giant prawns, and fish meal & fish oil, the non-renewables

tantalum, gold and oil. The 11 renewable natural resources

have in common that they require large areas, which is

the fundamental reason for the habitat destruction that

they cause (fish meal & fish oil being one exception, as it

does not cause extensive habitat destruction).

Areas necessary to meet Swedish imports of renewables

have been calculated. It has not been possible to calculate

any area for wood & paper or giant prawns from aquaculture,

respectively. Furthermore, ”area” is not relevant

with respect to fish oil & fish meal, or to the portion of

giant prawns imports that has its origin in fishery. The

areas below are given in square kilometres.

Cotton 1 600

Soy 1 600

Coffee 1 300

Brazilian Beef 1 100

Ethanol 500

Palm Oil 300

Cocoa 300

Bananas 100

Wood & Paper ?

Giant Prawns ?

Fish Oil & Fish Meal -

At the UN Conference on Environment and Development

in Rio de Janeiro (UNCED) in 1992, Friends of the Earth

International launched the concept of Environmental

Space, focusing on all human beings’ equal right to the

world’s natural resources, and the current extremely

uneven distribution of resource consumption (one fifth

of global population accounts for a dominating share of

world consumption of natural resources). Part of the environmental

space concept is also that today’s utilization

of natural resources must not impoverish biodiversity or

confine the options of future generations. There are many

similarities between the environmental space concept and

the philosophy behind the views of the Swedish environmental

goal policy presented in this report.