Driving forces behind the environmental pressure in Nordic countries - comparative decomposition analyses

The Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) considers initiating a project with the purpose to identify the driving forces behind the development of Nordic emissions to air. Two approaches are under consideration: a backward-looking and a forward-looking. The backward-looking approach aims to identify the reasons for the growth of emissions over the past decades. This analysis requires detailed statistical information on emissions from firms and households in (at least) two observation years covering the period of interest: preferably the most recent year available, and a historical year some 10-20 years before. The forward-looking approach would exploit a simulated data set. In addition to a year representing today, the remaining observation year(s) would be in the medium- or long-term future (20-50 years ahead). Simulation of data for the Nordic countries would be based on economic models. This pre-study assesses the possibilities to conduct backward-looking and forward-looking decomposition analyses for the Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland.