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The Sixth Assessment Report of Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has highlighted the urgency of accelerated climate actions harnessing synergies and minimizing trade-offs with various SDG. This calls for a clear understanding of linkages between climate goals and other SDGs at national level for formulating synergistic policies and strategies and developing different sectoral programs and coherent cross-sectoral policies. This is even more important for least developed countries such as Nepal where these linkages are less understood and development challenges are multifaceted. In this context, this paper aims to evaluate potential synergies and trade-offs among selected SDGs and their associated targets in Nepal in a linear pairwise comparison. Synergies and trade-offs related to climate action (SDG 13), access to energy (SDG 7), sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12), and life on land (SDG 15) have been evaluated using historical data for the period from 1990 to 2018 employing a mixed methods approach. Network analysis to map the conceptual linkages between the SDGs and their targets was combined with the advance sustainability analysis (ASA) to quantitatively evaluate the synergy and trade-offs between SDGs. The results illustrate the presences of a continual trade-off between emission reductions targets of SDG 13 with per capita energy consumption and share of renewable energy of SDG 7, land use for agricultural production target of SDG 12, and forest area target of SDG 15. This indicates that climate action is strongly interlinked with GHG emissions from economic activities and energy consumption. The results of the study represent a valuable input for the policy makers, supporting coherent and sustainable development planning as Nepal plans to graduate to a middle-income country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomass use for energy and materials is, on the one hand, one of the key mitigation options to reach the 1.5 °C GMT target set in the Paris Agreement, as highlighted by the IPCC and many other key analyses. On the other hand, particularly in parts of the EU, a strong negative connotation has emerged in public debate and EC policy, with a particular emphasis on the (presumed) displacement effect in markets and land use. This is a remarkable contrast because the reasons to use sustainable biomass, on the one hand, and the possibilities and synergies for supplying sustainable biomass, on the other, are underpinned with strong evidence, also providing insights on how displacement issues can be avoided. Sustainable biomass supplies can contribute 20–30% of the future global and European energy supply, leading to reduced overall mitigation costs, including realizing the net CO2 removal from the atmosphere using BECCS concepts. This paper highlights which options, pathways and preconditions are key to achieving such a substantial contribution of sustainable biomass in future (2050) energy and material supply (with a focus on the European setting). By pinpointing how "biomass can be done right" and how important synergies can be achieved via better agricultural methods, the restoration of marginal and degraded lands and the adaptation of climate change, a different policy agenda emerges in sharp contrast to how a biobased economy has been framed in recent years. It is recommended that future policy priorities, particularly at the EU level, take a more integral view on the synergy between the role of biomass in the energy transition, climate adaptation and mitigation, better agriculture and the better use of land in general. Strategies to achieve such positive results typically require an alignment between renewable energy, and agricultural, environmental, mitigation and adaptation policies, which is a largely missing nexus in different policy arenas. Resolving this lack of alignment offers a major opportunity, globally, to contribute to the European Green deal and improve energy security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last ten years have witnessed an increase in publications focusing on bioeconomy as a proposal to confront the global challenges of climate change, depletion of non-renewable resources and ecosystem degradation. This paper investigates the scientific literature on issues related agricultural bioeconomy by applying a bibliometric network analysis. Bibliometric analysis is applied to the publications of the Scopus database during the period 2010–2020 in order to provide an overview of the main aspects that characterize agricultural bioeconomy. The results showed that out of a total of 1100 scientific papers, only 2.45% were published in 2010, while the corresponding share in 2020 was 20.81%. In the five years of 2016–2020, cumulatively, 70.63% of the publications were made, showing the dynamic evolution of bioeconomy. In addition, out of 85 countries in total, Germany and Italy are the two countries with most publications, while the fragmentation of research is evident with the creation of two main nodes, the European and the American. Moreover, keyword analysis showed that biomass and sustainability are two main recurring concepts, confirming that, currently, bioeconomy operates at three different levels: energy demand, land demand, and governance. It is apparent that to boost the development of agricultural bioeconomy, the following aspects should be assessed: the effective use of resources, an understanding of the key drivers of agricultural bioeconomy, and a clear perception of their associations. There is still no consensus as to which are the key factors that will accelerate its sustainable development. Our pursuit is to use the tools of bibliometric analysis to reach more critical conclusions regarding the agricultural bioeconomy, rather than approach it in a static way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]