Achieving sustainable nutrient self-sufficiency in Sweden: a long-term scenario assessment

Sweden imports much of the fertilizer that feeds its crops, and a new study warns that cutting this dependency without shifting environmental burdens is far harder than it sounds. Researchers developed four contrasting scenarios for how the nation could manage nutrients by 2045, then evaluated each against climate, resource, and governance criteria. Their conclusion: no single strategy wins on every front, and the real challenge lies in combining nutrient supply security with reduced losses to water and air.

The study, published in Frontiers in Sustainability, was conducted by a team at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and partners, with funding from FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development. It forms part of a growing body of work examining how nations dependent on imported fertilizer can reorganize their nutrient chains in the face of geopolitical risk, climate pressure, and water-quality mandates.

The researchers built their scenarios around two organizing dimensions: whether nutrients are produced or recovered, and whether the system is centralized or decentralized. Three scenarios occupy distinct positions within this structure, while a fourth deliberately mixes production, recovery, scales, and governance arrangements to test the value of diversity itself.

The first scenario relies on large-scale domestic production of mineral fertilizer, using nitrogen from renewable energy and phosphorus mined from within Sweden. The second emphasizes industrial recovery of nutrients from organic waste streams, wastewater, and manure, treating them as feedstock for standardized fertilizer products. The third pushes decentralization to its limit, with nutrients recycled locally through source-separated sanitation, community composting, and short nutrient chains. The fourth scenario mixes all of these approaches across scales and actors, deliberately maintaining diversity in technologies, nutrient origins, and governance arrangements.

All four scenarios were evaluated against a common set of criteria drawn from the literature on nutrient sustainability: climate impact, resource use, eutrophication potential, and governance feasibility. The researchers also assessed how each scenario would perform under uncertainty, asking how sensitive its outcomes would be to shifts in energy prices, waste volumes, and policy support.

The results reveal a consistent pattern of trade-offs. The domestic production scenario performs well on supply security and governance simplicity but carries high climate and resource costs, since producing mineral fertilizer remains energy-intensive and phosphorus mining depletes finite reserves. The industrial recovery scenario improves resource circularity and reduces eutrophication potential but depends on stable waste volumes, compatible logistics, and market uptake of recovered products. The decentralized scenario offers the largest potential gains for water quality and local resilience but faces steep challenges in labour, governance, and scaling. The mixed scenario performs reasonably across most criteria but requires sophisticated coordination to manage its complexity.

Crucially, the researchers found that no scenario eliminates the fundamental tension between nutrient supply security and environmental performance. Even the most circular strategies depend on energy inputs, transport, and governance arrangements that carry their own footprints. The study also highlights the influence of geography: the value of recovered nutrients depends strongly on where they are produced relative to where crops need them, since transport can quickly erode both economic and environmental benefits.

The researchers emphasize that their findings should not be read as a ranking of strategies but as a map of trade-offs. They argue that the real policy challenge is not choosing a single pathway but designing combinations that manage the tensions between supply security, climate performance, and water quality. They also note that the scenarios were developed with input from stakeholders, including farmers, waste managers, and policymakers, to ensure they reflect real-world constraints and opportunities.

The study adds to a growing literature showing that circular nutrient strategies are not automatically sustainable. Recovered products can carry contaminants, transport can erode benefits, and governance complexity can undermine implementation. The researchers call for future work to quantify these trade-offs more precisely and to test how combinations of strategies perform under real-world uncertainty.

For Sweden, the findings arrive at a moment of heightened attention to fertilizer security, driven by geopolitical risk, energy price volatility, and water-quality mandates. The researchers argue that the scenarios offer a practical tool for policymakers navigating these pressures, providing a structured way to examine the consequences of different nutrient chain designs before committing to infrastructure and policy support.

The scientific backdrop to this work lies in the planetary boundaries framework, which identifies the biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus as two of the Earth system processes humanity has pushed furthest beyond safe levels. Industrial nitrogen fixation, originally developed over a century ago, now mobilizes more reactive nitrogen than all natural terrestrial processes combined, and much of it escapes to the atmosphere as nitrous oxide or to waterways as nitrate. Phosphorus, by contrast, is a finite resource mined from geographically concentrated deposits, meaning that both too much and too little availability create risks simultaneously. Recent assessments suggest that staying within safe boundaries for nutrients requires not only better fertilizer management on farms but systemic reductions in losses across the entire food chain, from production through consumption and waste treatment.

Sweden illustrates why these global concerns translate into national policy anxiety. The country’s agricultural sector depends heavily on imported mineral fertilizers, exposing it to the same supply shocks that have roiled European energy markets. At the same time, Swedish agriculture operates under some of the world’s strictest environmental regulations, meaning that simply increasing fertilizer inputs is not a viable path to greater food production. This dual pressure, securing supply while reducing losses, is what motivated the researchers to frame nutrient management as a governance problem rather than a purely technical one.

The assessment framework applied in the study deserves attention because it departs from conventional evaluation methods. Rather than attempting to assign monetary values or aggregate scores, the Sustainability Assessment Framework for Scenarios uses structured qualitative judgment across technological, environmental, and social dimensions. An ordinal scoring scale allows systematic comparison, while an interrelation analysis examines how factors within each scenario influence one another, revealing, for example, how energy choices cascade into climate outcomes and how quality assurance requirements shape governance burdens. The deliberate refusal to rank the scenarios reflects a methodological position: when trade-offs are genuine and context-dependent, forcing a single winner obscures more than it reveals.

Several cross-cutting uncertainties emerged from the analysis that apply regardless of which pathway Sweden pursues. The composition of the future electricity mix stands out, because both industrial nitrogen synthesis and energy-intensive recovery processes inherit the carbon intensity of the grid that powers them. A fossil-free electricity system would substantially improve the climate profile of the industrial scenarios, while a slower energy transition would erode their advantages. Similarly, the achievable magnitude of nutrient-loss reductions, whether through improved application timing, buffer zones, or recovered products with controlled release characteristics, strongly conditions the eutrophication benefits any scenario can deliver.

Contaminant control represents another shared challenge with scenario-specific nuances. Organic waste streams contain pharmaceutical residues, heavy metals, and micro-pollutants that must be managed before nutrients can be safely returned to farmland. Decentralized cycling faces this problem in acute form, since quality assurance across thousands of small-scale composting and sanitation systems is logistically demanding, even though the material volumes at each site are modest. Industrial recovery can concentrate and treat contaminants more readily, but the treatment steps themselves consume energy and generate residual streams requiring disposal. Mineral fertilizer production sidesteps contamination from waste streams but introduces its own concerns around mining impacts and cadmium levels in phosphate rock.

The governance dimension proved more consequential than purely technical assessments often assume. The decentralized fork-to-backyard scenario scored notably well on democratic participation, engaging households and communities directly in nutrient stewardship, which the researchers suggest could build public legitimacy for circular approaches more broadly. Yet this same scenario carried the highest implementation complexity, requiring behavioral change, distributed infrastructure, and coordination mechanisms that do not currently exist at scale. The industrial scenarios, by contrast, fit more comfortably within existing regulatory and market institutions, which partly explains their perceived safety and predictability even where their environmental profiles are weaker.

The response diversity scenario offers a distinctive contribution to the literature, because resilience thinking has rarely been operationalized in nutrient policy assessments. By maintaining multiple nutrient sources, technologies, and supply arrangements simultaneously, the system avoids the fragility of single-pathway dependence, absorbing shocks such as energy price spikes or trade disruptions without collapse. The cost is efficiency: redundancy inherently means some capacity sits idle, and coordinating heterogeneous actors imposes management overhead. The study’s finding that this scenario performs reasonably across most criteria while demanding sophisticated coordination echoes broader resilience research suggesting that diversity and efficiency exist in permanent tension.

For other import-dependent nations, particularly those in Europe facing similar combinations of supply insecurity and environmental mandates, the Swedish analysis offers a transferable template. The specific scenario designs would differ with national circumstances, such as the availability of domestic phosphate reserves, the structure of wastewater systems, or the density of livestock production generating manure surpluses. But the underlying insight, that technological feasibility, environmental performance, and governance capacity must be evaluated together, applies broadly. The researchers position the combined scenario-and-framework approach as a decision-support tool, one that helps policymakers surface hidden dependencies and trade-offs before capital is committed to infrastructure whose performance depends on conditions, such as energy prices, waste volumes, and regulatory support, that may shift considerably over the decades ahead.

Subject of Research: Sweden fertilizer scenarios 2045 trade-offs study

Article Title: Achieving sustainable nutrient self-sufficiency in Sweden: a long-term scenario assessment

Article References: Lima, P. D. M., Germann, V., & McConville, J. (2026). Achieving sustainable nutrient self-sufficiency in Sweden: a long-term scenario assessment. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 10, Article 1952306. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1952306

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1952306

Keywords: Achieving, sustainable, nutrient, self-sufficiency, Sweden, long-term, scenario, assessment, scientific research