Addressing the Interconnected Crises: Policy Integration for Climate and Biodiversity in Norway

ABSTRACT The biodiversity and climate crises are interconnected through land use and land use change, posing significant threats to ecosystem integrity, human well‐being, food and water supply and climate resilience. To effectively address these challenges, policies for climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and biodiversity protection must be considered jointly. In this paper, we analyse Norwegian national policy documents related to these three areas within the land use sector. We assess the extent to which climate and biodiversity policies are integrated into these national policy documents and identify three approaches to integration. (1) an ambition for integration that applies ecosystem management as a guiding principle, (2) a tendency towards partial integration, which is inconsistently applied throughout the documents; and (3) a lack of ambition for integration, where only one issue is addressed or where the three issues are treated superficially. The latter approach is by far the most prevalent, highlighting an absence of comprehensive integration and revealing a fragmented bureaucracy that prioritises individual policy issues over interconnected strategies. We argue that successful integration may require not only strong cross‐sectoral leadership, but also structural reforms and the establishment of new decision‐making bodies to effectively address the intertwined challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.