Planning and land use policies play an important role in managing the expansion of human settlements in a sustainable and democratically legitimate manner. In recent decades, environmental land use targets have become more stringent, making it increasingly challenging to balance competing interests in land. One emerging environmental target related to land use is that of limiting land take and the resulting soil sealing. The rationale for this target is strong. Land and soil consumption are linked to a range of problems, including increased flooding risks, water scarcity, land instability, reduced biodiversity, carbon sinks and food security (IPBES 2018). These concerns are also relevant in areas of low population density, such as the Nordic Region: land use changes affect scarce agricultural soils, coastal zones, forest landscapes, carbon-rich wetlands, peri-urban green areas and habitats that are difficult to restore once they have been fragmented or their soils have been sealed. Indeed, international treaties and global sustainability frameworks, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015), increasingly underline the need to pay proper attention to the management of land and soil resources. In Europe, various strategies and legislative proposals under the European Green Deal – an overarching initiative for a sustainable green transition within the European Union – include calls to halt land take and soil sealing. The most direct call for action is the No Net Land Take (NNLT) objective set out in the EU Soil Strategy for 2030, which aims to reduce net land take to zero by 2050 (European Commission 2021a).
While net land take can be quantified and monitored to track progress towards objectives such as NNLT, in practice, facilitating a “land sparing agenda” requires a reframing of policy goals across governance levels and sectors, alongside suitable and effective policy instruments, knowledge and expertise, and political commitment to such overarching ambitions. The agenda necessitates adoption of a holistic and integrated approach to land consumption, in which policies and actions of different land use sectors and policy domains (such as housing, infrastructure, energy and agriculture) help to advance it. This might involve making difficult choices about policy priorities but also calls for identifying land use solutions that maximise synergies between two or more policy domains. For example, better integration of green infrastructure and compact city development strategies could advance (urban) development that harmonises carbon neutrality, biodiversity conservation and housing policies (Hautamäki et al., 2024).
This memo is the first publication in the research project No Net Land Take and alternative nature-positive strategies, which examines the NNLT objective and related policies and strategies in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. While some European countries, such as Germany, France and Switzerland, have set domestic quantitative land take reduction targets (Lacoere et al., 2024), the Nordic countries have not adopted explicit goals or policies to limit land take and soil sealing. The Nordic case is a particularly interesting one, since the region is relatively sparsely populated with comparatively high land take per capita in several Nordic countries (Venter et al., 2026). Accordingly, there is a clear need to better understand how the Nordic countries approach land take as a policy challenge. The Danish approach, for example, has been described as “qualitatively oriented”, with the aim of balancing development needs with land take reduction ambitions (Sørensen and Christensen, 2020).
Despite the lack of direct commitments to reducing overall land consumption, many current policies and practices within the Nordic Region potentially contribute to net land take reduction. For example, densification and the compact city model have long been dominant ideas for urban governance in the Nordic countries (Røe et al., 2022). The Nordic countries have also been early developers of voluntary measures to compensate for ecological damage caused by land use changes (Morell et al., 2026). Denmark has been a pioneer of wetland restoration since the 1990s, and the current political ambitions expressed in the recent Tripartite Green Agreement are to rapidly expand wetlands by taking agricultural land out of production (Krabbe et al., 2026).
Against this background, the aim of the memo is to reflect on the emerging land sparing agenda from a Nordic planning and land governance perspective. The memo identifies important aspirations and actions that can be understood as related to land sparing in the Nordic context by outlining the strategic orientations and broader governance mechanisms that either support or constrain reductions in net land take. The subsequent memos will investigate differences in governance responses to the land sparing agenda across the Nordic countries in greater detail and provide examples of sustainable land management practices from different Nordic contexts.
The memo starts by presenting key terms related to land take (Box 1). It then explains the broader policy landscape by summarising international and EU commitments and policies that emphasise a land sparing perspective. This EU context is also important for the non-EU Nordic countries, since EU policy frameworks influence the wider European Economic Area and the Nordic policy environment, for example through policy learning, shared concepts and comparable monitoring practices. Next, a land take mitigation hierarchy of avoid, reuse, minimise and compensate is introduced, outlining how a range of policy instruments needs to be applied in sequence and/or in combination to achieve reductions in net land take. Finally, using the mitigation hierarchy as an organising structure, an overview is presented of how the Nordic countries currently facilitate land take reduction ambitions through their planning and land use policies. The overview is selective rather than exhaustive. The mechanisms, policies and examples were identified through a targeted review of policy documents, planning legislation and research literature, with the objective of illustrating the mitigation hierarchy steps in the context of Nordic planning and land governance. The concluding remarks point to areas that are important for integrating the land sparing agenda into planning and land governance frameworks, both in the Nordic context and beyond.