Sweden’s Climate Leadership in Retreat: When Reputation Trumps Responsibility

By Jack Jardine – Environmental PR Strategist & Founder of SEET

Sweden was once celebrated as a climate leader. It built a reputation on bold commitments, clean energy innovation, and a forward thinking green brand that set it apart from much of the world. That reputation is now crumbling.

In 2024, Sweden’s carbon emissions jumped by 7%, the largest increase in 15 years. Green funding has been cut. Fossil fuel subsidies have been expanded. Forest protections are being rolled back. And the political narrative has shifted. Instead of climate ambition, we hear the tired story of “economic necessity.”

This is not leadership. This is retreat.

A Reputation Built on Sand

When governments are praised long enough for their climate reputation, it becomes a brand. But reputations can mask the reality on the ground. Sweden’s forests, for example, were once hailed as a carbon sink. Today, because of over logging, monoculture practices, drought, and pests, their ability to absorb carbon dioxide has been cut in half since 2008.

Yet only around 6% of Sweden’s forests are legally protected. Clear cutting continues. Soil degradation spreads. These are not the hallmarks of a leader, but of a country banking on past reputation while sliding backwards in practice.

The Narrative Trick

Here is the dangerous pivot: governments frame these retreats not as choices but as inevitabilities. Energy costs are high. The economy is fragile. EU regulation is burdensome. “We have no choice,” they claim.

But every cut to funding, every weakened regulation, every expansion of subsidies is a choice. A choice to protect short term economic interests at the expense of long term planetary survival. A choice to preserve profit instead of protection.

This is the PR move I see repeated again and again: blame the environment for the economy’s struggles. Position climate ambition as a luxury that cannot be afforded. Create a false trade off between survival and prosperity. It is sneaky, and it is dangerous.

Economics vs Existence

Let us be clear: economies cannot exist on a dead planet. The argument that protecting forests, tightening regulation, or cutting subsidies will “kill growth” ignores the bigger reality. What will kill growth is unchecked extraction, collapsing ecosystems, and climate chaos.

If Sweden, a country long praised for its leadership, is willing to dilute its commitments, what message does that send across Europe? That climate ambition is negotiable? That when growth falters, the environment must be sacrificed?

What Real Leadership Looks Like

We cannot afford performative leadership. Climate action must be embedded, not branded. That means:

• Restoring investment in green transition rather than cutting it.

• Protecting natural carbon sinks with legally binding safeguards, not leaving them vulnerable to industry pressure.

• Ending false trade offs by showing that sustainable economies are resilient economies.

• Embedding behavioural change within governments and industries, so climate protection is not an optional line item but a cultural baseline.

  
  

This is the work I drive through SEET. We help organisations and institutions move past surface level messaging, identify the behaviours that drive environmental risk, and design communications and accountability frameworks that make sustainability real.

Refusing the Retreat

Sweden’s backsliding is not inevitable. It is a choice. And if we allow the narrative of “economic burden” to go unchallenged, others will follow.

The truth is simple. Climate leadership cannot just be a reputation to be managed. It must be a responsibility to be lived. Anything less is not leadership, it is retreat.

And the longer governments cling to that retreat, the higher the cost will be for all of us.

Because choosing the economy over the environment is not a balancing act. It is an acceleration toward collapse.