Professor Sirpa Kurppa of the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) discusses the opportunities for development and resilience in the charming Finnish Arctic
Northern Finland’s Arctic charm reaches from a strong forestry area to the Taiga, which is the original area of settlement for the Saami population. Enterprises are mostly micro-sized with a few big businesses in wood processing, mining and a growing number in tourism.
Mostly, gross domestic product comes from businesses based on natural resources and 40% of the land is owned by Metsähallitus, a state-owned company. The long-term prospect of the Finnish Arctic Strategy (2013, updated 2017) is based on diversified regional and local co-operation and the strengthening of regional orientation in Arctic co-operation, as well as new kinds of partnerships including public and private, in particular by strengthening the business environment and networking of actors in the Barents region (Lapland, Northern Ostrobothnia and Kainuu), all belonging to the northern sparsely populated area (NSPA) group.
The need of R&D activities has to originate from the Arctic, but interest is both national and global. Arctic areas have the potential to become a systemic laboratory or platform for climate resilience, dependable on a distributed bioeconomy. This would be of great national interest in terms of sharing knowhow and technology, which defines the whole country somewhat as an Arctic country.
In the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) we perform research on the Arctic, targeting:
- Ecological, economic and social sustainable use of natural resources;
- Resource-smart planning and decision making;
- Sustainable ways of refining Nature-based materials,
- Logistics into markets with the help of ICT; and
- Platforms: data analysis, testing, pilots and demos.
Arctic charm in the landscape
The area has specific Arctic charm, including pristine Nature, plenty of space, the cleanest air in Europe and plenty of clean drinkable water, silence, and – in the Northern area – total darkness during central winter (up to 50 days) and 24-hour daylight during central summer (up to 70 days). The Northern Lights (Aurora borealis) in winter form the speciality. In terms of renewable resources, there is a continuum from forest to scrubland in the Taiga, and a high local variation in aquatic resources and fertile agricultural land can also be observed.
Additionally, the area is rich in mineral resources. Being the NSPA, road logistics are, indeed, pretty dense and the area is well covered by digital networks. There are multiple users of natural resources, including forestry, reindeer husbandry, tourism, fishing, mining, and the Saami people with their Nature-based reindeer herding. Additionally, and based on the rule of every man’s rights, everyman has the possibility for collecting natural products such as mushrooms and berries. Reindeer herding and tourism or recreational activities are using, at least indirectly, different areas of the Arctic.
The lessons learned by our research team about how to improve the sustainability of bioeconomy in Northern Finland and for the Arctic could be expressed as:
- In the Arctic, economy is regarded as the most endangered dimension of sustainability, and bioeconomy has to be regarded as an option to enrich and empower economic activity in the Arctic and wider in the NSPA;
- We find very different bioeconomy capacities in different areas of the Finnish Arctic. Theoretically this aspect has been described as a relation between ecosystem services and the potential to build wellbeing or business for human welfare;
- The capacity of bioeconomy in each area is built by interaction between Nature-based capacities (ecosystem provisioning services), human capability and infrastructural resources and activity of social and human networks;
- The key issue for enhancing sustainable economy is bipolar. First it is necessary to identify the functions on each particular area that could provide value to customers, nearby or far away, and share these values, and secondly, to identify the critical resources needed to start fulfil those functions. The key change towards sustainability would be to recover of self-efficacy in the Arctic communities and to stop the resource flow from these communities outwards. This means resource flow in terms of capital and human resources. Purchases of energy have been one of the main reasons of capital outflow; and
- There are cases that can be benchmarked – cases that have gained their self-efficacy and capability to lead their own functions by their own specific way.
Improving Arctic resilience
- Diversity is the key driver of resilience, whether it is a discussion of ecological, economic or social resilience;
- Fluctuations of concentrating, releasing and reorganising are typical changes under the lifespan of natural populations, societies and economic activities. Under such a process, natural populations, communities and economic groups fulfil the opened niches and compensate for the degeneration of activities in their neighbouring habitats and as such build capability of recovering the overall activity level; and
- Original biodiversity of the Arctic is not high but the seasons are diverse. We should much better understand the risk/benefit relation that climate change causes to Arctic biodiversity and biomass production. Adaptation and seasonal dynamics of biomass production will be the key driver of bioeconomy alongside adaptation and, especially, diversifying economic activities and social approaches.
The key theme in celebrating Finland’s 100th anniversary of independence is ‘Together’. The reflection on the importance of collaboration in terms of sustainability in the Arctic would be as follows: Bioeconomy has to be integrated into the circular economy in order to be sustainable.
Circularity is impossible to attain in the present economic infrastructure without significant amounts of networking and partnerships locally and regionally. Striving for resilience is another basic reason for partnership. Third reason is the fact that arctic issue is national, European and global. It is very important for Finland – as well as for its Arctic charm – to find its national role and build up awareness of it.
However, it is just as important for the Arctic area to join together to empower its self-efficacy and role in Europe, as well as around the world.
