Is Finland the most underrated country in the world?
In which we receive incredible hospitality, participate in re-wilding efforts, and receive some more incredible hospitality.
If you’ve recently come across Finland in international news, it was probably either because it was named World’s Happiest Country for the sixth year straight - or because you stumbled upon this viral summer anthem about pounding back piña coladas after work (admittedly a weird drink choice for a country with an annual average temperature below freezing in most parts).
With a population of only 5.5M (#118 on global rankings, just ahead of nearby Norway but just behind the Central African Republic), Finland isn’t the first country to pop up on many traveler’s radars. Helsinki lacks the curb appeal of other capital cities like Copenhagen and Stockholm, and technically isn’t even classified among its Scandinavian neighbors (lacking the Viking heritage of Denmark, Sweden and Norway).
But as country #9 on our world tour, “The Land of a Thousand Lakes” (there’s actually 188,000+ of them) really stood out as one of our favorites so far. On The Green Journey, there’s two parts to our climate-positive travel equation: the low-carbon transport we take and the climate warriors we meet with on the way. And I’m happy to say that in both variables, Finland was exceptional.
The longest ride yet
Our journey in Finland began on a Saturday, 500+ miles and six days before we actually even entered the country. We were traveling from Poland to Estonia with a tight deadline to reach Tallinn in time for a meeting that Monday.
After an hour of rejections at the Poland-Lithuania border, a car with Finnish license plates and a large, mysterious trailer in tow pulled up at our gas station. Jackpot. I mustered my courage to approach the drivers, mentioned we were on our way to Tallinn, and asked for a ride. Luckily for us, Pasi and Olli were on their fourth day of road-tripping across Europe, finishing the home stretch as they towed a rented glider plane back to Finland for a month of practice in advance of the national championships.
A word of advice to any would-be hitchhikers out there; if you spot a car with a license plate from very, very far away, put on your most winning smile, and give it a go. There might be no better ride than two friends on a long trip who have inevitably run out of stuff to talk about with each other.
Over the course of ten hours, our conversation with Pasi and Olli never slowed. We talked about everything from Finland’s recent entry into NATO, to Finnish social awkwardness, to the many different permutations of the use of the word “ass” in American slang. And of course, because this is The Green Journey after all, we had a long discussion about climate change.
It was heartening to talk to Pasi and Olli, both members of the generation that largely ignored the initial science of climate change, about their fears and hopes for a warming world and for Finland’s future. They were quick to take note of the damage that had been done by their generation, and they weren’t at all dismissive when we expressed our anger and doubts about whether — and if, how quickly — the world could reach net-zero. They observed the changes happening around them; we had a particularly piquing conversation about how in recent years, they’d both noticed the amount of ‘cold-weather tourism’ increasing in Finland, with Chinese and Thai tourists coming to the country to beat summer heatwaves, and additional European visitors sure to follow.
But at the same time, both Pasi and Olli seemed to have a certain level of optimism about the future that’s sometimes hard for millennials and Gen Z to share — probably born of a combination of knowing the worst is yet to come, and knowing that they live in one of the few places in the world where a few degrees of warming could actually make the weather more pleasant.
When we pulled into Tallinn at 1 AM, my voice was nearly hoarse from all the talking, but my heart was full — especially with the lovely surprise that they’d booked us a hotel room for the evening. We promised to ‘pay it forward’ to other travelers on the road, and slept soundly that night full of excitement about the adventures that were yet to come in Finland.
So what’s the deal with Finland’s climate goals?
Finland’s sustainability story is often overshadowed by its next-door neighbor Sweden (of Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future fame), but it’s actually one of the biggest deals in the world when it comes to going green. Besides being the first country in the world to institute a carbon tax in 1990, Finland also stands apart from the crowd because it has one of the earliest legally binding carbon-neutral target dates in the world in 2035. Only The Maldives has an earlier target.
Finland also plans to meet its 2035 target without the use of international carbon offsets, where one (often wealthier) country pays another (often poorer) country to reduce emissions on its behalf. This is a pretty unprecedented pledge — many of the world’s biggest polluting countries and corporations anticipate relying heavily on international carbon offset markets as a way to reach their climate goals. And this can be quite controversial — I won’t get into the debate about morality of carbon offsetting (which at its best is a crucial tool in the fight to reach net-zero, and at its worst, kind of like buying indulgences as a member of the Catholic church in the 1500s) — but I will leave you with this example of a recent lawsuit against Delta — which I strongly contend does more harm than good as it discourages taking steps towards decarbonization — but it’s just one instance of the complexities surrounding carbon offsets.
Ok, apologies for the non-sequiter, but I’ll definitely talk more about carbon offsetting in a future issue of this newsletter. Back to Finland. To get to its carbon neutral goal, Finland will have to significantly cut back on its emissions — which at 45.8 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2022 still sits well above its next-door neighbor Sweden, is on a downward trajectory. Nationwide and industrial emissions aside, Finland’s CO2 footprint per person is well above global averages, and European averages for that matter, at nearly 10 tonnes of CO2 per person.
The good news: most of Finland’s CO2 emissions will be comparatively easy to tackle, coming from easy-to-electrify sources like transportation and heating. The other good news: Finland has already cut emissions by 43 percent from their peak in 2003. Most of the country’s electricity already comes from renewable sources, and while we were there we had the privilege of riding the VR train — a very, very sick train line that runs 95% on electricity.
Additionally, Finland is turning increasingly away from ‘renewable’ sources of energy with unanticipated side-effects like hydro and biofuels, and more towards solar, wind and nuclear — the bread and butter of the energy transition.
Will Finland meet its ambitious net-zero target? That remains to be seen, and unfortunately while we were in the country, we didn’t have time to meet with anyone from the Ministry of the Environment or a similar institution who could have given us a rundown on progress at a sector level. But, we think it’s brave, ambitious, and necessary to do what Finland’s doing — and dare to be the ‘first’.
Early adopters rarely regret early adoption.
The state of nature
Finland’s natural capital will play a significant role in the country’s efforts to build the first carbon-free welfare state. Today, more than 75% of Finland is covered with trees, making it the most forested country in Europe. But as we saw time after time and again, making our way through the Finnish countryside — a lot of these trees are crops for the timber industry, not actually wild, free-growing forest like the one we visited in Poland.
In 2020, the value of Finnish exports of forest industry products was 10.4B euros, which amounted to 18 percent of the country’s current exports. As a point of contrast, it’s estimated that petroleum products make up 18 percent of U.S. exports — so shutting down Finland’s forestry industry would be perhaps similar to shutting down the oil industry in the U.S. — a necessary step for the planet, but a nasty shock to some big corporations.
How is Finland going to reconcile its net-zero goals with the strength of its forestry industry? We aren’t sure. But, as one of the women we hitchhiked with in Finland, Sonia, pointed out, something will have to change. 2021 was the first year where Finland’s forests turned from net climate sinks to net emitters, and the forests only narrowly regained sink status in 2022. There’s definitely hope on the horizon, with increasing government conversation around restricting forest harvesting and national liability for restoring degraded landscapes like dammed rivers and peatlands — especially with the recent passage of the EU Nature Restoration Law.
Restoring nature
While we’ll follow along closely in the coming years to see how Finland evolves towards its 2035 net-zero target, it’s at least highly encouraging to know that many NGOs in the country are making progress towards nature restoration. We had the privilege of meeting with one of them on our journey: The Snowchange Cooperative, a powerful scientific organization known for its work with the Arctic Council, IPCC, indigenous Saami people in Finland, and most recently, for its 2023 recipient of the Goldman Prize, Tero Mustonen.
On a rainy Friday morning, we trekked out to one of the Snowchange Cooperative’s rewilding sites in Eastern Karelia, where we met with Kaisu Mustonen, the head of Snowchange’s biodiversity work. We spent the morning working with the Snowchange team at one of their flagship re-wilding sites.
Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. Unlike some types of ecological restoration, where continual human intervention is required to create a certain type of ideal landscape, the central thesis of re-wilding is “get all the dirty shit humans did out of the way and let nature fix things on its own.” Any type of degraded landscape can be re-wilded, from riverbed to alpine forest to marine bog, but what we focused on at Snowchange was the rewilding of peatlands.
Peatlands are basically a special type of swamp that is waterlogged. They occur in every climactic zone and continent and cover about 3% of the Earth’s surface. But what’s really special about them is that they are one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems that you can find. They’re one of nature’s greatest carbon sinks. But when peatlands are drained, and then dug up (or “mined”) to produce peat for burning as fuel or for growing flowers in industrial agriculture, this stored carbon gradually turns to CO2. In Finland, where burning peat for fuel is a popular energy source, there’s an increasing number of degraded peat mines that are not only in of themselves destroyed ecosystems, but also leech dangerous, toxic chemicals into nearby rivers and lakes.
Snowchange has taken on the mission of rewilding Finland’s peatlands. Today, the organization has 130,000 acres of peatlands undergoing rewilding at 80 sites. That’s pretty freaking impressive. And the rewilding is working quickly - at the site that we visited, the ecosystem has gone from homing 3 species of birds to 210. Talk about impact!
I’ll share more learnings from our day at Snowchange in the upcoming interview series. Stay tuned for interviews with climate warriors that I’ll publish every Friday on this Substack!
Have you tried sauna?
Ok, enough about carbon accounting and nature restoration. Let’s finish (sorry, I couldn’t resist doing it at least once) with a quick recap of what made our trip so special - the people we met along the way.
In Joensuu, we were welcomed by Joel and Elina, who introduced us to two local beverages: the Finnish Lonkero, which we loved, and the Salmiakki, which we hated. Just outside Joensuu, we hitchhiked with an incredibly amazing 19 year old, who, just off his army service and bored on the weekend, took us all the way to the gorgeous Koli National Park, an hour out of his way, because he was so excited to show off the natural beauty of the country.
Later, heading from Koli to the North, we were picked up by Janna, who turned around on a lonely, one-lane highway to get us because, as she said, it was her one big chance to pick up hitchhikers!
And of course, no trip to Finland could be complete without an evening spent in the sauna. We had the lucky chance to do this with our hosts Joel and Elina, and even though we’d had the opportunity to do sauna in other places (e.g., favorite bouldering gym in France), we never before had the hospitality or authenticity offered by our hosts in Finland. Next time, we’ll have to return in winter so we can combine our sauna experience with ice swimming!