Archive for category: Sustainable development

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Berry pickers, landscapes and modern slavery

Ever since I saw an exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography, over 20 years ago, I have followed news about Thai berry pickers in Finland. The exhibition included work by the Swedish photographer Margareta Klingberg, who portrayed foreign berry pickers doing the work that locals were no longer willing to do themselves. In her photographs, an innocent forest full of berries became a political landscape: the national landscape had new people in it.

Then, one summer before the pandemic, I saw a group of berry pickers at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. They did not fit the usual airport scenery of busy business travellers, excited children and the fizzy expectation of holidays. They looked tired, shabbily dressed, and out of place, waiting in line for a connecting flight to the north. The difference was impossible not to see.

Since then, the reality of the berry business has become harder to ignore. Reports and investigations have revealed conditions resembling forced labour, including physically demanding, long hours, and workers leaving Finland in debt. There have also been investigations concerning price-fixing cartel.

This year, Finland granted only a small number of permits for berry pickers, in an attempt to prevent abusive arrangements. In July, on my way back from Bangkok, there were a few dozen pickers on the same flight. The berry company had dressed them, quite boldly, in tracksuits with its logo. I truly hope they make good money here. In many parts of Finland, the forests are fuller of berries than they have been for years.

There are two specific conditions behind all this. The first is Everyone’s rights, or Freedom to roam, which allows anyone to use nature freely, including picking wild berries and mushrooms. The second is that income from selling self-picked wild berries and mushrooms is tax-free, as long as the berries are sold unprocessed and the picker is not in an employment relationship.

What makes the exploitation so bitter is that berry companies have built their business on these two privileges: free access to nature and tax-free wild-berry income. They have turned freedoms meant for everyone into an exploitive business.

When ESG efforts are crushed along with the mussels

Stora Enso is one of the big forest companies, a merger between Finnish and Swedish giants. Actually, Stora Enso calls itself a renewable materials company: “Our commitment to renewability is not only about our raw material. It is also linked to resource traceability and responsibility, production and material efficiency, logistics, and supply chain.”

Last week, it became evident how crucial, and apparently difficult, it is to control one’s subcontractors. In Kainuu, in northern Finland, a forest harvester destroyed endangered freshwater pearl mussels Margaritifera margaritifera, which are key species for biodiversity and can live up to 200 years. The harvester not only crushed the mussels in Hukkajoki stream but also muddied the water, making it difficult to live for them.

River pearl mussels were one of the protagonists in the Finlandia-awarded novel by Anni Kytömäki. Many book lovers learned for the first time about these amazing creatures that filter and clean the water in rivers, providing ecosystem services, as we like to say. The novel also described an event very similar to what happened in Hukkajoki.

In Kainuu, the logging itself was not illegal. Authorities had given instructions on how to protect the mussels: the river should not be crossed with big machines, and a zone around the river should not be logged. However, the machine crossed the river hundreds of times.

No good news for a forest company at a time when views on the sustainability of Finnish forest management are very polarized. There is particularly large controversy around harvesting methods.

Quite interestingly, both the book and the Hukkajoki case are linked to women’s bodies. Kytömäki’s protagonist living in 1950s cannot have an abortion despite severe issues with her pregnancy. In Suomussalmi, a biologist who had participated in mussel inventories happened to come to the spot when the devastation was taking place. When she told the driver that he absolutely should stop crossing the river, he sexually harrassed her.

Unless every subcontractor follows the laws and policies, the ESG remains just as good as greenwashing. The case of Hukkajoki makes one wonder whether even normal good manners should be part of the deal. Perhaps reading books might be helpful in improving human behaviour.

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Respecting Indigenous Knowledge

I visited for the first time Australia in spring 2023. When the Qantas plane landed in Sydney, the first announcement acknowledged the First Nations peoples of Australia as the continuing custodians and traditional owners of the land. I was amazed and inspired because we had started to plan the next WGEA Assembly around the topic of indigenous knowledge. We also adopted it later as the main topic of a collaborative course with the University of Helsinki.

Indigenous knowledge is founded on centuries of wisdom, challenging what we consider as knowledge. It is often seen as opposed to scientific knowledge, but this is too simplistic. Empirical, experience-based, and tested in everyday practices, indigenous knowledge is also scientific. Such a deep understanding of the environment is expected to become increasingly important as we must adapt to a rapidly changing climate. However, utilizing indigenous knowledge includes questions of how to approach it respectfully and fairly.

Indigenous knowledge is a tough question for public authorities. For example, a Supreme Audit Institution can listen to the holders of indigenous knowledge while making their assessments. At the same time, from the historical perspective, they are part of the oppressive system. Thus, engaging with indigenous knowledge is most of all about building trust.

The main discussions of the Rovaniemi Assembly and indigenous knowledge are available here: INTOSAI WGEA Seminar Summaries 2024. At the University course, students conducted a comparative analysis between Australia and New Zealand, as well as Canada and Finland. This was pedagogically a good exercise as it helped to see the various contexts and histories of First Nations and how they affect the situation today. Students’ report is available here:  wgea-and-university-collaborative-course-2024_indigenous-knowledge.pdf

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Mining for renewables

Mining is a complex topic. People don’t want such nuisances nearby but instead somewhere else, preferably somewhere far away. A NIMBY phenomenon which isn’t about a backyard only but larger region or a whole country. At the same time, we need minerals for our phones and gadgets, not to mention the batteries for electric cars. If this is the case, shouldn’t we accept that mining might as well take place in our territories and demand for sustainable mining practices? The dependency on rare earth materials is making mining also increasingly a geopolitical question.

Interestingly, the fact that renewable energy needs minerals has shifted the image of dirty mining towards mining as a key enabler of energy transition. Meanwhile, the concept of circular economy has fundamentally challenged the identity of mining sector, from quarrying virgin materials to re-mining solutions.

Source: Case Studies – Dirty side of green technology (helsinki.fi)

I have familiarised myself with the topic of sustainable mining in 2021 in two projects: supervising a perspectives report (https://www.vtv.fi/en/publications/perspectives-on-sustainable-mining-in-finland/) and co-leading a collaborative Masters’ course with Pia Bäcklund at the University of Helsinki. It has been an interesting journey into understanding the complexity of the topic. Students did fantastic work which is documented in the blog: Dirty side of green technology – Geographies of Inequalities 2021 (helsinki.fi)

Above is one of the beautiful maps that students made. It illustrates the supply chain of one rare earth material, cobalt, essential for batteries’ production. While the Democratic Republic of Congo is world’s leading producer of raw cobalt, Finland is the second biggest refiner after China, relying heavily in imported cobalt. Picture also quite clearly shows that mining is global business and the Corporate Social Responsibility should include the whole supply chain.

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Long-term plans

At the heart of sustainable development is the long-term approach, the famous future generations, that the Brundtland Commission so beautifully named as one key stakeholder in 1987. The importance of longer-termism is now gaining root among the investors and company leaders, as a recent article on ESG investment in Financial Times argued. On the one hand, there is the short-term survival in the midst of pandemic. On the other hand, there is growing awareness on the links between the pandemic and long-term systemic issues that can have  short-term impacts. 

One example of such systemic issues is the root cause of whole pandemic: the unsustainable way we consume and deal with the ecosystems globally. 

Applying a longer-term view in the usual governance routines might not always be easy. We wrote about this an article with Lassi Perkinen at the National Audit Office of Finland, using the UN Agenda 2030 as an example. In the EU, the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs came in 2015 in the middle of the EU2020 strategy and in the beginning of the multi-annual financial framework 2014-2020. Perhaps understandably, the EU simply later noted that the EU2020 strategy is aligned the with the Agenda 2030 and did not initiate any new strategy process for it. But this can also be considered as a missed opportunity for the EU to seize the moment and make itself a SDG-leader. 

Sustainable Development Goals

In the case of Finland, the Agenda 2030 came into the context where sustainability strategy had been renewed couple of years earlier. The main challenge was to align the strategy with the SDGs. Quite interestingly the SDGs finally proved to be more attractive than the Finnish priorities: the latest Government Report on the Agenda 2030 is structured according to them. 

The Agenda 2030 itself is reaching to year 2030 and is therefore not inter-generational. But reaching even to 2030 can be challenging in the existing government cycles. 

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The power of clear and colourful SDG logos is enormous. The recognizable iconography has helped the SDGs to become a truly global brand.