Northern Warning Lights: Ambiguities of Environmental Security in Finland and Sweden

As the literature on environmental security has evolved and widened, knowledge of the full range of potential consequences of environmental change for different societies remains scattered. This article contributes to a more comprehensive approach to the implications of environmental change by providing a three-level framework of the security impacts. In particular, it will address gaps in knowledge by pointing out the relevance of geopolitical and structural factors behind environmental security impacts. The article will focus on the cases of two countries, Finland and Sweden—both seen as stable, high-income democracies that are well equipped to adapt to climate risks. Yet even under these conditions, preparedness to threat-prevention will not follow without a recognition of the full range of risks, including ones that are linked to socio-economic and geopolitical factors. On the basis of the Finnish and Swedish cases, the article proposes an analytical framework of three categories of environmental security impacts: local, geopolitical and structural

Bottom-up estimation of the scope of tasks to completely phase out fossil fuels in Finland

Phasing out fossil fuel use in order to limit global warming is an urgent global task. In a new climate law, Finland has set itself the target of being carbon neutral by 2035. Various scenarios and models have been presented on future energy needs and technological methods of production. However, there is a lack of research covering all fossil fuel energy use (power, heating, transport) and estimations of full replacement tasks. In order to highlight the concrete steps needed, we use a bottom-up approach, calculating for 2019 (the latest year with no artificial signatures in the data) the contribution of coal, oil, natural gas and peat to the Finnish energy system. The replacement of fossil fuels via electrification would, at minimum, demand a doubling of power production, with the precise number depending on the technologies of replacement, most notably the use of hydrogen versus electric drive in various modes of transport. The scale of the task points, first, to the trade-off between biomass use in forest industry and in energy production, and, second, to the salience of reduced energy demand in helping the task of transition

The crises inherent in the success of the global food system

Food systems around the world are increasingly interwoven into a global network. The dominant productionist paradigm emphasizes aggregate production volumes, a focus on few key products, and the dominant role of large exporting countries and transnational corporations. This article proposes a new conceptualization of food systems that illuminates the unequal structure and the lock-ins of this network. The global network of national food systems manifests as a center–periphery constellation where the resilience of many food systems is fatefully undermined. This article also explores the reasons why the successes of the productionist paradigm are accompanied with severe problems, including the potential of global food crises. Increasing vulnerability to crises is an inherent feature of the tightly networked global food system. As a way forward, we propose a transformation pathway based on the notion of “next best transition steps.” A key idea is to afford agency and transformative resilience to those currently in the periphery of the global food system

Decoupling for ecological sustainability

The idea of decoupling “environmental bads” from “economic goods” has been proposed as a path towards sustainability by organizations such as the OECD and UN. Scientific consensus reports on environmental impacts (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions) and resource use give an indication of the kind of decoupling needed for ecological sustainability: global, absolute, fast-enough and long-enough. This goal gives grounds for a categorisation of the different kinds of decoupling, with regard to their relevance. We conducted a survey of recent (1990–2019) research on decoupling on Web of Science and reviewed the results in the research according to the categorisation. The reviewed 179 articles contain evidence of absolute impact decoupling, especially between CO2 (and SOX) emissions and evidence on geographically limited (national level) cases of absolute decoupling of land and blue water use from GDP, but not of economy-wide resource decoupling, neither on national nor international scales. Evidence of the needed absolute global fast-enough decoupling is missing.Peer reviewe