Forestry and environmental economics

Research on forest industries and forestry

Since the very beginning of the institute, forestry has been a central theme of our research. Our main topics include wood markets, private forest ownership, ecosystem services, forest industry import and export, markets and policy. Recently, the questions of climate change have become increasingly important, and currently we study, for example, how to fortify the carbon sinks in the forests and how to reduce emissions from the peatlands.

Twice a year, we publish a short term forecast about forestry and forest industries in Finland.

Kuvituskuva metsästä, jossa korkealle kasvavia puita.

New policy brief in English: Sustainability compass

Realised for the Interreg Central Baltic project MAREA: http://marea.balticseaportal.net/

A bottom-up method for participatory social learning to check the direction towards human prosperity and wellbeing within natural bounds

The Sustainability Compass is a geospatial tool that synthesizes big data by some most important indicators, classified by key themes, related to the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Please see below a visualization of the Sustainable Development means and Goals. As the Sustainability Compass is generated and updated through participatory learning, the tool enables different actors to reach a common understanding of sustainability, develop a shared vision for getting there and to assess the level of sustainability of current MSP or other national/regional plans.

The compass:

  • Allows interested citizens or organisations to get a wider perspective on possible problems, activities or solutions for specific purposes, fields or geographical locations, in order to understand best practices, also in relation to own objective
  • The Sustainability Compass is a simple tool, which aims to avoidtoo complex and therefore too uncertain interactions, and to identify key factors and indicators, which are more relevant and decisive for the specific field
  • The precautionary principle avoids getting involved in too complex and very uncertain matters, and to stop a step before
  • In case of high uncertainty, the choice could be even doing nothing or stick to old practices or technologies and avoid solutions, whose impacts might be unknown, or choosing approaches that imitate the natural functioning of ecosystems

The compass tool can be found here:

http://www.sea.ee/marea/survey/compass

Read the brief here

The MAREA project developed and tested novel concepts of ecosystem services mapping, environmental accounting and sustainability assessment.

Policy brief (pdf)

Our researchers