Finland's forest crisis

What happens when they stop absorbing carbon?

- Patrick Greenfield

Tiina Sanila-Aikio cannot remember a summer this warm. The months of midnight sun in Inari, in the far north of Finland, have been hot and dry. Conifer needles on the tips of branches are orange when they should be deep green. The moss on the forest floor, usually swollen with water, has withered.

“I have spoken with many old reindeer herders who have never experienced the heat that we've had this summer,” says Sanila-Aikio, a former president of the Finnish Sami parliament. “The sun keeps shining and it never rains.”

The boreal forests in the Sami homeland take so long to grow that even small, stunted trees are often hundreds of years old. It is part of the Taiga - meaning “land of the little sticks” in Russian - that stretches across the far northern hemisphere through Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada.

These forests help to underpin the most ambitious carbon-neutrality target in the developed world: Finland's commitment to be carbon neutral by 2035. The country aims to reach the target 15 years earlier than many of its European counterparts, and remove more carbon than it emits after that date.

In a country of 5.6 million people with nearly 70% covered by forests and peatlands, many thought it was achievable. Yet, even as Finland's climate target was being signed into law two years ago, alarm grew among scientists about whether it was already slipping out of reach.

For decades, the country's forests and peatlands have reliably removed more carbon from the atmosphere than they released. But from about 2010, the amount the land absorbed started to decline, slowly at first, then rapidly. By 2018, Finland's land sink - when an area absorbs more carbon than it releases - had vanished.

Its forest sink declined about 90% from 2009 to 2022, with the rest of the decline fuelled by a rise in emissions from soil and peat. In 2021-22, Finland's land sector was a net contributor to global heating.