Why the happiest country can't stop greening

There are many reasons to worry about climate change. Finland seems to lack most of them. It has some of the planet's cleanest air and water. It is abundant in forests and delights in its fauna. Berries can be picked in the wild as a natural right. About one in every seven Finns owns forested property. And the country's been ranked the world's happiest for seven straight years by UN. Clearly, there are things Finns have been doing right.

Still, the country is compulsively chasing solutions to cut down on carbon and doubling down on commitments to meet UN sustainable development goals. It's already rated the best-poised globally to get there before anyone else. That's not at all strange, said Jani Halinen, the nuclear energy vice president at VTT, the state-owned research institute. "We live close to nature and appreciate it. We understand why it's important to invest time and energy to protect it."

Nuclear is a big part of Finland's energy mix, but smaller than renewables. Together, they make 94% of its energy fossil free. At a time when Germany has gone off nuclear power over safety concerns, Finland is working on ideas to bring it closer to cities and neighbourhoods. The consideration is environmental.

"The climate crisis won't abate until we heat our homes cleanly. Finnish energy companies are taking the lead in moving away from combustion-based energy altogether," the CEO of a company working to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs), told a news portal recently. These are reactors designed to be so small and uncomplicated, they can be used for residential and district heating systems. The company, Steady Energy, is a spinoff from VTT, which holds the patent for the cutting-edge tech.

Betting on the unconventional seems to be the institute's credo. No product is too basic and no process too complicated to not be decarbonised. Researchers at its Bioruukki centre on the outskirts of Helsinki are exploring alternative fuels and are looking to sound the timer on cellophane and plastic food packaging. They may already have done so for global hunger.

Not too far from the spartan labs of VTT, Solar Foods is producing protein at the speed of light and at a level of innovation that would warm the hearts of sci-fi dreamers. Dr Pasi Vainikka and co-founder Dr Juha-Pekka Pitkanen are not agriculturalists. It was VTT's fertile research environment that catalysed their discovery of a way to make food using hydrogen, CO2, oxygen and nitrogen with a friendly and useful microbe for help.

Their first creation, christened Solein, is a chrome yellow powder with a slightly nutty flavour and neutral smell. The Ajinomoto company has launched a line of festive mooncakes in Singapore that are made with Solein. Pasi points out that it's a food with 70% protein that can be produced anywhere and has a 70-hour 'harvest' cycle. Think food crisis hotspots and extraplanetary outposts. The area needed to produce it is much smaller than a livestock farm that yields a comparable quantity of protein. With clean energy to run the engine, the food has next to no carbon footprint.

But the Finnish climate community is preoccupied with more than just carbon footprint. Around 2018, researchers at VTT came up with a formula to calculate carbon handprint. If footprint measures the greenhouse gas emissions caused by a product, 'carbon handprint' quantifies the positive environmental impact it achieves.

The ultimate aim is to go from being carbon neutral to climate positive, the blissful state where one is net zero on emissions and then sucks out others' CO2 as an extra.

Ask any climate researcher in Finland and they are likely to say that the 'h' in happiness stands for hydrogen. It is central to the country's plan to become carbon neutral by 2035. But hydrogen does not exist in pure form on Earth and its extraction involves complicated and costly methods. That's one gap the Finnish industry is working to bridge through path-beaking research by the likes of deep-tech company Hycamite and ship-engine builder Wartsila. It may not be as simple as it sounds, but Markku Kivisto, head of cleantech investments at govt agency Business Finland is confident the bets will pay off. "Saving the world is good business, let's do it together," he says.

The writer was in Finland at the invitation of Business Finland