In 2019, we published the initiative of Ecological Reconstruction (in Finnish and English), which provides a research-based framework for the challenge Finland will face in the next 15-30 years to radically reduce its climate emissions and curb its consumption of natural resources, while safeguarding opportunities for a good life.

The following year, we published a Transition Policy Dashboard (in Finnish and English). It brought together five indicators that government leaders, journalists and citizens could use to monitor and anticipate progress on ecological reconstruction. The dashboard was part of the Helsinki Biennial.

Since then, we have studied the rapid international evolution of innovation and industrial policy. Innovation and industrial policy creates the conditions for steering the economy according to ecological boundaries and other societal objectives such as comprehensive security. Innovation and industrial policy must be based on a multidisciplinary and open knowledge base, which we believe is best built through science-driven planning (see separate section).

A selection of projects linked to this theme:

• Commissioned by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, we produced a report on seven recent initiatives for a fair and sustainable economy: the Donut Economy, the Eco-Welfare State, Ecological Reconstruction, the European Green Deal, the Green New Deal for Europe, Wellbeing Economy and the Mission Economy. We described how the initiatives have been received in Finland and how they move the economic debate forward.
• We contributed to the PMO studies on the feasibility of mission-driven innovation policy in Finland (FIMO) and on the changing role of the state (ECONCHANGE).
• We participated in the industrial policy panel discussion at the Beyond Growth conference at the European Parliament in Brussels. Our researchers have also been involved in several working groups on the implementation of national industrial policies.

The industrial sustainability transition and the broader sustainability transformation require a new kind of knowledge production and continuous multilateral updating of the situational awareness. Knowledge production must be cross-cutting and able to take into account the links between industrial renewal and climate and environmental objectives, international competitiveness and cooperation, security and the potential for a good human life. We call such knowledge production science-driven planning. Above all, being science-driven implies that planning must rise above the interests of individual stakeholders. The role of science-driven planning is to produce the best possible forward-looking knowledge to support democratic decision-making and, in business, cross-sectoral strategy work.

BIOS has proposed the creation of a dedicated planning unit as part of the national research, innovation and industrial policy system. The knowledge base it would provide would not only allow well-informed decisions to be taken, but would also enable a high quality public and scientific debate. Assessments of policy ideas and decisions, and of the direction the economy and society are taking, should be grounded in a multidisciplinary scientific understanding.

We presented the idea of science-driven planning in a concise way in a BIOS concept paper (in Finnish) and more broadly in a scientific article entitled “Science-driven planning for the industrial sustainability transition” (article in Finnish). In November-December 2023, we piloted science-driven planning at the Ateneum Art Museum, where we invited Finland’s top experts for two days to create a state-of-the-art situational awareness of industrial renewal in Finland. In September 2024, we published a 12 min documentary video presenting the idea of science-driven planning, available on Vimeo (with English subtitles).

In examining the environmental and natural resource problems of societies and charting a path to a more sustainable future, the complexity of environmental issues needs to be understood. For example, a focus on climate alone can lead to problematic conclusions in relation to biodiversity. A broader vision is needed, but this cannot be achieved by any single unambiguous indicator. In the BIOS work, a holistic view has been developed from the perspective of socio-ecological metabolism. By looking at the material and energy flows on which societies depend, and the pollution and waste flows they generate, we get to the root of the complexity of the problems. BIOS has promoted this perspective in the Finnish environmental debate and presented it to a wider audience. In the research literature, our key contribution has been on the issue of ‘decoupling‘.

The use of natural resources is necessary for all societies, but human needs can be met and wealth created by radically different inputs of materials and energy. Understanding this qualitative dimension is essential in the ecological transformation: it is not just about reduction, but also about doing things differently. A good life for all must be pursued within ecological limits. By tackling the issue of transforming the systems of provision, it is possible to combine a reduction in the consumption of natural resources and the pressure on nature with the safeguarding of well-being.

In the sustainability transformation, every sector of society, every production and consumption system, is facing change. BIOS researchers have examined these changes in Finnish society, particularly in the forest industry and energy systems.

In 2017, BIOS facilitated a research statement on the then government’s bioeconomy and forest use plans, and work in this area has continued throughout the years. We have called for a more sustainable prioritising of forest use and actively participated in the critical debate on forest sinks accounting and how to achieve Finland’s climate targets. We have also addressed the issue in research articles both domestically and internationally. Alongside this, our researchers have examined Finland’s role in the international forest debate. The 12-part Forest Podcast (in Finnish), which ran from 2021-2022, brought together an exceptionally wide range of experts on the topic to discuss a more sustainable future for forest management and the forest industry.

Alongside and often linked to the forest issue, BIOS has also addressed the future of Finnish energy production. In 2018-2019, we actively participated in the public and research debate on the future of district heating in Helsinki. In 2022, BIOS researchers contributed to a report with the Geological Survey of Finland on the material requirements for decarbonisation in Finland. This led to the development of a publicly available national energy calculator. A research article was also published on the subject. BIOS was also actively involved in the societal debate on energy transition in the wake of Russia’s war of aggression in 2021.

For many other systems, such as transport and cities, we have relied on the best expertise in these areas rather than actively working on them ourselves.

Tellervo Ala-Lahti, who joined BIOS in August 2023, has brought legal expertise to the research unit. Ecological reconstruction is constantly confronted with different legal issues, which need to be anticipated as part of economic and societal governance. The first blog post (in Finnish) on this topic dealt with the industrial policy dimensions of environmental licensing.

Research on hunger, food insecurity and justice issues in food systems has been a long-standing strand of BIOS work. Published scientific articles have addressed the problems of hunger (in Finnish) and international food crises. Alongside this, a large number of writings aimed at the general public have been published over the years, tackling current food systems issues, such as the debate on self-sufficiency in the context of crises triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic or the Russian war of aggression. BIOS has collaborated with a number of food systems research projects and organisations and has been part of the Fingo food security group.

Ecological reconstruction requires and causes cultural change – shifts in shared meanings, values, customs and practices. We examine cultural change as a component of the sustainability transformation through the methods of humanistic environmental studies, critical social theory and sustainability science. We think that cultural phenomena are systemically linked not only to psychological, spiritual, social and political factors, but also to societal metabolism, environmental change and non-human beings.

Cultural change is a broad issue that we explore and contribute to in the fields of art, journalism, teaching and education. In addition to our artistic research into human relationships with nature and environmental issues, we have collaborated with the Heureka Science Centre, the Helsinki Biennale, the Ateneum Art Museum and many curators and artists (e.g. Agenda – Art 2030). We have addressed issues of environmental and economic journalism in numerous journalists’ meetings and in cooperation with the project “During Good Weather” led by Hanna Nikkanen. In the field of education and training, BIOS has produced content for, among others, the training programme on ecological reconstruction for headmasters developed by the Children and Youth Foundation’s School of the Future. We have also played our part in promoting networking between experts working on education, training and cultural issues.

We also examine cultural change from a more critical perspective, for example by exploring the use of the concept of culture in different contexts. The more progress that has been made towards the sustainability transformation, the clearer it has become that the required actions also raise a wide range of social, cultural, political and economic resistance. One of the strands of the BIOS work has been to explore and highlight such forms of public resistance, obfuscation, delay and obstruction to climate policy and the sustainability transformation. Identifying these forms is particularly important in a context where societal change should be rapid and at the same time equitable, but also because increasingly, discourses casting doubt on sustainability policies are also being harnessed to support ideologies that are authoritarian or put human groups in confrontation with each other. In this area, BIOS aims to develop and research the climate and sustainability expertise that best promotes a just sustainability transformation. The work will result in both research articles on discourses and actions that hinder the sustainability transition and contributions on the future of expert advocacy.

Since its inception, BIOS has been mapping the security sector’s expertise on global environmental risks. Together with various partners, we develop tools for comprehensive risk analysis and management. One of BIOS’s initial impulses was the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra’s Forum for New Security, which brought together experts in security, science and many other fields.

From 2018 to 2023, BIOS was part of the Strategic Research Council (STN)-funded WISE consortium (Creative Adaptation to Wicked Socio-Environmental Disruptions). The consortium’s work packages were led by Janne I. Hukkinen (University of Helsinki, consortium leader), Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen (University of Tampere, consortium deputy leader), Sakari Kuikka (University of Helsinki), Peter Lund (Aalto University), Markku Wilenius (University of Turku) and Paavo Järvensivu (BIOS Research Unit, consortium interaction manager).

WISE aimed to improve (1) decision-making on wicked socio-environmental disruptions and (2) Finland’s resilience and adaptation to disruption. WISE developed and tested a new integrated policy mechanism, the Policy Operations Room (POR), in particular at the level of city leadership. The Policy Operations Room is a decision-making platform for strategic crisis management that brings together decision-makers and experts to cross domain boundaries, identify alternative futures, test different problem frames and solution models, and lower participants’ personal defence mechanisms. When used repeatedly, platforms such as the Policy Operations Room maintain and update strategic situational awareness among different actors.

Under the lead of BIOS, WISE also developed a web-based collaboration platform for decision-makers and experts in Finnish municipalities. “Tulevaisuuden tilannehuone” (Situation Room of the Future) is a workshop-style exercise in which participants go beyond their usual tasks and build an overall picture of the future of their municipality, combining environmental and economic factors among others. The exercise continues to be free of charge and freely available to municipalities (available only in Finnish).

The collaboration with Yle to develop a new kind of environmental journalism was BIOS’s pilot project. It received funding from the Kone Foundation’s “Is Finland Becoming Polarized?” call, which supported cooperation between researchers and journalists. In the first phase, starting in autumn 2015, we met regularly with the journalist team, produced extensive background reports on topics such as population growth, food production, water crises and the economy, and organised a training day for journalists. This background work led to journalistic stories on topics such as environmental refugees, soil carbon stocks and forest carbon sinks.

The most important output of the collaborative project was the multimedia platform “Mission: The Future”, which was published in autumn 2017. The collection of discussions, audio clips, interviews and news stories on the future of Finnish society was produced in cooperation between BIOS and Yle’s news and social affairs and drama departments. All the content produced during the project is no longer available, but the podcast series Tulevaisuus hanskassa (in Finnish), hosted by Jari Hanska, can still be listened to and watched. The project ended at the end of 2017.