Happening now: activists in Finland have stopped freight traffic to a paper mill owned by UPM (Finnish forest industry giant). They are doing this to demand that UPM stop profiting at the expense of people in nature in Uruguay and Finland. UPM has just opened a huge pulp mill in Uruguay and now the country is experiencing an unprecedented water crisis. Local researchers emphasize that UPM's eucalyptus plantations consume the country's fresh water reserves. UPM must stop its activities that accelerate this crisis.

Finland is overlogging forests beyond sustainable levels, this has caused the collapse of land use carbon sinks, species loss, human rights violations, biodiversity loss and economic pressures. Despite the countless evidence that Finnish forestry isn't sustainable, politicians and companies are still trying to convince people that the harmful Finnish methods that caused this problem is the solution to the climate and biodiversity crises.

Forest news from this week in Finland:
- Almost 60% of the first thinnings are in violation of the Forestry Act
- Overlogging was confirmed to be the cause of the land-use carbon sink loss
- Finland's net emissions are still the same as they were 30 years ago - Experts found that typical Finnish forestry is the cause of nature loss
- Helsinki Energy company invests tens of millions into biomass despite that it goes against Helsinki City's energy strategy

Right now the Environment Council are meeting in Brussels to discuss the EU’s #NatureRestorationLaw and I have travelled from Finland to Brussels by train and boat to remind them that the longer we wait to restore nature, the more it will cost. 1/21 The EU Nature Restoration Law is an integral part of the EU Biodiversity strategy, which calls for binding targets to restore degraded ecosystems. More than 80% of the EU’s habitats are in poor condition and biodiversity is rapidly declining. 2/

I am protesting outside the European Summit in Brussels to let people know that forests are not renewable and that we must go beyond burning. We cannot replace the burning of fossil fuels with the burning of another carbon energy source, we need true renewables. 1/ One guy stopped on the street to ask me about the situation, I told him that burning wood is worse than coal for our climate, to which he replied that we will then have to burn coal. It isn't one or the other, it's not fossil fuels or forests. 2/

There's a lot of debate in Finland around who is responsible for nature loss, the short answer is everyone. The share of this responsibility is not equal though. It should be clear the responsibility correlates with how much nature has been destroyed. #luontokato To make this simple: If a government has cut down millions of hectares, they should be responsible for a large share of biodiversity loss, which means they must now pay to restore this. It costs a lot to restore a large amount of nature loss, that's just the simple truth.

Big news! Two Finnish nature organisations @luonnonsuojelu and @GreenpeaceSuomi are taking the Finnish government to court because of insufficient climate measures. This will be Finland's first climate trial. 1/7 The organisations are seeking legal protection from the Supreme Administrative Court because Finland's carbon neutrality goal for 2035 is threatened to be unfulfilled, and the Government has not taken sufficient measures to fix the situation. 2/

A new report released today at #COP27 reveals that the world faces a 50% risk of breaching a 1.5C temperature rise threshold in only nine years. For perspective, a recent UN report showed that global emissions need to fall by 45% by 2030 to keep temperatures below 1.5C. 1/3 Just today, a new analysis has found that carbon emissions from fossil fuels will hit record levels in 2022. Keep in mind that in order to restrict global heating to 1.5C.
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Mindblowing facts: the 10 richest men own more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people on Earth, and if the top 10 billionaires spent a million dollars each day, it would take them 414 years to spend their combined wealth. This feels even more incomprehensible: if the 10 richest men lost 99.999% of their combined wealth, they would still be richer than 99% of the world.

Between 1990 and 2015, the richest 1% (63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, the richest 10% (630 million people) were responsible for 52% of emissions, while the poorest 50% (3.1 billion people) were responsible for just 7% of emissions. 1/ The 40% of people in the global middle class (c.2.5 billion people) accounted for 41% of the cumulative emissions.

This is emissions inequality spelled out in its simplest form. 2/

Words cannot express how disappointed and fed up I am with Finland. In one breath, the Prime Minister of Finland says that Finland is committed to stopping nature loss and in the next, she is trying to oppose restoration law. This is greenwashing, don't let Finland fool you. If Finland was as serious about stopping nature loss as they say they are, then they should be jumping at the chance to restore nature, in fact, they should be pushing the Nature Restoration Law to be even better! Instead, they are trying to destroy it.

We are gathered outside the Finnish Parliament to demand that Finland stop resisting action to restore nature. Right now, the government is meeting to discuss the Nature Restoration Law because some political parties are trying to oppose it. Please read this🧵to find out more: 1/ Firstly, the Nature Restoration Law is an EU law that falls under the EU Biodiversity Strategy, which calls for binding targets to restore degraded ecosystems. The goal is to restore wetlands, rivers, forests, grasslands, marine ecosystems and species. 2/

Everyone should be talking about this: a new report by Oxfam has found that billionaires are responsible for a million times more greenhouse gas emissions than the average person. Their emissions from their lifestyles, such as their private jet and yacht usage, produce thousands of times more emissions of the average person produces; however, it’s their investments that put their carbon emissions over a million times higher than the average person.

A new report has found that we have warmed the planet so much that we will see irreversible Arctic sea ice lost and definite sea level rise. What really hit me about this is this quote from Robbie Mallett, a sea ice expert at University College London Earth Sciences - “It’s a terminal diagnosis and now we have to live with consequences.”

A new analysis has released that the super-rich emit the same amount of greenhouse gases as the whole of France in the form of investments in carbon intensive businesses. It gets a lot worse though, a short 🧵: 1/ They examined the carbon impact of the investments of 125 billionaires. “On average each billionaire’s investment emissions produced 3m tonnes of CO2 a year; a million times more than the average emissions of 2.76 tonnes of CO2 for those living in the bottom 90% of earners”. 2/

A short 🧵 of must see climate change graphs: Climate change is happening and happening fast. CO2 levels have been rising since the Industrial Revolution and they are now at their highest in about 4 million years and the fastest they’ve been for 66 million years.

You know our agricultural systems are bad when massive companies that destroy our environment like Mars, McDonald’s, and PepsiCo sign a report calling for more sustainable food production. Did you know that agriculture is the world’s biggest industry? Pasture and cropland occupy around 50% of the planet’s habitable land and use about 70% of our freshwater supplies. Food production is responsible for 1/3 of all greenhouse gases emitted by human activity.

A very Finnish problem: some Finnish people feel extremely threatened when you tell them that you want more forest to be protected. They see forest protection as if someone is taking something away from them, when in reality protecting more forests would benefit everyone. They say ‘but we have the largest share of forest protected in Europe’, okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good amount, it is still well below target levels. Finland is even trying to make the targets lower because they want to cut more forest.

Even more Finnish drama: the minister of agriculture and forestry compared the forest industry to the car industry. This goes to show how little Antti Kurvinen values forests and only views them through the mindset of the economy rather than true sustainability. No one should be talking about the forest industry as if it were the car industry. That's like asking to compare the agricultural industry to aviation, it just doesn't make sense and is irrelevant.

I don’t think enough people are talking about this. Yesterday, the UN Environment Program released a report which told us that “only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster”, and that there is no “credible pathway to 1.5 in place.” Almost every country in the world committed to the Paris Agreement, which is an international treaty to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably 1.5°C by the end of the century. Policies currently in place point to 2.8°C temperature rise by the end of the century.

Africa is facing severe effects from the climate crisis, which the media, governments and people have often ignored. Just in 2022 alone, extreme weather events as a result of the climate crisis have killed at least 4,000 people and affected a further 19 million. A report by @CarbonBrief details how many people were affected and/or killed by drought, wildfires, storms, landslides or floods. I think it is important to bring attention to these events, so I will list them all here, please note the list is not exhaustive.