Climate change is high on this week’s news agenda, and Helsingin Sanomat has an interesting poll on Finns' attitudes to climate change.
As president Sauli Niinistö has shown this week in New York, Finland’s global leadership on climate policy is strong.
However on the home front, Finns are split down the middle. According to the HS poll some 46 percent of respondents are willing to compromise on their own living standards to fight climate change.
On the other hand, some 45 percent believe climate change has been exaggerated and the same figure is unwilling to accept a lower standard of living to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The breakdown of respondents by party affiliation also provided interesting data, with most parties showing a similar split on climate policy.
However the Finns Party was an outlier, with just one percent of their supporters questioned saying they’d compromise on living standards, and just two percent saying Finland should be a trailblazer in climate policy.
Overall 48 percent of respondents said Finland should lead the way on climate, and that figure rose to 61 percent among the under-30s.
Some 1,099 people took the online survey in August and September.
A berry good time
It’s berry picking season in Finland, and Iltalehti has a story from Mikkeli of the country on a campaign to encourage more people to venture into the forests.
At present some 90 percent of berries that are sold in Finland are picked by seasonal workers from abroad who move to Finland for the picking periods.
'Berry buddies' are on offer this year to help people who might not know where to look for forest fruits, or might be scared of getting lost or encountering one of the larger mammals known to lurk in Finnish forests.
The campaign is run by Arctic Flavours, which describes itself as an ‘association for Non-Wood Forest Products specialising in wild berries, mushrooms, herbs and special forest products’.
Birgitta Paananen, the association’s Managing Director, tells Iltalehti that at the World Berry-picking championships last weekend (yes, really), the winner of the women’s competition picked 16 kilos of lingonberries in an hour.
That would fetch 56 euros in Mikkeli market square, and thanks to a quirk of the Finnish tax system that income is untouched by the state.
Paananen suggests that a family might earn enough for a foreign holiday if they worked hard in the forests.
Intrepid berry pickers can head to the Arctic Flavours website for more information in English about the bountiful harvest available in the local woods.
Helsinki misses out on Super Cup
Most papers report on the Finnish angle from yesterday’s Uefa meeting in Ljubljana. The European football body ruled on hosting rights for upcoming prestige men's games, and Finland missed out on the 2021 Super Cup.
Instead the Uefa meeting selected Belfast as the host city.
The Finnish FA had wanted to host the match at the revamped Olympic Stadium, which is scheduled to reopen next year.
The Super Cup is a curtain-raiser played at the start of each football season, and in recent years it has been hosted by some of the continent’s lesser-known footballing destinations: Trondheim, Tbilisi, Tallinn and Skopje.
There was one silver lining, however: the 2021 men's Champions League final will be played in Saint Petersburg, just three hours from Helsinki. Helsingin Sanomat notes that this location is closer than any previous final stadium.