Kaleva from the north-central city of Oulu reports that although Brussels airport remains closed, EU interior ministers will gather in the city on Thursday to discuss Tuesday’s bombings. Finland’s Petteri Orpo plans to attend. He says the meeting primarily has an important symbolic value in demonstrating solidarity with the Belgians. The official death toll now stands at 32 with 270 people injured.
Kaleva also notes that foreign and exchange students at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences are arranging a candlelight procession in honour of the Brussels victims on Thursday evening. The march, announced by Belgian student Alina Hellinckx on Facebook, begins at 7.45 pm from Otokuja.
Donate, don't discard
In other news, Kaleva quotes the Natural Resources Institute (Luke) as saying that as much as 500 million kilos of edible food is thrown away annually in Finland. EU and Finnish officials have set a target of halving the amount of food waste by the year 2030.
Luke, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Council of State are seeking legislative solutions to food waste, including systems for donating it to the needy.
According to Luke, every year households in Finland waste some 120 million kilos of food with a value of some 500 million euros.
Besides the loss of nutrients, it notes that discarded but usable food has a significant impact on climate change. For instance the country’s food waste generates about 1,000 million kilos of equivalent carbon dioxide (CO2e). This corresponds to the annual greenhouse-gas impact of more than 300,000 cars, estimates Juha-Matti Katajajuuri, a senior research scientist at Luke.
KL: 2030 emissions targets will be pricey
The business daily Kauppalehti also sounds a climate theme, quoting new figures from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland suggesting that Finland will struggle to meet its emissions targets for the year 2030.
The EU has pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent before 2020 and by 40 percent before 2030, compared to a 1990 baseline.
According to the VTT study, many EU states have already reached their 2020 goals, while the measures put in place by Finland should just allow it to squeak in under the limit. However the 2030 goal will be significantly more challenging, requiring Finland and other EU countries to impose much stricter measures. Moves such as cutting pollution from oil heating and boosting the share of biofuels in transport should be enough to cut Finland's emissions by 40 percent before 2030 – but costs will also rise significantly, VTT says.
HBL: Nuclear politics from the Urals to Pyhäjoki
Staying with the energy theme, the nation's leading Swedish-language daily, Hufvudstadsbladet (HBL), leads off with a look behind the scenes of Russian involvement in the Fennovoima nuclear plant to be built on Finland's northern west coast. The massive bilateral investment was on the agenda when presidents Vladimir Putin and Sauli Niinistö met in Moscow this week. Putin cited the major investments in the Urals by Finnish state-owned power company Fortum and Russian state firm Rosatom's delivery of the Fennovoima plant in Pyhäjoki as examples of the good economic relations between the neighbouring lands.
Fortum's belated, reluctant decision to join the Fennovoima project was motivated by political and strategic calculations, say researchers at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in a recent report. The move was part of a comprehensive solution at the state level, say Toivo Martikainen and Antto Vihma in their paper entitled "Dividing the EU with Energy? Unpacking Russia's Energy Geoeconomics".
They argue that Fennovoima as a prime example of how Moscow is using "its energy resources as a means of enhancing its strategic influence in its neighbourhood and the EU".