Browsing by Subject "sustainability"

Agricultural systems hold great potential in contributing greenhouse gas mitigation measures globally. Crop diversification, perennial vegetative cover and soil conservational measures are highlighted in order to develop agricultural production in a sustainable way. Increasing climate related public concern has created a demand for sustainable materials for manufacturing industries. Nettle (Urtica dioica) has been proven to hold economic and ecological advantages and great commercial potential. Nettle is a perennial low input crop with multiple end uses within harvest offering an attractive crop for farmers. The crop has been historically used in industrial scale however, current nettle production in agricultural scale is marginal despite its positive characteristics. Research on nettle’s commercial potential has been conducted in various industries. Lack of farmers has left results idle and commercial potential unachieved. This study uses basic management accounting practices in order to find the break-even points and profitability of the production in Finnish conventional farming framework. The production information is gathered from various international projects and is used in order to assess the profitability of nettle production and expand the assessment to evaluate production’s environmental benefits. For a comparison, similar assessment is performed for a conventional crop rotation consisting an oilseed crop, wheat and grass. In the chosen 4-year setting, the nettle production proves more expensive majorly due to first year’s economically non-viable production. Nettle’s low input use during the yield years and predictable long term yield output is likely to reduce unit costs over time. Nettle’s production cost of dry biomass is 0,29 euros per kilogram and break-even price after subsidies is 0,16 euros for a kilogram, similar to wheat. Nettle’s low input use and relatively large, annual 8000kg fresh yields indicate the production could turn profitable with comparably low prices. Environmentally, after the first year nettle creates an annual 1,3 ton carbon sink despite conventional fertilizer use and machinery work done of field.

Current food production and consumption practices have major impacts on the climate and the environment. Studies are calling for a transition towards plant-based diets as climate change poses an imminent threat of global natural catastrophes. Plant-based milk (PBM) products can be seen as radical innovations and as alternatives to liquid dairy milk that have started to break away from their former ethical and medical market niches. This study aims to gain understanding in how PBM products are positioned as alternatives to dairy milk and how the mainstreaming of these products could challenge the dairy sector. Specifically, the study is interested in how Finnish PBM products are marketed and how these PBM producers could be potential drivers of a sustainability transition in the food industry. This study focused on the digital marketing material that Finnish PBM producers used during the initial launch of their PBM products. The materials were collected online from existing and locatable sources (e.g. websites and social networking spaces) as well as from solicited material acquired from company representatives. The data was analyzed by conducting qualitative content analysis on the materials. The results showed that Finnish PBMs are marketed as alternative yet convenient products that are simultaneously health, tasty, and functional, as well as sustainable and plant-based. Even though Finnish producers were found to be hesitant to explicitly challenge the dairy sector, some brands positioned their products as part of a new food system that is transitioning away from the use of animal-products. These results suggest that the mainstreaming of Finnish PBMs and specifically oat milk is a positive shift towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption. Furthermore, the involvement of well-established food and dairy industry actors in the Finnish PBM market could have a role in reforming the institutional structures that empower people to eat animal-derived products. The seemingly neutral, non-provocative marketing style of Finnish PBM products is aiming to normalize the use of PBMs and thus claim its spot in Finnish food culture as an everyday consumer good.

Background: Food systems and diets affect both human health and the environment. As dietary behaviour adopted in childhood often track to adulthood, the meals served in daycare centres offer a good opportunity for promoting healthy and climate-friendly eating habits in both short- and long-term. Objectives: As part of the FoodStep project, the objectives of this study were to examine compliance with the food-level recommendations, nutrient content per child and climate impacts of the conventional menus in Finnish daycare centers, as well as the potential changes in the compliance with the food-level recommendations, nutrient content per child and climate impacts of the FoodStep menus, modified towards more plant-based diet. Methods: Menus, recipes, and planned portion sizes were used to create hypothetical food diaries, representing the planned foods per child during a full-day daycare. Nutrient calculations were performed for conventional menus and modified FoodStep menus for four Finnish municipalities. Climate impacts of the same meals were calculated at Natural Resources Institute of Finland. Results: In the conventional menus, food-level serving frequency recommendations were not met for several food groups, but the compliance was clearly improved in the modified FoodStep menus in all the municipalities. At nutrient-level, the issues in the two menus were similar in every municipality: compared to the recommendations for daycares, too low proportion of energy was derived from fat and too high from protein. In addition, the planned salt supplies were excessive. The planned supplies of energy and micronutrients fulfilled the recommendations with the only exception of iron in the conventional menu of one municipality. In three of the four municipalities, the FoodStep menu modifications led to markedly reduced climate impacts. Conclusions: More focus in daycare menu planning would be needed to meet both the food- and nutrient-level recommendations. Moderate modifications of the conventional daycare menus – increasing vegetables, fruits, and berries, and sustainable fish species and decreasing meat and dairy products – can improve the compliance with the food-level recommendations and decrease the climate impacts of the menus without negative effects on the nutrient supplies.

The European Commission and the Finnish government have released their respective roadmaps in sustainable forest policy. With the European Commission pushing for further cooperation and integration in a field with no dedicated framework, it becomes vital to have a consensus on the concept of “sustainable forestry” with Member States such as Finland. Finland, on the other hand, as the most forested Member State in terms of percentage of total land area, manifests opposite views regarding how the administration is supposed to effect policy. This thesis consists of an analysis of respective documents from the European Commission and the Finnish government: the New EU Forest Strategy for 2030 and the Government Report on Forest Policy 2050. Similar in scope and structure, they clearly reflect these different attitudes towards policymaking and the role of policymakers themselves in the coming decades. The focus of this analysis is, however, their respective use of metaphors. With the theoretical support of the Advocacy Coalition Framework of Hank Jenkins-Smith and Paul Sabatier and the Critical Metaphor Analysis of Jonathan Charteris-Black, these metaphor choices are then observed to explain which stakeholders—either forestry, administrative, or environmental—are favored in each document. In this thesis, metaphors are words whose basic meaning, which is usually the one easiest to imagine, is not the one used in their textual context. From associating that missing, metaphorical meaning to chosen key concepts, this analysis shows that the metaphors found are used in cohesion with each other. This reveals a re-conceptualization of those key terms according to the accompanying metaphors. For example, the European Commission presented forests in its Strategy as “towns”, while the Finnish government saw them as “(ore) mines”. The results of this thesis reveal the consistency of metaphor choices in discourse and their significance in depicting a potentially different set of narratives from those contained in conventional language, both overtly and covertly. With these results in mind, scholars can further pursue research in other fields thanks understanding of metaphor and its prevalence in communication, or even expand this line of research into the role of media, for example.

Sustainability is a normative concept embedding ethical commitments. A central ethical issue in the sustainability debate and sustainability science regards moral standing. Moral standing is a philosophical concept that means that a being matters morally for their own sake and that there are direct duties owed to the being. It is widely accepted in contemporary ethics that, in addition to humans, at least some sentient nonhuman animals have moral standing. However, the dominant academic and political discourse of sustainability has hitherto focused only on the moral claims of humans without a critical examination of this anthropocentrism. In anthropocentrism, a view of moral standing, only humans have moral standing or they have a much higher moral standing than any nonhumans. Animal and environmental ethicists have questioned anthropocentrism through philosophical arguments. Nevertheless, the academic discourse of sustainability has been disconnected from the philosophical research on moral standing. There is, thus, a research gap in examining moral standing within sustainability science by drawing also on ethical research. This master’s thesis integrates the two distinct fields of knowledge, that is, sustainability science and ethical research on moral standing. The aim is to answer the following research questions: (1) What kind of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric conceptions of sustainability are there in sustainability literature? (2) What kind of conceptions of sustainability ensue from the main philosophical views of moral standing? (3) How plausible are the different anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric conceptions of sustainability? The thesis applies the philosophical method for investigating the plausibility of alternative views. With animal ethical arguments, I defend the plausibility of a sentiocentric and unitarian conception of sustainability that considers the interests of all sentient beings equally. Also, I present a typology of the main anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric conceptions of sustainability based on philosophical literature on moral standing. My typology characterises the key features of what I call the strong variety of anthropocentric sustainability, the weak variety of anthropocentric sustainability, sentiocentric sustainability, biocentric sustainability and ecocentric sustainability. In addition, this research employs interdisciplinary literature related to the topic and reviews the anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric conceptions of sustainability in sustainability literature. Based on my analysis, I contend that the dominant conceptions of sustainability maintain anthropocentric speciesism, that is, discrimination according to species classification within an anthropocentric worldview. This bias is present, for example, in the conceptions of sustainability of the Brundtland Report, the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, the planetary boundaries framework as well as IPCC reports examined in this thesis. Some non-anthropocentric conceptions of sustainability are starting to emerge in academic discourses: interspecies sustainability, posthuman sustainability, ecocentric sustainability, multispecies sustainability, what I call multicriterial sustainability and defences of the animal ethical dimensions of sustainability. Hitherto, the discourse of sustainability has, still, rarely questioned anthropocentric speciesism. I argue that the anthropocentric conceptions of sustainability lack plausibility for five reasons. Firstly, it is morally wrong to engage in speciesist discrimination. It is wrong to disregard sentient nonhuman animals’ interests and equal duties owed to these creatures in the context of sustainability. Secondly, anthropocentric speciesism is connected to discrimination against certain animalised and marginalised humans, such as indigenous peoples. Thirdly, normative claims require ethical justification, which makes it unacceptable to assume anthropocentrism without critical examination. Sustainability science should consider ethical research on moral standing and aim at overcoming the speciesist bias through critical reflection. Fourthly, from a psychological perspective, it is valuable to oppose oppressive systems that, according to research by Melanie Joy, distance humans from reality and their authentic experience. Fifthly, the sentiocentric equality of all sentient beings protects environment and wellbeing by opposing the animal industry. Also the biocentric and ecocentric conceptions of sustainability lack plausibility, despite their non-anthropocentrism, as only sentient beings have interests. I conclude that there is a duty to embrace the sentiocentric and unitarian conception of sustainability that commits to the equality of all sentient beings, which eliminates discrimination. This conclusion entails a duty to transform the paradigm of sustainability science and the discourse of sustainability. In future research, it is essential to further develop this sentiocentric conception of sustainability, examine its possible challenges and how societies and the academic world could implement it.

The aim of this Thesis was to analyze Finnish food policy from a sustainability point of view. Changing operational environment, both globally and nationally, place food systems under a variety of economic, socio-cultural and ecological pressures. In addition to meet the basic objectives, such as ensuring food security, food systems are expected to fulfill a number of other goals. The drivers and goals, as well as means to food system change are defined in food policy. Considering the ecological, economic and sociocultural dimensions of sustainability in the food system analysis can also be viewed as an agroecological approach. A content analysis, using Atlas TI software was done for three most recent and topical Finnish food policy documents: Food2030 - government report on food policy, and the government programs for local and - organic food sectors. The food policy documents were analyzed with the following research questions in mind: how well is the need for systemic change recognized in the Finnish food policy; what are the main drivers for change; how are different dimensions of sustainability taken into account; is the change anticipated as gradual improvements to the current food system or are there any references suggesting radically reformed food system? The recently renewed Finnish food policy is specifically drafted with the current and forecasted changes in the operational environment in mind. The main drivers were mainly identified as sociocultural trends such as globalization, urbanization and changes in consumer behavior. The economic drivers, especially the competitiveness and export orientation of the food sector emerged as important goals for the future. The ecological dimension to food system reform gave the lowest share in all three categories (drivers, means and goals). A change in a complex system such as a food system takes place by affecting one partof the system at a time. The current Finnish food policy does not present radical changes or radical means to change the current system. However system-level changes can often be identified only afterwards.

My master’s thesis concerns the interplay of three distinct topics: sustainability, intellectual property rights and competition law. The perspective is systemic: the aim is to give a bird’s-eye view to issues that concern all three of the topics. The definition of sustainability is viewed theoretically as a form of justice and acquiring its practical meaning from the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The potential intellectual property right and competition concerns in the sustainable development goals are described and analysed in the thesis with the focus on those where the issues arise when an exclusive right of an IPR becomes a form of abuse of a dominant market position. The key findings of the thesis include the classical access versus incentive problem on how to let especially developing countries access innovations that increase the wellbeing of people and the environment while also incentivising further innovation. Further findings concern the role of competition law as a balancing tool for IP law by restricting what kind of licensing behaviour can be accepted for innovations that are important for promoting sustainable development. In addition, critical observations of the need of coherence of regulation and the predictability of competition law enforcement in sustainability settings are presented. In conclusion, intellectual property law and competition law can both be useful in promoting sustainable development at their current state, but both could benefit from attention from legislator regarding their missions. It should also be remembered that intellectual property law and competition law cannot be the only fields of law taking part in this task and whose mission is updated, but rather it should be considered which objectives are best suited to regulate within other fields of law.

Food waste is a global issue that causes major damage economically, environmentally and socially. Stakeholders carry a shared responsibility for the waste and more effort is needed to prevent its creation. Retailers, an affluent link in the food supply chain (FSC), can make a difference. Solving the food waste issue requires comprehending what has already been done. Understanding the field and analyzing the impacts of different kind of food waste initiatives from various perspectives can benefit the food industry as well as non-governmental organizations and public authorities on the path towards more sustainable processes. The aim of this research is to define what kind of food waste initiatives have been implemented among the leading European food retailers between the years 2011 and 2014. The research is carried out from a European perspective as its field of food trade is considered unique in terms of policies, integration and the development of the functions of the FSC. The research was implemented through a qualitative content analysis from a deductive point of view during autumn 2014. The theoretical framework of the paper consists of literature related to the European food retail sector, the food waste issue and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The data used in the content analysis was collected from Europe’s leading retailers’ CSR reports and homepage publications. It was then analyzed from various perspectives, with an emphasis to the causes of food waste and the theory of CSR. The research found that retailers have implemented several different food waste programs which vary with respect to their objectives, duration, strategic integration and operational aspects. The initiatives present a variety of economic, environmental and social CSR dimensions and outputs. The paper argues that retailers have used innovative solutions in their food waste programs that have resulted in environmental and other benefits.

Agroforestry is a collective name for land-use systems and technologies where woody perennials are deliberately used on the same land-management units as agricultural crops and/or animals. Silvopasture is a type of agroforestry that integrates trees, livestock, and forage crops on the same piece of land. This topic is specifically interesting because silvopasture is already present in Finland, mostly in the form of traditional biotopes, despite these being endangered habitats. Agroforestry is also recognized by the Kyoto Protocol as an afforestation practice that has several advantages. These include environmental benefits, increased productivity, and animal welfare. However, there has been discussion on detrimental effects of animal presence to the trees as well. This research aims to explore the effects of silvopasture on trees, cattle, and the environment in South-western Finland traditional biotopes. Several individual criteria are assessed in three categories: woodland, animal performance and biodiversity. Data was collected on three farms on four pastures through field surveys and farmer interviews. The data is analyzed through multi criterium decision analysis (MCDA) with normalized values from agriculture and forestry to assess performance of silvopastures on three separate categories. Results from four pastures follow a somewhat similar pattern but variation occurs. High scores of forest indicators are reached in woodland category whereas biodiversity category results are lower. Silvopasture negatively affects forest regeneration but otherwise does not have adverse effects. Cattle performance is positive outcome whereas biodiversity category has room for improvement. To get more accurate and comprehensive results the research should be conducted during growing season and with several farms around Finland. However, silvopasture is a meaningful measure to diversify habitats, contribute to animal wellbeing and strengthen ecosystem services.

This study presents the potential of insect frass, also known as insect waste streams (IWS), as a biofertilizer in Finland based on information collected from the participants in a survey. In Finland, the use of IWS as a biofertilizer is still in the research and development phase. The questions in the survey were designed to provide information about IWS, considering IWS as an innovation, how it is used, and the potential impact of IWS in the future. The aim was to fill the information gap to provide a basis for the use of IWS in Finnish agriculture, to promote circular economy and sustainability, and to paint a picture of the future of IWS as a potential product in Finland. For this study, 32 participants from the University of Helsinki, the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), and some Finnish companies in the insect sector responded to a survey. The framework of the study was based on four pillars: the innovation itself (IWS), the time horizon (short-term 3-5 years and long-term 15-20 years), the members of the society or stakeholders, and the communication channels. A mixed method was used to analyze the quantitative data collected and the data from the qualitative open word sections. The results of this survey show that participants consider IWS as a biofertilizer with plant and soil health benefits that has the potential to reduce the use of agrochemicals. IWS could be marketed with different physical properties, such as granules, powder, or spray that can be used with other fertilizers. The basis for using IWS in Finnish agriculture would be the promotion of circular economy and sustainability, market demand, the scale of production, and the nutrient combination of the product. The most effective way to use IWS to grow crops could be during sowing and as a supplement to other fertilizers. The participants held similar views on the practicality of IWS in Finland, with the main difference being the prediction of the time horizon for the applicability of IWS: the group of participants who had direct contact with IWS as a product was more optimistic about the potential of IWS to replace significant amounts of chemical fertilizers as an additive in the long term. Also, the risks and barriers of using IWS were more tangible for the group directly involved with IWS.