Browsing by Subject "forest"
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(2020)The aim of this thesis is to study the normality of Finnish privately owned timberland returns and assess the risk level under value-at-risk and conditional value-at-risk frameworks. The motivation behind the normality assumption of timberland returns is that modern portfolio theory requires the asset returns to follow a normal distribution. If the chosen assets do not follow this assumption, the modern portfolio theory is not a valid framework for the analysis. In addition, the modern portfolio theory uses variance as a risk measure, which does not consider the skewness or excess kurtosis of the asset returns. Hence, we study the return of Finnish timberland assets under value-at-risk and conditional value at-risk frameworks. The theoretical framework is based on four different value-at-risk and conditional value-at-risk estimation methods: historical, Gaussian, modified and extreme value theory based. The chosen timeframe is from January 1995 to December 2018 and the data is for six different roundwoods: logs and pulpwood of Birch, Spruce and Pine. The main finding is that the Finnish privately owned timberland returns are non-normally distributed. This is, because the return series exhibit excess kurtosis and skewness. In addition, different value-at-risk and conditional value-at-risk estimation methods give differing results due to the non-normality. Value-at-risk and conditional value-at-risk illustrate the risk of the Finnish privately owned timberland better than variance. In conclusion, the risk of the Finnish privately owned timberland is still moderate, but the normal distribution underestimates it.
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(2023)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.
Now showing items 1-2 of 2