As the climate consequences of tourism become increasingly difficult to overlook, understanding how carbon implications shape travel decisions has emerged as a critical yet underexplored research focus. Although scholarship on tourism-related emissions has expanded substantially, the field has paid uneven attention to how climate considerations are integrated into travelers’ decision-making processes. This dissertation examines carbon-neutral tourism from a demand-side perspective with a specific focus on young adults and Finland. It focuses on how young travelers interpret, negotiate, and enact low-carbon choices in everyday travel contexts. Drawing on research on pro-environmental behavior, the study conceptualizes carbon-neutral travel behavior as a socially embedded, layered process shaped by individual motivations, moral considerations, perceived responsibility, and structural constraints. Particular attention is given to the persistence of the attitude–behavior gap and to the distribution of responsibility for climate action among travelers, industry stakeholders, and governments. The dissertation adopts an integrated and interdisciplinary framework to explain the attitudinal, normative, responsibility-based, and behavioral dimensions of carbon-neutral travel behavior. Drawing on behavioral and sustainability research, the study combines perspectives from the Theory of Planned Behavior, the Norm Activation Model, Attribution Theory, and the Avoid–Shift–Improve framework to examine low-carbon decision-making across different travel domains and levels of behavioral adoption. By differentiating awareness of positive and negative consequences, the study refines the understanding of personal norm activation, while the Avoid–Shift–Improve framework translates these underlying decision-making processes into differentiated behavioral pathways, structuring low-carbon decisions across key travel domains (e.g., mobility, accommodation, and consumption practices) and varying levels of adoption (e.g., weak, moderate, and strong engagement). Finland provides a specific context for studying carbon-neutral travel behavior because it presents a sustainability paradox in which strong environmental commitments coexist with mobility and consumption patterns that may sustain high carbon emissions. The dissertation comprises a set of interconnected studies based on survey data collected independently in two survey rounds conducted between 2023 and 2025, involving 951 university students. Young adults constitute an analytically significant group because their travel practices are still forming, while their long-term mobility and consumption patterns will substantially influence the future carbon trajectory of tourism. The analysis employs quantitative methods and is complemented by conceptual and theory-led qualitative data analysis. The dissertation contributes to tourism studies and tourism geography by advancing a theoretically informed and empirically grounded understanding of the transition to carbon-neutral tourism. The novelty of the study lies in its demand-side analytical focus and in the integration of multiple behavioral frameworks to provide a more comprehensive explanation of carbon-neutral tourism behavior. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that is situated within tourism geography, particularly research on tourism mobility, travel consumption, and socio-spatial behavior, and informed by behavioral psychology and sustainability research, it confirms that low-carbon travel behavior cannot be reduced to individual attitudes or intentions alone. Further on, it suggests that low-carbon behavior should be viewed in relation to social norms, awareness of the benefits of low-carbon actions, attribution of responsibility, and the specific social and structural contexts that influence travel choices. The findings indicate that moving toward carbon-neutral tourism requires collective effort across travelers, industry stakeholders, and governing bodies at multiple levels, with all playing interconnected roles. By treating carbon-neutral tourism as a demand-side perspective, the study provides a foundation for more detailed analyses of behavioral change across the social and spatial dimensions of tourism.
Peatlands are important ecosystems that support biodiversity, regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs) and flooding, and help to purify water. In Finland, however, more than 50 % of peatlands have been drained to support forestry, agriculture, and peat extraction. These activities have reduced peatland biodiversity, increased GHG emissions, and altered peatland hydrology, resulting in widespread peatland ecosystem degradation. Consequently, large-scale restoration efforts have been initiated to mitigate these impacts and restore peatland functioning. As restoration progresses, regular monitoring of peatland biodiversity, GHG fluxes, and the water table (WT) is needed to track peatland conditions over time. One approach to monitoring peatlands is field-based observation. However, this method is constrained by high costs, limited accessibility, and restricted spatial coverage. To address these limitations, this research explores the use of geospatial environmental and remote sensing (RS) data, combined with statistical modelling, as an alternative means to support peatland monitoring. First, environmental data were used to analyse whether different restoration and climate change scenarios affect the national-scale distribution of potential habitats for red-listed peatland plant species in Finland. Second, environmental data and RS data (Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery) were compared and combined to detect national-scale patterns of potential peatland GHG sinks and sources and to evaluate which data sources provided better predictive performance. Third, environmental data were used to improve RS-based peatland WT models in three study areas ranging from 18 to 175 ha. Environmental data were able to predict the potential habitats of peatland red-listed plant species at the national scale. Drainage and climate variables were the most important predictors. Model projections indicated that climate warming will reduce potential suitable habitats for many red-listed species, especially in the northern and middle boreal zones. However, restoration increased the amount of potential suitable habitat, reduced habitat loss, and moderated future northward shifts in species distributions. The benefits of restoration were strongest under mild climate scenarios and gradually weakened towards the end of the twenty-first century under severe warming. Although the models performed well, future studies concerning the interaction between restoration and climate change should include ecological constraints such as dispersal and species interactions to improve the realism of long-term predictions. In detecting potential GHG sinks and sources, models combining both environmental and RS data performed best, while RS-only models had the lowest accuracy. Maps generated from environmental data alone and those from the combined dataset showed similar patterns, whereas RS-only maps displayed some differences in spatial extent. These results suggest that RS data alone are not sufficient for reliable national-scale GHG predictions and that integrating environmental and RS data is necessary to obtain accurate and realistic estimates of potential peatland GHG sink–source distributions. At the local scale, combining RS and environmental data improved peatland WT models, both spatially and across seasons. In patterned northern boreal aapa mires, the topographic wetness index and topographic position index were important for explaining spatial WT variation. In a southern boreal drained peatland forest site, canopy height played a larger role in WT dynamics, especially across different management treatments. Uncrewed aerial vehicle data offered very high-resolution information that captured microtopography and vegetation patterns, while Sentinel-2 data allowed repeated seasonal monitoring. These results demonstrate that multi-source RS, combined with environmental variables, can support efficient peatland WT monitoring. Overall, this thesis shows that environmental and RS data can be used to monitor peatland red-listed species, GHG, and WT dynamics. The usefulness of environmental and RS data depends on the object being studied, the spatial scale, and site conditions, but together they provide a reliable way to observe peatland condition beyond what field measurements alone can capture. As more field data become available, and RS techniques continue to develop, these approaches will become increasingly valuable for supporting peatland conservation, restoration planning, and long-term monitoring.
Environmental sustainability has become a widely institutionalised goal across governance levels and policy domains, yet tourism continues to pose challenges for substantive transformation. As a sector characterised by high mobility, carbon intensity, and dispersed responsibility, tourism highlights the limits of sustainability frameworks under conditions of continued growth. This dissertation examines how tourism governance manages tensions between sustainability commitments and tourism development through spatial, institutional, and temporal practices. Its central question asks how tourism governance institutions use legitimacy-seeking strategies to manage contradictions between sustainability commitments and growth imperatives. Three subsidiary questions address how institutional constraints limit substantive environmen- tal outcomes in protected area tourism, how sustainability policies are translated into practices that accommodate growth objectives, and how temporal policy frameworks sustain legitimacy while deferring structural change. Empirically, the research focuses on Finnish protected area governance and sustainable tourism policymaking, drawing on an analytical framework grounded in New Institutional theory, temporal theory, and in environmental policy. The first two articles analyse how platformisation, corporatisation, and governance re-entrenchment have positioned tourism as an organisational necessity rather than a supplementary activity within protected areas. The third article examines temporal-scalar tensions within protected area governance. The fourth traces sustainability discourse across governance scales, from European Union frameworks through national and regional strategies to desti- nation-level implementation. Taken together, the articles show how institutional and temporal mechanisms work across different governance settings to stabilise growth-ori- ented trajectories while limiting substantive transformation. In Articles III and IV, temporal framings emerge as mechanisms for legitimising sustainability policy: environ- mental solutions are projected into the future while growth-oriented practices persist in the present. The future thus emerges as both an analytical lens and a political resource. The dissertation aims to make three theoretical contributions to tourism geography. First, it suggests that institutional limits can be understood as structural features of governance architectures that accommodate, rather than resolve, underlying contradic- tions. Second, it develops temporality as a legitimacy-preserving mechanism enabling the ongoing deferral of transformative change. Third, it conceptualises these dynamics as structured unsustainability, a condition in which symbolic compliance, procedural alignment, and temporal displacement sustain institutional continuity beneath the language of transition. In doing so, the study explains why sustainability governance in tourism systematically yields limited transformation through structural design rather than oversight.
This essay explores how qualitative fieldwork in regenerative tourism research can be approached to foster more impactful and ethical scholarship. Arguing that regenerative tourism research must itself be transformative and align with regenerative thinking, the essay identifies three key principles for fieldwork: participatory, relational, and reflective. Participatory fieldwork fosters co-creation and empowers local communities, while relational approaches decentre the human and acknowledge the agency of more-than-human actors. Reflective practice, in turn, highlights the importance of researcher positionality, emotional labour, and the political nature of the field. As the provided examples demonstrate, these principles are already evident in emerging empirical studies that examine tourism through the lens of regenerative tourism.
Global climate warming has resulted in the circumpolar degradation of palsa mires. While climate is a key driver of palsa distribution and stability, local factors such as vegetation also influence permafrost dynamics. However, studies on the effects of vegetation on active layer thickness (ALT) in palsas remain limited. To address the logistical constraints of long-term annual monitoring, we drew on 13 years of field course data on ALT and vegetation height from a palsa mire in northwestern Finland. Specifically, we explored: (i) the occurrence of a temporal thickening trend in ALT, (ii) the influence of vegetation height on ALT, and (iii) the correlation between ALT and climate variables. Results revealed a complex relationship between ALT, climate, and vegetation height, which was measured at two distinct vegetation types: moss, lichen, and dwarf shrub-dominated low vegetation and shrub-dominated tall vegetation. No statistically significant long-term trends in ALT were detected, but a slight deepening was observed under both low (0.28 cm a-¹) and tall (0.49 cm a-¹) vegetation. Significant correlations (p < 0.05) between ALT and climate variables were found only at tall vegetation patches, specifically with snow depth. While not statistically significant, ALT showed positive correlations with several snow-related variables and summer air temperatures, and negative relationships with snow cover onset, autumn precipitation, and winter wind speed. ALT was statistically significantly thicker under low vegetation compared to tall vegetation. During thaw season, shrubs may reduce the thickening of the active layer by providing shade and increasing evapotranspiration, compared to low vegetation patches. These findings highlight the complex interplay between climate, vegetation, and ALT in palsas, emphasizing the need for long-term monitoring to better understand permafrost degradation patterns and changes in palsa mires. Recurring annual field courses provide an approach with educational benefits for collecting scientifically valid ALT observations.
In the field, geographers engage directly with natural and human environments. In this discussion article, I argue that the discipline of geography fundamentally relies on fieldwork in research, teaching, and collaboration. I defend the value of field data in an era of abundant digital data, as modern geography needs both. I discuss why and how fieldwork is essential for producing, learning, and sharing scientific knowledge, illustrating this with recent examples from physical geography. In many ways, fieldwork forms the foundation of geographic knowledge because 1) field observations and explorations reveal what questions to investigate, not just what to measure 2) fieldwork bridges abstract concepts and reality, and 3) sharing field data enables collecting spatially extensive, temporally extensive, and scientifically comprehensive knowledge that would not otherwise exist. While these points may appear self-evident to many, this article serves as a reminder for those moments when the value of fieldwork is questioned, and the required time, money, and effort appear excessive for collecting field data.
Geodiversity is gaining recognition in research and is an important addition to holistic ways of understanding and studying nature. However, there is a lack of fine-scale methods to observe and quantify fine-scale geodiversity. This thesis aims to improve our understanding of fine-scale geodiversity in northern environments. First, I explore how fine-scale geodiversity can be observed through geofeatures that are elements of geodiversity. Further, I examine how fine-scale geodiversity varies, and how it can be quantified. Second, I examine how fine-scale geodiversity is connected to biodiversity, explicitly to the species richness of vascular plants, bryophytes, and lichens, in Boreal-Arctic heath ecosystems. Third, I study the impact of ski tourism–related land use on fine-scale geodiversity in Finnish Lapland. Finally, I aim to identify what practitioners can get from information on fine-scale geodiversity and how it can be used in nature conservation and land management. The thesis includes three articles that apply ecological methods to geodiversity research. I present a new field method for collecting fine-scale geodiversity data from Boreal-Arctic environments. I introduce this method, which produces a quantitative measure of georichness, i.e. the number of distinct geofeatures (geological, geomorphological, and hydrological features), but also qualitative information about the identities of geofeatures in a study plot (5, 10, and 25 m radii). Fine-scale geodiversity provides unique knowledge of the abiotic environment, geofeatures, and their interplay with biodiversity, and it can be assessed in both undisturbed and human-impacted locations. This thesis reveals that greater georichness indicates greater species richness of vascular plants, bryophytes, and lichens in continuous mountain heaths and tundra. However, this relationship is context-dependent, with other factors playing a larger role in some areas. I also present results from Finnish Lapland ski resorts that revealed geodiversity tends to be lower in areas that are heavily impacted by land use. In addition, observed geofeatures differed between areas of low, medium, and high land use intensity, suggesting geodiversity’s vulnerability to human disturbance. To conclude, the fine-scale geodiversity method can be used to gather comprehensive information about geodiversity and it can be implemented in nature monitoring and evaluations to support land use planning and conservation.
Research ethics teach us how to protect the people we portray in our studies. Yet while researchers hold the power to harm participants through what they write, they are also vulnerable in the writing process itself. In this autoethnographic piece, I revisit six moments from my recent fieldwork in Iran and reflect on the affective and moral tensions I experienced while turning lived encounters into academic arguments. Focusing on research conducted within an authoritarian theocratic system, I describe the moral weight involved in portraying state officials and religious authorities. I also reflect the tensions I felt as a male feminist researcher writing about women’s lives and gender justice in a patriarchal context. By foregrounding the writing phase, this paper argues that vulnerability does not end with fieldwork but intensifies when interpretation becomes public and consequential.
Interdisciplinary research approaches are critical to understanding the profound shifts in glacial and periglacial environments due to climate change. However, conducting fieldwork in these geographies often involves navigating the complexities of situated narratives, traditionally dominated by masculinist and geoscience-centered approaches. In this commentary, using feminist glaciology as a lens for understanding the socio-environmental dynamics within the cryosphere, we reflect on the significance of interdisciplinary and cross-boundary research. Drawing from three different yet interconnected fieldwork experiences—nature-based tourism research in Patagonia, geophysical surveys in High Mountain Asia, and engaging with the green transition and indigenous perspectives in the European Arctic—we explore the challenges and solutions of doing research in these extreme environments while reflecting on positionality, knowledge production, and the need for diverse perspectives in the climate crisis.
Ship-time fieldwork on expedition cruise ships is peculiar as the field never truly ends. Every moment spent onboard can potentially become valuable data, and the field can spatially expand far beyond the ship itself during landings and activities ashore. Drawing from two fieldwork campaigns at sea, in the Arctic, this paper explores how time and space are continuously changing in ship-time research, stretching and contracting into what is referred to as an elastic field. Temporal elasticity emerges from the disjunction between ship schedules, shifting time zones, and natural Arctic cycles like midnight sun. Spatial elasticity, meanwhile, arises from the placelessness of the vessel, the fleeting nature of landings, and the folding of research into private and shared spaces. Elasticity, thus, raises questions about positionality, ethics, and fatigue. By highlighting this elasticity, the paper invites scholars to rethink how fieldwork might be practiced, narrated, and theorized in contexts where movement is intrinsic to the research encounter.
Ecosystems provide us with countless benefits, such as material resources, regulation of environmental processes, and opportunities for recreation. These benefits, known as ecosystem services (ES), support our daily welfare and well-being. ES arise from ecological, sociocultural, and economic interactions, and are influenced by both ecosystems’ capacity to provide services and society’s demand for them. ES are unevenly distributed across space, and their supply and demand change over time. Understanding the patterns of ES provision and consumption facilitates the evaluation of their sustainable use. Therefore, comprehensive assessments of ES production and consumption across spatial and temporal scales are essential to deepen our understanding of the ES concept and its role in natural resource management. In this thesis, I exemplify the use of the ES framework by assessing the spatial and temporal patterns of ES potential, supply, and demand. Overall, I demonstrate how to select and interpret indicators of ES potential, supply, and demand and address them using spatial and statistical methods. I study the provisioning services of forests (wood resources) and the cultural services provided by urban and peri-urban areas through three separate case studies. Each article examines ES aspects across distinct scales, ranging from continental to local. Two articles are at the European level, one of which also includes a temporal scale, and one is at the urban level. The results regarding wood ES show that the potential, supply, and demand for wood have all increased across Europe. Compared to demand, Europe has a substantial supply surplus, and the analysis of mismatches between the supply and demand indicates that, on average, Europeans have good spatial accessibility to wood resources. However, the growing trend of exploiting wood ES might affect the state of forest ecosystems and their capacity to provide high-quality ES other than wood. The findings regarding cultural ES suggest that subjective spatial characteristics of green spaces, such as perceived accessibility, play a bigger role in more frequent interactions with nature than the biophysical features of these spaces or the consumption of cultural ES itself. This indicates that urban residents demand better access to green spaces in order to fully enjoy and recognize the capacity of urban ecosystems to deliver high-quality cultural ES within close proximity to their homes. My thesis exemplifies the application of the ES framework in ES mapping, incorporates ES spatial flow into supply and demand mismatch evaluation, and highlights the importance of subjective human needs and perceptions regarding ES demand as vital parts of the ES framework. The evaluation of the distribution and trends in the potential, supply, and demand of the provisioning ES of wood, alongside the produced maps, supports resource monitoring of European forests. The same applies to the maps of wood ES supply–demand mismatches, which integrate the ES spatial flow through spatial accessibility analysis. These results can inform European forest management strategies, providing spatial insights into wood potential, supply, and demand, and their mismatches. Furthermore, the evaluation of the characteristics of green spaces’ use patterns emphasizes the importance of spatial perceptions in interactions with urban and peri-urban nature. This information can be communicated to decision-makers in the studied cities and used to enhance access to green spaces that provide vital cultural ES for urban populations.
Fieldwork has long been a cornerstone of geographical research, and field courses have likewise served as an essential means of engaging with the key issues that define the discipline, both in physical and human geography. In human geography field courses, students learn to use qualitative methods such as interviews and participant observation among people. In this intervention paper I discuss what practical challenges the COVID-19 pandemic posed to the organisation of a field course in human geography in the University of Oulu in Finland, during spring 2020. The key questions and challenges back then were how the main idea of leaving the university classrooms and going among the people to learn geography was even possible at the same time when governments around the globe strongly advised people to stay home and avoid human connections. Regardless of the challenges, the field course was organised. In the course, students managed to come up with creative solutions to achieve the course's learning goals and learn to use qualitative methods in practice. The course required the redefinition for the concept of ‘field’, which at the same time challenged geography’s disciplinary history.
Tourism is widely recognized for its economic and developmental potential, but its capacity to facilitate socio-political transformation, particularly in authoritarian and theocratic contexts, remains relatively underexamined. This thesis focuses on the role of tourism in such transformation, analyzing how it interacts with state ideology that regulates bodily autonomy, mobility, gender roles, and public behavior. In these settings, tourism can create subtle spaces for negotiation, adaptation, and the quiet reordering of norms. This study examines how tourism contributes to socio-political, cultural, and gendered transformations through the frameworks of evolutionary economic geography and resilience thinking. The analysis is based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Qeshm and Hormuz islands in Iran, utilizing participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Findings reveal that tourism can reconfigure both vertical (state–society) and horizontal (intra-community) power relations. Tourism helps women and youth to gain visibility, economic independence, and new forms of social legitimacy by creating gray zones where social norms can be contested without direct confrontation. Local inhabitants, particularly women, use the emergence of tourism as tool for direct income, reclaim public space, and challenge traditional gender power relations. The study demonstrates that resilience in these settings involves not only adaptation but also transformation, enabling communities to shape new socio-economic and cultural equilibria. The thesis offers several theoretical contributions. It aims to advance evolutionary economic geography by proposing path inclusivity as a critical dimension of regional development. By focusing on transformative resilience, this thesis seeks to reframe resilience as a political force capable of reshaping both ideological constraints and social hierarchies. The study also aims to expand cultural resilience discourse, and at the same time conceptualizes co-created authenticity to describe how cultural expressions emerge through dialogical interaction between locals and tourists. The research, therefore, positions tourism as a space of social transformation and contributes to broader debates on power, culture, and agency by showing how tourism-induced change, though incremental and uneven, can erode ideological controls and support gradual, culturally grounded shifts toward gender equality and social change.
As the climate crisis is worsening, we have witnessed a re-emergence of the authoritarian and racist far-right. The interdisciplinary scholarship on political ecologies of the far-right has shown that the far-right has found an array of different responses to the global ecological crisis. The far-right obstructs climate politics by disputing humans’ role in causing it and proposes border walls in the name of environmental protection of the ‘homeland’. Whilst studies have made a significant contribution to our understanding of the far-right’s role in the Anthropocene, the questions of race and racism have become the elephant in the room for a significant part of the scholarship. The role of race as an analytical focus is understudied and underconceptualised, and racism is either treated as ancillary to nationalism or as something that will happen in the fascist future. Building on theories on race and space and the racial Anthropocene, this doctoral dissertation advances research on the political ecologies of the far-right by investigating how the far-right reproduces and shapes racial ideologies and structures that underpin the climate crisis. In doing so, the dissertation analyses two far-right groups, the Finns Party in Finland and the Izborskii Club in Russia. Consisting of three independent research articles and a synopsis, this doctoral dissertation analyses how race is produced in their ecological and climate change-related politics by focusing on whiteness and fossil imperialism (Article I), racial ecologies (Article II), and climate obstruction and coloniality (Article III). By focusing on racism in the study of three examples of the far-right’s engagement with climate change and the environment, the doctoral thesis shows that through racist ecologies, such as environmental determinism and populationism, the far-right obstructs climate policies and reproduces the meaning of race by naturalising the uneven impacts of the climate crisis as an outcome of racial difference.
This dissertation is situated at the intersection of geography, education and youth studies. It examines the transitional stage between lower and upper secondary education among 15–16-year-old young people in northern Finland. The decisions made during this stage are increasingly consequential in youth educational paths. In Finland, like elsewhere, youth education has become a central cog in the push to keep up with global competition and knowledge-based economization. However, concerns have been voiced over increasing spatial inequalities in and between different Finnish regions in terms of educational accessibility and educational attainment levels. To address the complexity of these spatial dynamics and tensions, this inquiry approaches youth educational paths as spaces of education. Drawing on relational theories of space and particularly the work of Doreen Massey, these spaces are considered as dynamically constituted across multiple sites and scales. The material used in the study comprises state education policy documents as well as materials generated during school visits in urban and rural northern Finland in 2019, including interviews with young people and ethnographic fieldnotes. The three sub-studies included in the dissertation explore how spaces are constituted at the intersection of policy, everyday life, and emotion. The study shows how the spaces of educational paths are constituted through state policies that dictate what kind of education is available and where. It brings to the fore how young people in northern and sparsely habited regions often face the expectation to be mobile when navigating their educational choices. The study also shows how these spatialities extend from policy spatialities to relations with and between different places at the site of young people’s everyday life. The study also highlights how spaces of youth educational paths entwine with emotions, discussing how the entwined emotional and spatial dimensions of youth educational paths entail a strong orientation toward futures – and how these futures pertain to imaginations about the state, northern regions as well as young people. This dissertation contributes to the rethinking of spaces of education via a multi-sited and multi-scalar approach that enables a nuanced understanding of the spatialities of youth educational paths. The study underlines that youth educational paths are not merely linear transitions from one educational stage to another but involve complex and dynamic spatialities at the nexus of policy, everyday life, and emotion. Such a spatially attuned reading highlights how spaces of youth educational paths and related inequalities are not fixed or uniform but are actively produced and thus open to change.
Seasonal snow and ice play a key role in the hydrological regimes of Arctic and sub-Arctic river catchments that differentiate them from their lower latitude counterparts. Against a backdrop of assumed reduced spring flooding due to ongoing Arctic warming resulting in shorter winters with less snowfall, we examine the prevailing conditions that led to spring-melt flooding, its impact and mitigation management strategies across Northern Ostrobothnia in April 2024. We find that sustained freezing temperatures in early 2024, combined with thicker than average snowpack in March, preconditioned the region’s catchments to two episodes of flooding driven by abrupt warm events and widespread snowmelt in early March and April. Due to their predominantly shallow, east to west long-profiles, the region’s rivers received large fluxes of snowmelt runoff simultaneously along their entire courses, responding rapidly with rising levels and discharge. Thick river ice formed during the colder than average winter, causing ice jams at constricting pinch-points including bridges, dams and where rivers naturally shallowed or narrowed, leading to backup and flooding. Numerous effective civil interventions – including the release of discharge into managed agricultural areas – prevented extensive flood damage and major disruption to infrastructure other than temporary closure of some roads. We conclude that the event was pragmatically managed, precluding significant material damage and disruption. However, projected long-term climate scenarios indicating increased temperature fluctuations and extreme precipitation – including snowfall – events associated with intense warm air intrusions, coupled with potential meter-scale relative sea- and base-level rise could act in consort to increase the region’s winter and spring flood risk, rather than mitigate it.
The concept of geodiversity is gaining recognition in many scientific fields, as well as in practical applications such as conservation and tourism. Although the importance of geodiversity is now widely accepted, its precise definition, scope and broader applicability continue to be debated and discussed. In this paper, we explore the variety of viewpoints that relate to geodiversity and scrutinize the importance of geodiversity for different audiences. These viewpoints include definitions, assessment, research fields, terminology and its applications. To help explore and convey the different viewpoints and values commonly attributed to geodiversity, we invoke the Rokua UNESCO Global Geopark in Finland as a specific case study. Finally, we present potential future directions for geodiversity research, including key knowledge gaps, and highlight the vulnerability of geodiversity to increasing human pressures that threaten its integrity and long-term sustainability.
As 21st Century anthropogenic carbon emissions increasingly perturb Earth’s atmospheric composition, an accessible understanding of how greenhouse gas driven climate change manifests on natural and human systems becomes crucial to public awareness. Here, we investigate the contemporary causes and consequences of global sea level rise (SLR), focusing on the impacts of coastal flooding on Morecambe Bay, Northwest England. We review and summarize current literature regarding terrestrial ice loss and ocean thermal expansion, delving into the uncertainties and assumptions. We define three SLR scenarios through to 2100 AD: 1) the Green Road (GR: 0.44m SLR), 2) Business as Standard (BS: 0.77m SLR), and 3) Impending Doom (ID: 1.55m SLR). We adjust these SLR scenarios for regional isostatic and gravitational effects, and map them to local flood projections for Morecambe Bay. Even under the most optimistic – GR – scenario, we find permanent flooding is inevitable by 2100, necessitating adaptation strategies. Under BS and ID scenarios, significant inundation of industrial and residential areas is projected, with permanent displacement of up to 15,000 homes and moderate to severe disruption to national transport networks, including the UK’s West Coast rail-link. Moreover, national power and industrial infrastructure at Heysham Nuclear Power Station and BAE Systems, Barrow would be impacted under our worst-case scenario. Directed mitigation and informed decision-making are crucial for minimizing economic and social impacts, emphasizing a need for public awareness of the future impacts of environmental change and its local manifestation.
Depression is, at its worst, a fatal disease and a significant factor threatening work ability. Recent studies have suggested physical activity as an effective treatment for depression. Scientific evidence on the beneficial association between physical activity and depressive symptoms is strong. Recently, studies have also highlighted the residential environment’s importance for both mental health and physical activity. Due to accelerating urbanisation, it is increasingly important to understand how our living environment affects our physical movement behaviour and mental health. This study’s aims were to I) compare the prevalence of depression symptoms in different countries, II) investigate how characteristics of the residential environment and physical activity are associated with depressive symptoms, and III) study how 24-hour movement behaviours (physical activity, sedentary time and sleep) are associated with depressive symptoms in urban and rural residents. The main data for the study were collected from individuals born in Northern Finland in 1966 when they were 46 years old (n=5,860). In addition, the first substudy utilised previously published research articles to compare the prevalence of depressive symptoms between different countries. The characteristics of the residential environment, based on the participants’ home coordinates, were examined using geographic information system methods. Physical activity was measured using both a questionnaire and accelerometer-based activity monitors that the participants wore for 2 weeks. Depressive symptoms were assessed in all studies based on the second version of the Beck Depression Inventory. The results indicated that depressive symptoms vary between countries. Higher urbanicity and population density of the residential environment were associated with a higher odds of more severe depressive symptoms, while higher greenness was associated with a lower odds of severe depressive symptoms. More time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity or sleep at the expense of light activity or sedentary behaviour within a 24-hour day was associated with lower depressive symptoms in those living in rural areas. According to this study’s results, preserving and increasing green spaces in urban planning and taking into account all the movement behaviours of the 24-hour day, for example in health care and physical activity recommendations, could be ways to decrease depressive symptoms at the population level. It is also important to consider the differences in movement behaviours between those living in urban and rural areas. Future research in longitudinal settings is needed to confirm causal relationships, in particular, between residential environment and depressive symptoms.
