This article critically examines the ways in which transport and mobility sustainability regulation causes transport poverty and what can be done to reduce this impact in the Finnish Arctic region (Lapland). It explores how regulatory changes under the European Union’s Green Deal policy may either mitigate or exacerbate transport poverty in this sparsely populated area. Drawing on a comprehensive review of relevant EU and Finnish legislation, the article identifies key legal factors that influence accessibility, affordability, and reliability of transport. These factors are examined in the context of Lapland’s unique characteristics, including its low population density and high dependence on private cars. The analysis reveals that most regulatory measures – except for the Social Climate Fund – are likely to worsen transport poverty for vulnerable groups in Lapland. While the Social Climate Fund may offer short-term relief, it is not sufficient on its own to provide a sustainable long-term solution. To promote a fair and inclusive transition to sustainable transport, the article recommends that Member States prioritise the use of Social Climate Fund resources in remote areas to support alternative transport options such as mobility-on-demand and shared mobility services. While financial support or fiscal incentives for purchase of EV are possible, the prices of EV may still turn out to be too high for low-income households and many residents affected by transport poverty are likely to remain unable to afford electric vehicles in the near term. Despite this, only the minimum necessary should be allocated to direct income support, as it risks prolonging reliance on fossil fuels. The findings underscore the need for comprehensive strategies that effectively address the distinct challenges faced by vulnerable populations in remote regions, ensuring an equitable transition to sustainable transport.

Understanding how human actions and environmental change affect water resources is crucial for addressing complex water management issues. The scientific tools that can produce the necessary information are ecological indicators, referring to measurable properties of the ecosystem state; environmental monitoring, the data collection process that is required to evaluate the progress towards reaching water management goals; mathematical models, linking human disturbances with the ecosystem state to predict environmental impacts; and scenarios, assisting in long-term management and policy implementation. Paradoxically, despite the rapid generation of data, evolving scientific understanding, and recent advancements in systems modeling, there is a striking imbalance between knowledge production and knowledge utilization in decision-making. In this paper, we examine the role and potential capacity of scientific tools in guiding governmental decision-making processes and identify the most critical disparities between water management, policy, law, and science. We demonstrate how the complex, uncertain, and gradually evolving nature of scientific knowledge might not always fit aptly to the legislative and policy processes and structures. We contend that the solution towards increased understanding of socio-ecological systems and reduced uncertainty lies in strengthening the connections between water management theory and practice, among the scientific tools themselves, among different stakeholders, and among the social, economic, and ecological facets of water quality management, law, and policy. We conclude by tying in three knowledge-exchange strategies, namely - adaptive management, Driver-Pressure-Status-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework, and participatory modeling - that offer complementary perspectives to bridge the gap between science and policy.

Collaborative governance is considered effective in environmental problem solving. However, it is not always successful in delivering benefits. In Finland, collaborative ‘watershed visions’ are gaining popularity as a way to advance holistic water management. Watershed visions bring the public, private, and civil society actors across sectors together to agree on a desired future for a river basin and to plan steps for achieving it. The capability of watershed visions to lead to positive environmental impacts is, however, highly uncertain. We applied a Theory of Change approach to conceptualize an outcome-oriented impact pathway for the watershed visions to enhance the understanding of their possibilities to achieve their desired long-term impacts. Using empirical material, we structured a watershed vision process into an impact pathway of nine phases necessary for achieving the desired future. From each phase, we identified assumptions suggesting why and under what conditions the impact pathway successfully works, risks to its realization, and key uncertainties inherent to the risks. Focusing on the uncertainties, we developed a tool for ex-ante, interim, and ex-post evaluation of the watershed visions. We suggest that a longitudinal Theory of Change is a useful tool for addressing change and managing uncertainty in any collaborative process with long-term aims, and that applying this tool can increase the success of collaborative governance.

This paper assesses the extent to which the justice concerns of local stakeholders in the Arctic region of Finland are reflected in recent legal reforms. The reforms concern the Mining Act, the Act on a Mined Minerals Tax, the Nature Conservation Act, the Environmental Damages Fund, and the Act on the Sámi Parliament. The assessment is made from the perspectives of distributive, procedural, recognition, and intergenerational justice. We identified the justice concerns by conducting 21 interviews and a workshop, after which we analysed the legal reforms and discussed whether they reflected the justice concerns expressed by local stakeholders. We concluded that most of the justice concerns had been addressed, but only to a certain extent. Still, the most fundamental features of the governance of mining activities have not changed. By its very nature, the Finnish system of mineral ownership has remained a claim system, albeit not an entirely pure one. The reforms were not designed to limit the total volume of mining activities, and the mineral industry, backed by the EU and national policies, is likely to grow in the region. The most important legal change concerns the position of the municipal council. Today, a local land use plan is a precondition for granting a mining permit. The national Parliament did not approve a government proposal to reform the Sámi Parliament Act, which was a significant failure in recognition justice.

Land-use conflicts can be costly and time-consuming and cause social burden to all parties. In this study, we developed an approach for mapping synergy and conflict potential between land uses and tested it on nature protection, nature-based tourism, forestry and mining. First, we calculated the ecological and socio-cultural values for the study area, and further the economic values related to forestry and mining. Second, we conducted an integrated spatial assessment of these values and used it jointly with a variant of a value compatibility analysis to locate areas with possible synergistic and conflicting land uses. This study was carried out in Finnish Lapland where land use conflicts have occurred due to the need to develop forestry and mining in areas that are also important for nature-based tourism. The method operated well as it identified sites with ongoing land-use disputes. Synergy potential between biodiversity and socio-cultural values was identified in protected areas and other sites of natural beauty, and conflict potential concerning forestry near tourist resorts and concerning mining at proposed mining project sites. The developed framework can assist in locating sites that may need proactive measurements to avoid conflicts, and sites that would benefit from multi-purpose management thereby supporting sustainable and adaptive land-use planning.

This paper offers an approach to long-term planning for an industrial sector that is sensitive to climate change, the state of adjacent natural environments and the associated socioeconomic developments. The paper combines exploratory and target-seeking scenarios to understand the future challenges of nature-based blue tourism under alternative global futures, and to develop sequences of actions to accomplish the best achievable future outcome for blue tourism at a local scale. We detail a bottom-up approach to scenario development for tourism, with local stakeholders developing local scenarios within the boundaries provided by the locally extended Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), widely used in climate research. As a demonstration of the approach, a group of invited stakeholders developed locally extended scenario narratives and the adaptation plans for blue tourism for coastal areas surrounding the Helsinki metropolitan area in Finland. The co-creation process yielded several recommendations for immediate action concerning protection of the coastal environments, land use planning, internal communication with the sector and coordinated monitoring of economic, ecological, social and cultural sustainability indicators. The approach offers a way forward for systematically assessing the future risks and opportunities that a changing environment and society create for blue tourism.

The achievement of a radical global reduction of greenhouse gases requires a legal-institutional setting capable of facilitating such a transition on a wide range of renewable technologies. This paper identifies and critically evaluates the key institutional, procedural and substantive legal mechanisms facilitating or preventing sustainable production of blue renewable energy with Finland as a case study country. The focus is on offshore wind power and hydropower. While we approach energy transition from the perspective of an EU member state, we simultaneously shed light on the relevant parts of the EU legal framework that significantly affect national legal frameworks.

This paper highlights the shortcomings of the mainstream utility economic approach to the private law pillar of ‘property’ in fostering socially desirable developments, such as sustainability, important in the context of the circular economy (CE). In this exercise, we take the examples of two prominent private law regimes, namely intellectual property and property laws. We shed light over specific issues related inter alia to acts of repairing, reusing and leasing, where in particular these selected private law fields are currently failing to provide the incentives needed for directing innovations and businesses towards more sustainable types of model. We argue that this mainstream utility approach to property has become untenable in a world where the impact of both tangible and intellectual property law frameworks on ecological integrity should actually be prioritized. As we then show, legal practices that reflect more social planning types of theory might better facilitate a smoother and swifter transition towards the CE. This switch would also better align private law regimes with some of the noble goals already included in public areas of law, that way putting the two frameworks more in harmony towards achieving a European sustainable CE.

The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social–ecological–technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental change. Furthermore, they do not yet possess the legitimacy or capacity needed to address disparities between the winners and losers from change. These emergent forms of adaptive governance appear to be particularly effective in managing complexity. We explore governance and SETs as coevolving complex systems, focusing on legal systems to understand the potential pathways and obstacles to equitable adaptation. We explore how governments may facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance and promote legitimacy in both the process of governance despite the involvement of nonstate actors, and its adherence to democratic values of equity and justice. To manage the contextual nature of the results of change in complex systems, we propose the establishment of long-term study initiatives for the coproduction of knowledge, to accelerate learning and synergize interactions between science and governance and to foster public science and epistemic communities dedicated to navigating transitions to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures.

Environmental and conservation decisions are often complex, which results in complexity also in policy assessments. Conservation decisions have implications for different stakeholders and typically draw on multidisciplinary knowledge bases, incorporating natural, physical and social sciences, politics and ethics. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a potentially important tool for supporting conservation policy decisions. This article reports a spatially referenced MCDA of policy instrument scenarios for conserving forest biodiversity in Southwestern Finland. The effects of the realistic policy instruments designed in dialogue with stakeholders included voluntary permanent conservation, enforced spatially concentrated permanent conservation, voluntary permanent conservation with active nature management, and voluntary temporary conservation. These instruments were compared by combining forest-owner survey, MCDA and ex ante impact evaluation. The main objective was to find the forest biodiversity conservation instrument that would produce the highest total benefit. The effects of the different instruments were evaluated with ecological, economic, social, and institutional criteria after a 20-year time period. The results showed minor differences between the instruments, with voluntary permanent and voluntary temporary conservation producing the largest total benefit. Despite the small differences, the analysis was robust in showing that voluntary instruments were more favourable than enforced permanent conservation.

•Social issues have ever-increasing importance in mining industry.•SLO and CSR have similar aims from slightly different angles.•Arranging communication between communities and companies should be obligatory.•Binding agreements between companies and communities demand clear definitions.

The development of mining and other resource-based industries are among key drivers of economic development in the Arctic. The fragile environment and the presence of nature-based livelihoods and indigenous communities pose challenges for mining development. Mining operations should be optimized so that the profitability is maintained in changing market conditions and to meet increasing societal and environmental demands. In this study we present the current understanding on the interplay between mining and the surrounding socio-ecological systems in the Arctic region. The existing academic literature on the Arctic region was reviewed, covering 127 peer-reviewed publications since 2000. We investigated the mining activities from four perspectives examining: 1) environmental, 2) economic, 3) social and 4) legal dimensions, covering three life-cycle stages: 1) pre-mining, 2) mining, and 3) post-mining. The publications on the environmental and economic aspects focused principally on the impacts of mining, whereas social and legal publications discussed the interaction between people and their rights and ways of controlling their environment. Besides the need for more balanced research between different life-cycle stages we uncovered five research gaps concerning the knowledge base needed to increase the sustainability of Arctic mining: 1) impacts and adaptation to climate change, 2) monitoring the sustainability of mining using standardized indicators, 3) holistic economic assessment of mining, 4) social sustainability and conflict management, and 5) mechanisms that mitigate or compensate for the adverse effects of mining on biodiversity.

This article analyses the legal adaptive capacity for increasing sustainable fish aquaculture production in EU-Finland. Currently, fish aquaculture is driven by increasing global demand of fish, declining natural fisheries, food security and blue growth policies. At the same time, environmental policies such as the EU Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive set tightening legal-ecological requirements for the industry's nutrient emissions. Against this background, the success of blue growth policies related to aquaculture – and the hope of reconciling competing interests at sea – boil down to measures available for dealing with excess nutrients. In line with the mitigation hierarchy, the article establishes four alternative pathways for the fish aquaculture industry to grow without increasing its environmental nutrient footprint significantly, and evaluates the legal adaptive capacity and the legal risks attached to these pathways.

The Arctic is one of the largest regions on the globe, and is regarded as a vast storehouse of potential resources, including minerals. Both mining and tourism are rapidly growing economic sectors in the region. While the variety of tourism activities supported and offered is extensive, all of these activities are essentially forms of nature-based tourism. Land-use conflicts between mining and tourism are likely to emerge when a new mine is opened close to a tourist area, because mining activities may dramatically change the landscape, which is essential for tourism. The impact greatly depends on the location of mining facilities, the physical size of the mining project, the mining processes used, logistics and how well the image of the mine and its end product fits in with the image of the tourist destination. While tourism and the mining industry may benefit from each other, the relationship between a mine and tourism is often asymmetrically counterproductive; where such a relationship exists, a need for regulation arises. In this article, we assess the legal means available for resolving conflicts between the mining and tourism industries and discuss possibilities to improve these means. The two key regulatory instruments for governing such conflicts are land-use planning and mining permit processes. We illustrate the nature of conflicts and various decision-making procedures with reference to the Finnish legal framework and a case study on an ongoing mining project in the town of Kolari.

Mining and mineral exploration activities have increased notably in Finland during the last 20 years. This has created challenges in land use planning in the municipalities were the activities are intense, and affects the social licence of the industry to operate. The aim of our research is to contribute in improving the pro-activity in land use related decision-making and strengthening the prerequisites in gaining a social license to operate. This is done by investigating 1) the potential future overlap of different land use types (such as exploration, mining, forestry, reindeer herding, and tourism and recreation), 2) the dialogue mechanisms between interested parties, and 3) the opportunities and limitations that legal frameworks provide for adaptive decision-making. Our multidisciplinary approach enables in gaining a deep understanding on how to reconcile different interests on mining intensive areas.