Sun illuminated parts of a trail in the recreational outdoor area of Sveitsi in Hyvinkää, Southern Finland, on 16 October 2023. The Finnish government’s budget proposal for next year leaves Finland on track to fall short of both its biodiversity and climate goals, scientists told Helsingin Sanomat on Monday. (Antti Aimo-Koivisto – Lehtikuva)
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FINLAND will achieve neither its biodiversity nor climate targets if the government continues on the path taken in its budget draft for next year, experts stated to Helsingin Sanomat on Monday.
Markku Ollikainen, the chairperson of the Finnish Climate Change Panel, revealed to the newspaper that he is especially concerned about the coherence of climate policy decisions, estimating that neither the government programme nor the budget draft quite aligns with the long-term climate goals of Finland.
Many budgetary decisions, particularly in the transport sector, undermine the effort to combat the climate crisis, according to him.
The right-wing government is to lower the fuel tax, call off the raise in the distribution obligation for biofuels and slash funding for promoting the development of charging infrastructure for electric and gas-powered vehicles. While it declared after the budget session that it has agreed to invest 19.5 billion euros in developing the infrastructure, it is simultaneously removing a number of budgetary items related to the development effort, resulting in a drop in funding compared to this year.
The government will also scrap the subsidy offered to households switching from gas to oil heating, relieve municipalities of their obligation to draft a climate plan and withdraw funding for the planning process, and do away with the subsidy for promoting paludiculture on peatlands.
“It’s unfortunate that support is being removed from the best and most certain emission reduction that we know of in agriculture,” Ollikainen lamented to Helsingin Sanomat.
The decisions, he highlighted, are the first that increase emissions in the burden-sharing sector. Consisting of areas such as agriculture, construction and transport, the burden-sharing sector should see a reduction of at least 50 per cent – or 17.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents – in emissions from the level of 2005 by 2030, under a commitment made to the EU.
The Finnish Climate Change Panel has calculated that the target has slipped further out of reach due to the actions called off by the government.
“We had a deficit also due to the measures taken by [Prime Minister Sanna] Marin’s government. We weren’t quite on track to reach our target. The estimate was that we’d have to find at least a million tonnes worth of new emission reduction measures; now the need is about three million tonnes,” told Ollikainen.
He also expressed his disapproval with the government’s decision to continue subsidising domestic flights to regional airports: “From a climate perspective, it’s a waste of money and it increases emissions,” he summed up.
On the other hand, he commended the government for adopting the goal of capturing all carbon dioxide emissions from large industrial
Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
