Tiina Sanila-Aikio cannot remember a summer this warm. The months of midnight sun around Inari, in Finnish Lapland, have been hot and dry. Conifer needles on the branch tips are orange when they should be a deep green. The moss on the forest floor, usually swollen with water, has withered.
“I have spoken with many old reindeer herders who have never experienced the heat that we’ve had this summer. The sun keeps shining and it never rains,” says Sanila-Aikio, former president of the Finnish Sami parliament.
The boreal forests here in the Sami homeland take so long to grow that even small, stunted trees are often hundreds of years old. It is part of the Taiga — meaning “land of the little sticks” in Russian — that stretches around the far northern hemisphere through Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska, and Canada.
It is these forests that helped underpin the credibility of the most ambitious carbon-neutrality target in the developed world: Finland’s commitment to be carbon neutral by 2035.
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