Canadian Biomass • Winter 2025 • Finland shares success stories

Government decision makers, biomass and bioenergy industry experts, investors, scientists and researchers, flocked to Ottawa by the hundreds to take part in the Scaling Up Bio 2024 Conference, which took place this past November at the Fairmont Château Laurier.

The keynote speaker for the event was the Government of Finland’s Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Sari Essayah, who shared her country’s successes and ambitions for growing the bioeconomy in Finland.

“It’s really a great pleasure to be here in Canada today and talking to you about scale-up of sustainable bioeconomy. This is this is also one of the priorities for the Finnish government and in the EU,” Essayah told the crowd.

She said the bioeconomy is an economic concept that holds very promising potential in addressing major global challenges and in supporting local economies and livelihoods.

“We should remind ourselves that it is also a concept that holds a strong intergenerational element. The young must be able to believe in sustainable development, that bioeconomy will always be part of. That should be one of our priorities,” Essayah said.

In Finland, the forestry sector is the leader of its bioeconomy, representing one third of the total value added to the Finnish bioeconomy. Some of the other significant contributing sectors to the country’s bioeconomy include construction, food and beverage, and energy.

“In Finland, forest policy is relatively high on the national political agenda, and from the culture, you can understand why,” Essayah said. “Finland is the most forested country in the European Union, and roughly 75 per cent of Finland’s land area is covered in forests. Of those forests, over 60 per cent are owned by private families and around one-third by the state. Over 10 per cent of our citizens are forest owners.”

The minster stated that the forest-based bioeconomy has great potential in creating well-being and products for consumers, but that we also need to work continuously to maintain forest regenerative capacity and sustainability.

“That is a pre-condition for the sustainable scale-up of this industry,” Essayah said.

Finland has had a national bioeconomic strategy since 2014. The country’s current strategy moves away from a focus on increasing the use of biomass to creating more value from the bioeconomy.

“In other words, creating more from less, which I believe is also very relevant to viewpoint for today’s discussions. Finland’s vision is to double the value of the bioeconomy by 2035,” Essayah said.

The minister discussed five areas of focus for growing the bioeconomy policy. The first one was attracting more skilled labour to the industry.

“This is one challenge and concern, at least in Europe. It applies to both primary production and industry,” Essayah said.

While stating that some labour shortages in production operations will likely be solved via automation, the minister added that “we need to pay more attention to make this sector attractive today.”

The second area of focus is the successful scale-up of businesses based on high-quality research and decision making.

“Bioeconomy is at different stages in different countries. What we all share is the need to continue investing in research and development. The bioeconomy still has a lot of untapped innovation potential for products and services, and we still don’t know all products that we can make in the future,” Essayah said.

The ability to measure and monitor the bioeconomy to steer it in the right direction was the third area of focus. The minister stated that being able to measure and monitor bioeconomy is also important to justify the policy actions and minimize any possible negative impacts.

"Sustainability and responsibility should be kept a higher priority when we develop local bioeconomy," Essayah said.

The fourth and fifth areas of focus were creating consensus-based bioeconomy policies for developing inclusive value chains; and supporting and recognizing the role of regions in developing their local bioeconomies based on their own resources and strengths.

"The Finnish bioeconomic strategy recognizes the importance of regional bioeconomies in strategic implementation, food logistics and infrastructure, clean energy, and cross-sectoral synergies, including industrial parks, are some of the things needed to create the right business environment for new enterprises and to scale-up existing solutions," Essayah said.

Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) president and CEO Derek Nighbor discussed the economic opportunities related to managing Canda's forests during the Scaling Up Bio 2024 Conference.

His presentation, "Canada's forest bioeconomy: Pushing forward," focused on building opportunities through forest fire management.

"We've got a huge fire problem in Canada, and the bioeconomy, and finding markets for low-grade wood and using every part of that tree, using some of the stuff that's dying to get in the bush for higher value, is absolutely critical." Nighbou said.

He said managing forest fires is key to improving air quality while addressing Canada's biggest carbon emissions generator, which is forest fires.

"It's critical so we can stop seeing Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in the north being evacuated in a fire season that shockingly started in the late winter," he said.

One of the solutions to better forest fire management is more proactive management from different levels of government.

"Ninety-four per cent of the lands on which we're working are in the purview of the provinces, and that's really critical. And that's a unique factor for Canada,"Nighbor said.

To improve forest fire management, Nighbor recommended sustainable funding for the municipalities most at risk. These funds could go towards educating those communities while protecting them through proactive forest management. He suggested that Canada look to its neighbours to the south to see an example of government taking action on this issue through its Wildfire Crisis Strategy Implementation Plan.

"Coming out of some of the catastrophic fires in California and across the western United States, we've seen the U.S. government invest heavily," he said. "It's investment in aggressive mapping to see where fire-prone zones might be and getting in those areas to get at high-risk fibre."

Nighbor added that Canada needs a more comprehensive action plan for climate and decarbonization, and that the forestry sector needs to be part of that beyond just planting seedlings.

"The forest industry has more to offer. We're very good at it, we plant 400 to 600 million seedlings a year." he said.

The forestry sector offers full value-chain solutions in terms of decarbonization through building with wood, moving more products from truck to rail, and being more proactive managing fire risks, Nighbor told the crowd.

"We need a more comprehensive action plan, and finding markets for low-grade wood is an important part of that green procurement in terms of how government, through building systems, through biomass, to building with wood, can really lead the way through more demonstration projects and green procurement."