Peat production|According to Neova, the company has not moved production to Sweden. Peat production is decreasing in both countries, says company director Ahti Martikainen.
A state-owned company Neova (formerly Vapo) rejects the views of the demonstrators who painted the parliament building on peat production.
“Yes, I would say that they are completely false claims,” says the company’s director responsible for communications and social relations Ahti Martikainen.
Martikainen justifies this, among other things, by the fact that the company does not receive subsidies in Finland or Sweden.
“We have not moved peat production from Finland to Sweden. In both countries, the volume of peat production has decreased in recent years. In Sweden, it is very small,” he says.
Swedish The activist group Återställ våtmarker and Elokapina attracted attention on Wednesday with their demonstration at the parliament.
The pillars of the parliament building were stained with a red color reminiscent of blood. The background for the demonstration was opposition to peat production.
The policemen carried the protester away from the Parliament building before nine in the morning.
Protesters the accusing finger pointed at the Neova company, of which the Finnish state owns 50.1 percent.
Elokapina justified on his Instagram account that Neova is Sweden’s largest peat producer. The Finnish government, on the other hand, has received hundreds of millions of euros in support from the EU to stop peat operations in Finland.
Now, according to Elokapina, Neova is mining peat in Sweden in an “unprecedented way” and causes more emissions than all Swedish domestic flights combined, it wrote.
“So the state-owned company raises subsidies while destroying peatlands in Sweden,” it wrote.
Demonstrators in front of the parliament building on Wednesday morning.
Neovan According to Martikainen, the views of the protesters are familiar to the company.
Last spring in Sweden, demonstrators protested against peat production at the Finnish embassy in Stockholm, after which the company responded to the claims.
According to Martikainen, the claim that Neova would increase subsidies in Finland while destroying peatlands in Sweden is incorrect, among other things, because the company has not received any of the mentioned EU JTF support, i.e. support from the Just Transition Fund.
This is also confirmed to HS by the Ministry of Labor and Economic Affairs.
The fund is part of a whole with which the European Union aims to achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.
In Finland, this money has been used to compensate for the socio-economic and environmental adverse effects of reducing the energy use of peat. The EU funding that Finland receives from the JTF fund is approximately EUR 466 million.
In addition according to Martikainen, peat is not raised in an “unprecedented way”.
“In other words, not much in Finland, not Neova or anyone else, raises energy peat anymore. In Finland, we will probably raise a total of five million cubes this year.”
In Sweden, production is around one million cubic meters this year and last year, according to Martikainen, around 1.3 million cubic meters.
Production in Finland was around 20 million cubic meters in 2018, so it has decreased to around a quarter, says Martikainen.
Neova is Sweden’s largest peat producer, according to the company, with a market share of about two-thirds.
According to Martikainen, not much energy peat is produced in Sweden, but mostly so-called growth peat and some peat intended for animal bedding.
“In any case, it’s on the decline there as well. That the claim that a Finnish state-owned company would now harvest from there at an unprecedented speed – which would imply that larger amounts year after year – but when it is there also year after year smaller amounts,” he says.
In Finland, the company already announced once in 2021 that it will stop the production of energy peat, but as a result of the Russian aggression, it has been produced again for security of supply reasons.
Martikainen otherwise commented on the protesters’ activities only by stating that Finland and Sweden are democracies and the activists operate very openly.
“We are not in the place of the judge or the police.”
Peat is a political issue because its emissions are significant compared to many other forms of energy.
According to the climate panel, the emission factor of burning peat even exceeds the emission factor of coal (Statistics Center 2022).
The panel
according to the report
mitigating climate change requires that the energy use of peat be completely abandoned.
“Finland must also reduce the surface area of peat lands in economic use and find ways to limit soil emissions in areas that fall within the scope of production and areas released from the production of energy peat,” it writes.
As part of climate goals, efforts have been made to significantly reduce the energy use of peat.
In Finland, the goal of the previous government was to halve the energy use of peat by 2030.
There is no corresponding clear entry in the program of the current government. Minister of the Environment and Climate Kai Mykkänen (kok) has said The future of the countryside in the interview, that the current government will continue the work of its predecessor to reduce burning peat by the end of the decade.
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