2024-11-25
24 分钟Biodiversity and environment reporter Patrick Greenfield travels to Finnish Lapland to investigate the disappearance of its carbon sink, and its implications for the fight against global heating. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
This is the Guardian.
Today, a trip to Finnish Lapland and a warning from its forests to the rest of the world.
The flight up takes about one hour and it was in August, so it was the end of the Arctic summer, and I arrived at Helsinki in night and I was flying towards the light.
The sun hadn't quite set where I was going in the far north of Finland, but that was my kind of first memory of flying into a Finnish Lapland, really, and seeing this glow on the horizon that got brighter and brighter.
Patrick Greenfield, a biodiversity reporter at the Guardian, recently took a trip to the very north of Europe to see the primeval forests of the continent's last true wilderness.
Sorry, do you mind if I record our conversation so we can.
They are this magical place that is frozen most of the year, but then defrosts and bursts into life in those long Arctic summer days and then descends back into darkness when it's freezing cold and there's only kind of reindeer and the Northern lights.
To keep the people living their company, along with a few polar bears in some places in different parts of the boreal ecosystem, Patrick met up with local.
Activists who keep tabs on the forests and the rare species who live there.
And they were going to show me some of the last surviving bits in that area of primeval forest.
Forest that developed after the last ice age and had never been disturbed or touched by humans before.
So, as you see, there are old trees, the dry deadwood standing and laying.
The ecosystem is very diverse.
So Finland is about two thirds forest and stretches up right from the Baltic Sea into the Arctic Circle and is one of the most magical ecosystems I was yet to visit.
This forest is over 200 years old.
That tree is easily four, maybe even 500 years old.
Wow.
For centuries, these forests have been gobbling up carbon dioxide and storing it in their bark, in their leaves and in their roots.
They've been a natural defense against global heating.
But recently, something changed.