Published: 13 May 2025. Written by: Vivian Price
Finnish forest sector workers are increasingly engaging in conversations about the climate crisis and just transition. Researcher and documentary filmmaker Vivian Price shares insights from her time in Finland: how a just transition could take shape in the forest sector—and why dialogue is at the heart of it.
Meeting at the Crossroads of Forests, Labor, and Climate
Finland’s forests, once seen as a crucial climate solution, are now net carbon emitters. This turning point raises critical questions: What is the future of one of Finland’s most important export sectors? And what about the people who work in it? Who gets to shape the conversation about where we go from here? I’ve observed that too often, workers are not considered as political actors nor are unions part of consultation bodies, even in a country with a tripartite model of governance.
As a documentary filmmaker and researcher of labor and climate justice, I came to Finland with a goal: to understand how workers and environmental advocates in the forest sector might talk to each other about the future—and facilitate that dialogue through visual methods. As both labor and environmentalists find themselves on the defensive politically, finding common ground could benefit them both.
This goal fits in well with the objectives of Legitimacy2035, that citizen engagement is necessary for Finland to reach its ambitious climate goals.
My work is not only academic. I use film as a storytelling method to engage unions, their members and climate activists in reflecting on their roles in shaping a just transition. Finland’s forest debate offers a critical place to contribute to the ongoing exchange.
Filming the Forest Transition
Over the past several months, I’ve worked with unions, researchers, and environmental groups across Finland. Highlights include:
- Teaching a course on visual storytelling at the University of Eastern Finland to help PhD students and postdocs narrate their work through film.
- Leading a climate workshop for construction union members in Tampere, sparking lively discussion on forest use, international parallels, and labor conditions.
- Leading a health, safety and climate workshop in Turku for Nordic union representatives from the construction sector, at the invitation of Rakennusliitto.
- Meeting unionists from Teollisuusliitto, JHL, Rakennusliitto, and Building Workers International, to learn about their efforts to address green transitions, and build power among their members.
- Meeting environmentalists from Greenpeace and Elokopina, and scholars from BIOS Research Institute, from the Universities of Eastern Finland, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Lapland, Helsinki, and others to gain perspective on the structural framework of forest politics.
- Interviewing several workers, for example, a painter who works at a paper and pulp mill and who rides her motorcycle through forests and reflects on the intersection of industrial life, safety, and nature, a carpenter who is concerned about residential construction, and a retired worker on safety issues.
- Presenting a new film, Voices from the green transition about coal in South Africa and lithium in Chile in Rovaniemi during the Political Science Research Days.
- Engaging with an informally organized sustainability community of engineers, artists and others at Aalto University, where to screen Talking Union, Talking Climate and facilitated cross-sector discussions that moved into concerns about the way the forests are managed.
- Sharing Talking Union, Talking Climate with solidarity ambassadors, members of Finnish unions, arranged by Suomen Ammattiliittojen Solidaarisuuskeskus (SASK)
- Touring Kemi, a massive paper and pulp byproduct mill, and Junnikkala, a new sawmill near Oulu.
- Touring Hyytiälä Forest Station, part of the nationwide network of research stations (RESTAT Finland), and learning about the multidisciplinary research projects.
- Presenting research at a gathering of Nordic Health & Safety staff from construction unions in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, where they shared challenges and opportunities to support their members and engage with the EU in designing safety policy.
These encounters gave me insight into the ideas of many sectors of the public.
In the coming months, I hope to work with union educators and labor activists to learn how climate and structural analysis of the forest sector might be integrated into their organizing approach.
I want to interact more deeply with forest sector workers and unions to explore questions from their lived experiences that they are already asking: What is the relevance of a green transition to the forest industry and what might it mean for our jobs, our communities, and the forests we live with? What does a just transition mean in Finland?
Workers and unions naturally are focused on preserving their livelihoods, and are influenced by the realities of the labour market in Finland and the cultural mores they grew up with. Many unionized workers in forestry are well-paid and take it for granted that the trees transported to their plants to be processed and turned into pulp and cardboard are plentiful, that they are grown with the intention that they should be harvested, even if they also experience the deterioration of forests in their personal lives.
From preliminary discussions, I have heard various views from union representatives about the findings that the forests in Finland have become net emitters. One union representative commented that they thought climate activists basically had their opinions, that they were not based on facts, but they had already made up their minds. However, this leader felt, unions have to be in the forefront of change so their members don’t become displaced. Another said that they were well aware of over-harvesting and were anxious to see more high value use from timber. A number of union representatives expressed the feeling that too much wood is burned, while others thought that as long as the wood sidestreams came from local mills that wood was a better fuel than coal.
Aside from forest conditions, it is likely that market forces, especially competition with eucalyptus plantations in Uruguay, will diminish the profits of pulp production. In order to mitigate workers being pitted against one another, Paperiliitto, the union representing paper and pulp mill workers, created a network of communication along its union supply chain in Finland and sister unions in Uruguay.
Unions are looking for new ways of organizing. Some unions, like JHL, are already deeply engaged with conversations around climate and just transition because of the displacement of their members from coal-fired power plants. Unions in general are under attack. The government has put forward a series of measures weakening unions such as limiting the right to strike, disallowing workers to deduct their dues from taxes, along with undermining many aspects of the social welfare system. Unions in the forest sector have been especially targeted as employers abandoned sector level bargaining several years ago and now unions are forced to bargain agreements with hundreds of companies, one by one, tying them up for months.
Environmentalists are hopeful that they can work with unions to shape better government policies. They express concern that forest industries are still seen as trusted Finnish partners who have managed the economy well for many decades. Yet, they argue, increasingly these industries are global players whose objectives for profit-making are in conflict with local and national interests.
The structure of Finnish forests paradoxically rests on the private property claims of hundreds of thousands of small plot owners, yet they too have an intermediary, the Finnish Forest Owners Association, that works closely with employers. Furthermore, the rights of the Sami people to protect their land, their way of life and the health and biodiversity of the forests is at stake.
Environmentalists and human rights groups have filed several lawsuits against the Finnish government for their lack of intervention to mitigate carbon emission in the forests in the light of the 2035 climate goals. Meanwhile, employers are exerting pressure on the government to reconsider, cut or abandon those goals. Protests have followed, and alliances between environmentalists, unions and even business networks are in the making.
“The opening of the forest sector operators to abandon the carbon neutral 2035 target of the Climate Act has sparked a debate, which has led to the goal being supported by, among others, the Confederation of Finnish Industries , Europe’s largest climate business network CLC , AKAVA , STTK , SAK and a large number of other operators (Greenpeace).”
These contradictory views and varied positionalities are just the beginning of exploring how people experience forests as workers and as conservationists and what outcomes an intentional and collaborative dialogue focused on union collaboration could yield.
Toward a New Kind of Dialogue
Inspired by earlier work I did in Norway with the WAGE project, I am learning about the ways unions are approaching climate education in Finland. In Norway, our group addressed the problem of polarization by creating a series of video dialogue experiments. In one project, we interviewed climate activists about their visions for the future of Norwegian oil, showed those interviews to oil workers, captured their responses and edited both sides into a video conversation — one that invites reflection, not confrontation. In another, we filmed a zoom conversation between unionists in the oil industries in Nigeria, Norway and the US, about what it’s like to be a trade unionist in their countries, about how profits are distributed, and how they are feeling the effects of climate change.
This method proved successful in promoting exchange between oil workers and environmentalists across three continents, and also gave a wider public access to how workers ponder energy transitions. In Finland, where forest policy is also often polarized, I believe such storytelling tools can help clarify shared concerns and differences alike.
I’m currently collaborating with unionists and researchers to shape this proposal, design creative workshops that are integrated into their educational and social events, and amplify worker voices through film and dialogue.
Why Storytelling Matters in Just Transition
Too often, discussions about climate policy happen without those most affected at the table. But workers are not just passive subjects of transition—they are thinkers, critics, innovators, and narrators of their own futures.
By combining research and documentary filmmaking, I aim to make space for those narratives. In the forest sector, where jobs, livelihoods, ecosystems, and identity are deeply intertwined, storytelling can be a bridge.
Dialogue is not a silver bullet. But without it, we risk leaving behind the people whose participation is essential for real and just climate action.
About the Author
Vivian Price, PhD, Professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills and former union electrician, is a researcher and filmmaker for U.S. and international projects on labor and climate justice. She is directing short films as part of Transition: action, concepts, debates and strategies – an international comparison, a study based in the Leeds School of Business, and is a visiting scholar at the University of Eastern Finland, where she is beginning visual research with workers and environmentalists in the context of the Finnish forest climate sink. She also serves on the research team for the Critical Minerals Just Transition Listening Project.
Her 2023 film Talking Union, Talking Climate follows three oil workers from California, Norway, and Nigeria as they share experiences and perspectives on labor, climate, and the future of oil. Through these conversations, the film explores the role of the state, unions, and oil profiteering across borders. Structuring a conversation across time, space and political distance (Jordhus-Lier, Price & Houeland 2024) is an article published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers about the experiments in visual methods she initiated with her Norwegian colleagues.