Forecasting

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Tero Mustonen

Tero Mustonen

Finland

snowchange.org

Tero Mustonen PHD is the Lead Author of a chapter in the upcoming Sixth Assessment Report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC focusing on adaptation, impact and vulnerability in the context of climate change.

Mustonen’s research specialises in the monitoring, progress and effects of climate change in the Arctic region of the Nordic countries and in the coniferous forest belt during the past 20 years. The effects of climate change on natural economies, and on local and indigenous communities in Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and Fennoscandia in particular, are at the core of his research. These communities have plenty of traditional knowledge on the progress and impacts of climate change.

“Humanity is at a crossroads when it comes to climate change. The decisions we make today are relevant to our very existence, but there is still time to change our course,” Mustonen says. “The IPCC's scientific assessment reports give mankind an idea of the severity of our situation. It is a great honour to be involved in this work in the upcoming years. I, for example, seek to promote the Northern viewpoint, such as the role of the traditional knowledge of the Sami people. Northern peoples have a lot to offer to this work, and they are also often the first ones to experience the changes caused by climate change,” he adds.

Mustonen obtained his PhD from the University of Joensuu in 2009. He also works as a fisherman in the Snowchange Cooperative. Mustonen has won several human rights and environmental awards, and is one of the most renowned researchers of the Arctic region of the Nordic countries of his generation.

Dictionary

When thinking of a future we want or desire to see, we have been able to maintain linguistic diversity and cultural heritage of thousands of local and Indigenous peoples. We are still maintaining our specific languages and therefore the need of dictionaries, leading to better communications whilst being separate and distinct peoples, will stay. Uses of dictionaries will span also renaissances of poetry as multilingual communications stimulates the creative elements of society.

Neon light: OPEN 24 hours

City-states and urban megalopolises continue to exist. The world may be operating on two realities – rural / Indigenous / rewilded landscapes in relations with the urban systems (which need the ruralities for food security) but these cityscapes are open for business always and without hindrances.

Carved Stone Figure

The Moa, and other prehistoric artefacts are maintained and resurgent. They testify to the power and significance of Indigenous cultures and their legacies – the Moa of course from the Easter Island will also speak of over-uses of resources leading to collapses, of the “Earth Island”. But for the traditional and Indigenous societies these cultural processes remind how strong they are and have been and the colonial period of 1492-2030 will be only a small blip ultimately in the thousands of years of existence of these preserving cultures of traditional mind, memory and wisdom. Global civilisation will cherish these artefacts as cultural heritage and repatriate them to their homelands whilst re-forming peaceful co-existence and restitutive land claims with Indigenous peoples across the planet.

Tree

In 2020, now, I live inside an old growth forest area (the last hectares remaining in our village) in the boreal Finland. In the future to come, we see these home boreal forests resurge and make a come back. Future forests, trapping and preserving carbon, are such that trees can finally grow old, up to 400 years, and then, once they fall, they will feed new life on the forest floor once they decay – eternal cycles of the life and dignified death of the boreal forest. We are slowly discovering how trees talk and think, we are realizing that the boreal old growth is on par with Amazonia as an interconnected, extremely sensitive living network of seen and the unseen. As in 2020 over 95 % of the Finnish forests are subject to economic uses and only pockets of the old growth remain, in the future, through the re-discovery of our traditional relations with the trees, they will have a life protected and deserving dignity.

Fish

Fish that I caught have taught all I know about our lakes, rivers and sea. In the future what science propagated over the past 200 years in species studies, surveys, DNA microscoping and research dissections will be at last positioned with the true essence of who the fish are as non-human people – the traditional owners, guardians and masters of their waters, who give their bodies to us as food so that humanity in its weakness can go on. Therefore fish and humans are intimately linked. Finally concepts like ‘coarse fish’ and non-valued / bycatch fish will fade into memory and annals of history when wild fish stocks re-emerge and rebound as healthy and thriving central elements of restored global wildlife and biodiversity in a trinity of cross-generation, inter-species and trans-boundaries connectedness to achieve the well-being for all beings around us.

Central Territory: Snow

I am a winter seiner. It means I am professionally fishing on the ice. In 1968 our seining could start in mid-November on the ice and lasted until mid-May. Due to climate change impacts, in 2020 the Snowchange seining crew began their harvests 8th March and the season ended 20th March. In the future to come, this was the worst of it. Boreal and Arctic traditional and Indigenous societies are 100% co-dependent on snow and ice for mental health, stability, food security and life. Due to the actions that begun under the Biden administration and expanded rapidly in 2020s the northern winters re-stabilized and our snow and ice -dependent life could continue along with the wildlife and nature that has formed in the north to be codependent on the cryosphere. All those hundreds of community people from Inupiaq in Alaska to Igloolik, Canada, to Attu, Greenland, to Iceland to Sápmi of the Sámi people to Selkie village in Karelia to Kolymskaya in NE Siberia with the Chukchi got their prayers and wishes answered and winters returned, meaning our lives returned. Snows and dreams, interconnected, for the stability of the planet.