Press releases

Wednesday 20 October 2021 is International Landscape Day, which is based on the Council of Europe Landscape Convention. The Convention encourages everyone to participate in observing landscapes and in the decision-making concerning them. Various campaigns, competitions and guided landscape walks are organised to celebrate Landscape Day, offering many opportunities to explore landscapes from new perspectives.

A new handbook will promote sustainable and equitable allocation of transboundary water resources. The publication is the first of its kind and is the latest example of Finland’s significant role in international water cooperation.

Monitoring cruises show that the Gulf of Finland has recovered from the deterioration caused indirectly by salt pulses in the Baltic Sea in the mid-2010s. Weather-regulated flows between the Gulf of Finland and the main basin of the Baltic Sea cause fluctuations in the state of the Gulf, which makes it difficult to discern the impact of emission reductions. In deep-water regions of the Bothnian Sea, oxygen levels appear to continue to deteriorate.

In her doctoral dissertation, Pinja Näkki, a researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute, has studied risks that organisms such as bivalves living on the seafloor face from microplastics. As much as a quarter of the Baltic clam that were studied ingested microplastics when the surface of the sediment had plastic on it. Microplastics ground from car tyres were found to cause stress and organelle damage to the Baltic clams. Pinja Näkki will defend her dissertation on Friday, 10 September.

International Landscape Day will be celebrated in October. As in previous years, the festivities in Finland will include an open photo competition, guided landscape walks and a photography campaign that is already launched today.